The Devil You Know

January 11, 2021
New York Times columnist Blow (Fire Shut Up in My Bones) proposes a radical path toward Black empowerment in this impassioned call for “as many Black descendants of the Great Migration as possible” to return to the South “with moral and political intentionality.” This mass resettlement, Blow argues, would allow African Americans to “colonize and control the states they would have controlled if they had not fled them.” He paints a devastating picture of how white liberals have failed to match rhetorical support for Blacks with action, and buttresses his political arguments with painful personal experiences of racism, including the time a cop pulled a gun on his son, a student at Yale. But Blow doesn’t discuss potential challenges to his plan, including the likelihood of increased gerrymandering and voter suppression by Republican lawmakers to blunt the impact of such a demographic shift, nor does he offer much support for his belief that the Republican Party would be forced “to court not the Negrophobe, but the Negro” in order to win the presidency or control the Senate. Though Blow’s provocative call for action contains much food for thought, readers will wish for a more realistic way forward.

January 22, 2021

One truth of elections in the Unites States that cannot be stated enough is that the majority of white people have voted Republican at least twice, from Gerald Ford through the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Any discussion of civil rights and racial equity needs to acknowledge a historic and continued lack of support from white America, argues New York Times columnist Blow, in this newest book after Fire Shut Up in My Bones. In this latest work, Blow suggests that the way to give Black America a real voice in politics means undoing the Great Migration. The book develops this thought experiment on how a repopulation of Southern states by even half of the Black population could turn the South into a Black power bloc. Blow uses the examples of anti-war protesters in Vermont and the 2021 Senate runoff in Georgia as proofs of concept. While the account evades some of the tougher questions on economic development and the dismantling of entrenched voter suppression, Blow does provide a compelling argument on how a second migration back to the South could prove a way forward for Black America. VERDICT Blow, who has followed his own advice and moved to the South, will find a readership in like-minded individuals who are seeing his argument play out in Georgia.--John Rodzvilla, Emerson Coll., Boston

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 1, 2021
The distinguished New York Times columnist offers a daring but utterly sensible plan to advance Black civil rights. The devil that Black Americans know all too well is racism, and, as Blow notes from the outset, it is not confined to the South: "Black people fled the horrors of the racist South for so-called liberal cities of the North and West, trading the devil they knew for the devil they didn't, only to come to the painful realization that the devil is the devil." Though George Floyd's murder at the hands of Minneapolis police was roundly protested--and with Whites often outnumbering Blacks at demonstrations around the country--soon after, Jacob Blake suffered the same fate, in Milwaukee, by bullets rather than asphyxiation, but with "no similar outpouring of outrage." What Blow calls "white liberal grievance" is useless in the face of a racist system that will not change. Or will it? Given that Georgia is at the crux of the 2020 presidential election and that Stacey Abrams' get-out-the-vote campaign brought in hundreds of thousands of voters to turn the state blue, Blow considers the state "proof of concept" that Black voters can indeed sway elections. He adds that the entire South could follow suit if only Blacks would reverse the path of the Great Migration to the North during Jim Crow and remake the electoral map by forming a solid majority. As he writes, if just half of Black residents elsewhere moved South, it would establish that majority from Louisiana all the way across the Southern heartland to South Carolina, "a contiguous band of Black power that would upend America's political calculus and exponentially increase Black political influence." It would also end White supremacy in that intransigent region. "The South now beckons as the North once did," he urges in his resounding conclusion. "The promise of real power is made manifest. Seize it. Migrate. Move." Valuable as a thought experiment alone but also an "actual plan" for effecting lasting political change.

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