What's Going On
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Overview
With the same personal authority and exhilarating directness he brought to his account of his passage from a prison cell to the newsroom of The Washington Post, Nathan McCall delivers a series of front-line reports on the state of the races in today's America. The resulting volume is guaranteed to shake the assumptions of readers of every pigmentation and political allegiance.In What's Going On, McCall adds up the hidden costs of the stereotype of black athletic prowess, which tells African American teenagers that they can only succeed on the white man's terms. He introduces a fresh perspective to the debates on gangsta rap and sexual violence. He indicts the bigotry of white churches and the complacency of the black suburban middle class, celebrates the heroism of Muhammad Ali, and defends the truth-telling of Alice Walker. Engaging, provocative, and utterly fearless, here is a commentator to reckon with, addressing our most persistent divisions in a voice of stinging immediacy.
Synopsis
With the same personal authority and exhilarating directness he brought to his account of his passage from a prison cell to the newsroom of The Washington Post, Nathan McCall delivers a series of front-line reports on the state of the races in today's America. The resulting volume is guaranteed to shake the assumptions of readers of every pigmentation and political allegiance.
In What's Going On, McCall adds up the hidden costs of the stereotype of black athletic prowess, which tells African American teenagers that they can only succeed on the white man's terms. He introduces a fresh perspective to the debates on gangsta rap and sexual violence. He indicts the bigotry of white churches and the complacency of the black suburban middle class, celebrates the heroism of Muhammad Ali, and defends the truth-telling of Alice Walker. Engaging, provocative, and utterly fearless, here is a commentator to reckon with, addressing our most persistent divisions in a voice of stinging immediacy.
Publishers Weekly
McCall (Makes Me Wanna Holler) here offers essays on contemporary racial issues, warning at the outset about "the incompetence of white leadership" and blacks' failure to respond when "we're victimized by one another." In conversational tone, he starts with hard-hitting pieces on how basketball mythology warps both black and white America's view of black men and how the black community must confront gangsta rap, which he sees as a product of what a friend of his terms "internalized oppression and pathology" and a testament to a highly violent world. Then the momentum slows. Some essays seem reworked feature storiesreports on the attempt of Alexandria, Va., to move out poor people and the conflicts among middle-class blacks living in Prince George County, Md. McCall offers vignettes of interaction with whites: a baby free of race fear, an elevator ride full of it. He closes with pieces on Muhammad Ali, the failures of the white Christian church and a moving piece on the death of a former "homeboy," a criminal mourned by his victim's mother, a black woman with "unflagging belief in redemption." Author tour. (Oct.)
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
As is the case with most angry black man narratives, McCall's is a landscape almost totally bereft of redeeming black women. There is anger present, but McCall is not seeking a harvest of white guilt. Rather, he is demanding that black people demand more of themselves. McCall chides black men for tacitly buying into the myth of inherent athletic ability -- the myth that black excellence is a product of genes, not work ethic. This contradiction, McCall points out, is part and parcel of a set of backward politics among black athletes. McCall is clearly a student of life and human nature. In What's Going On, he attempts to "clean house" by addressing the lack of understanding blacks have for each other.Publishers Weekly -
McCall (Makes Me Wanna Holler) here offers essays on contemporary racial issues, warning at the outset about "the incompetence of white leadership" and blacks' failure to respond when "we're victimized by one another." In conversational tone, he starts with hard-hitting pieces on how basketball mythology warps both black and white America's view of black men and how the black community must confront gangsta rap, which he sees as a product of what a friend of his terms "internalized oppression and pathology" and a testament to a highly violent world. Then the momentum slows. Some essays seem reworked feature storiesreports on the attempt of Alexandria, Va., to move out poor people and the conflicts among middle-class blacks living in Prince George County, Md. McCall offers vignettes of interaction with whites: a baby free of race fear, an elevator ride full of it. He closes with pieces on Muhammad Ali, the failures of the white Christian church and a moving piece on the death of a former "homeboy," a criminal mourned by his victim's mother, a black woman with "unflagging belief in redemption." Author tour. (Oct.)Library Journal
McCall, who has been to prison, journalism school, the Washington Post, and the best sellers lists (Makes Me Wanna Holler, LJ 1/94), is back with essays ranging from the dangers of rap to the politics of gun control.Kirkus Reviews
McCall follows up his critically acclaimed autobiography Makes Me Wanna Holler (1994) with this eye-opening collection of personal essays on race and racism in America.One of the principal themes that crops up here, in tones that range from levity to gravity, is that of childhood and parenthood. In the essay entitled "The Problem with Babies," a white toddler who tries to engage McCall in play in a fast-food restaurant is depicted as a sort of adorable predator; the child's ignorance of racial tension between his mother and McCall leads to the conclusion that babies "don't give a damn about the racial boundaries that grown-ups impose." In other pieces, McCall meditates on his son, as he condemns both whites and blacks for the intraracial violence that he states, in no uncertain terms, is destroying the African-American community; he writes of his daughter in an essay in which he confesses to having committed sexual assaults on several women as a young man, not realizing that he wasn't entitled to their favors by virtue of his being male. It is this surprisingly and often disarmingly confessional tone that brings cohesion to these essays. McCall knows his own faults and those of the very community that he defends and of which he is part; he can be slow to admit that those faults include poor family structure and upbringing. He is far quicker to finger white racism as a cause for black suffering, but his strong defense lies in his own experiences. While McCall is reluctant to divorce himself from acceptance of Louis Farrakhan, it is his essay on Muhammad Ali that better depicts a black dissenter as a model human being.
Despite some flaws, this is a strong effort from the journalist turned essayist.