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On Fortner’s telling, the supposed black silent majority countered a
tide of intra-racial violence with a successful movement against drugs
and crime culminating in the passage of the Rockefeller Drug Laws and
the takeoff of mass incarceration. Thus black people themselves, rather
than the rightward drift of American politics, are responsible for the
huge numbers of Africans Americans languishing in prison. “Mass
incarceration had less to do with the white resistance to racial
equality and more to do with the black silent majority’s confrontation
with the ‘reign of criminal terror’ in their neighborhoods,” he asserts.
Central to Fortner’s revisionist project is his desire “to tell it like
it is.” The choice of black vernacular signifies his claim to an
authentic black voice as well as his willingness to say unpopular things
in service of a larger truth. Black Silent Majority opens with a very
personal recollection of his traumatic childhood in Brownsville,
Brooklyn, punctuated by sirens and gunshots at the height of the 1980s
crack crisis. As a toddler, Fortner lost his brother to a stabbing, “the
pain and sorrow” of which “stayed in [his] home like accumulated dust.”
Reading Fortner, one sometimes has the feeling of passing through the
racial looking glass and arriving in a strange world where the unlikely
pairing of Richard Nixon and Daniel Patrick Moynihan are used to restore
historical agency to African Americans. Fortner does not shy away from
the words “ghetto,” “social pathology,” and “indigenous values,” nor do
they appear in the distancing embrace of quotation marks. Elsewhere, he
casually references Charles Murray’s Losing Ground (1984) to provide
black-on-black-crime statistics. In many respects, Black Silent Majority
harkens back to an era of social science innocent of charges of racial
bias and prurient representations of African American deviance.
full:
http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/donna-murch-michael-javen-fortner-black-silent-majority
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