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Our latest list of nonfiction books by journalists of color or those of special interest to them — part two of three.
The first installment, “Get Down With the Legends!,” was published last week. A third will appear in the coming days.
Jabari Asim
Jabari Asim, who teaches creative writing at Emerson College, is a former deputy editor of the Washington Post Book World and was editor of the NAACP’s the Crisis, has “We Can’t Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival” (Picador, $17 paper).
“We Can’t Breathe,” a collection of eight essays, last week made the longlist of candidates for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, worth $10,000.
“I’m a huge fan of essays. I read them like most people read the sports pages,” Asim told Adrian Walker, a Metro columnist for the Boston Globe, during a conversation at the Harvard Bookstore, according to Kenya Vaughn, writing in the St. Louis American. “I thought it was time to dip my toe in that water.”
Asim sets the tone for his book as he ends his introduction, which homes in on the “white lies” portion of the title.
We “continue to write — and resist,” Asim explains. “In the tradition of black bards known and unknown, we compose with purposeful fury. We muster our candor and eloquence against a master narrative advising us to patiently attend those who continue to cling so eagerly to antiblack racism, to sit with folded hands and hear them out.
“It’s what we might call a morality tale, a parable in which embracing white people at their worst inspires them to return the gesture and open their arms to us in all our complicated, flawed, and wonderful coloredness. The warmth of our newfound mutual affection will be so intense and contagious that it softens hardened minds and changes the direction of the American future. It’s a story that requires a substantial suspension of disbelief.
“Or it’s simply another lie.”
Soren Baker
Soren Baker, a freelance journalist, has “The History of Gangster Rap: From Schoolly D to Kendrick Lamar: The Rise of a Great American Art Form” (Abrams Image, $24.99 paper). Baker has had more than 3,500 articles published in such outlets as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone and RedBullUSA.com. He has written 14 books, including “I’m The White Guy,” which documents Baker’s life as a white rap journalist.
“As a young white man growing up in Maryland I couldn’t identify with a black man but I gravitated to [gangster rap] because of the injustice in it,” Baker told Melissa Driscoll Krol of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Md., near his Gambrills, Md., hometown. “I didn’t want anyone treated unfairly or have their rights violated because they were black. I could identify with the frustration going on and that’s why I rallied around the music and it meant so much to me.
“I felt gangster rappers were talking about a very important subject matter that was largely being ignored,” Baker said in the November interview.
Sha Be Allah wrote Sept. 20 for the Source, “From still-swirling conspiracy theories about the murders of Biggie and Tupac to the release of the 2015 film Straight Outta Compton, this era of gangster rap continues to fascinate music junkies and remain at the forefront of pop culture. The History of Gangster Rap is a deep dive into this compelling phenomenon from one of its most noted documenters, journalist Soren Baker. . . .”
Fred Carroll
Fred Carroll, a lecturer at Kennesaw State University, has written “Race News: Black Journalists and the Fight for Racial Justice in the Twentieth Century” (University of Illinois Press, $95 hardcover; $27.95 paper; $25.16 ebook).
“I decided to focus on black journalism specifically once I discovered how I could make a substantive contribution to the study of the black press,” Carroll said, according to Morgan Harrison, writing last February in the Sentinel at Kennesaw State. “Prior histories tended to focus on individual publishers, or individual newspapers, or moments when black journalists clashed with white authorities, particularly during the world wars.”
“I wanted to write a book that explained how black journalism as an industry evolved politically and professionally across the 20th century,”said Carroll, a reporter at the Daily Press in Newport News, Va., from 1999 to 2006. “I wanted to paint on a bigger canvas.
Harrison continued in the Sentinel, “Carroll explains ‘Race News’ as an examination of the relationship between the commercial black press — mainstream weekly newspapers like the Baltimore Afro-American, Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier — and the alternative black press, which included publications like Marcus Garvey’s ‘Negro World’ in the 1920s and the Black Panther Party’s ‘The Black Panther’ in the 1960s. . . .”
“Race News” won the AEJMC History Division Book Award this year from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Unfortunately, many will find the type size (at least in the paperback) too small and uninviting.
Karl Evanzz
Karl Evanzz, author of books about Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam and a former Washington Post researcher, has produced a limited 25th anniversary edition of “The Judas Factor: The Life and Death of Malcolm Shabazz” (Xis Books, $25.99 paper).
In his 1992 page-turner, Evanzz told how Assistant FBI Director William Sullivan circulated a memo urging that the FBI handpick “a new national Negro leader” once Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad were destroyed.
“When this is done, and it can and will be done, obviously, much confusion will reign, particularly among the Negro people,” the March 4, 1968, memo reads. “The Negroes will be left without a national leader of sufficiently compelling personality to steer them in the proper direction.”
In this 540-page update, Evanzz writes, “The Judas Factor was all but ignored by the mainstream media. The basic reason is, generally speaking, that American journalists operate from the ludicrous premise that every government in the world except the American government periodically engages in conspiracies against its own citizens.
“So anyone who accuses a branch or department of the American government of being involved in a conspiracy is dismissed as a ‘conspiracy theorist,’ which is the kiss of death from the media. This is true despite such blatant examples as the joint FBI/Chicago Police Department conspiracy to assassinate Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago. . . .”
David Grann
David Grann, a staff writer at the New Yorker, has won numerous kudos for “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI” ($16.55 hardcover on Amazon; $12.71 paper; $26.91 audio CD; $11.99 Kindle)
Here’s how Tatiana Craine of the Marshall Project described this book when the project named it one of the best books of 2017:
“At the turn of the 20th Century, the Osage were some of the wealthiest people in the world (scroll down). After years of injustices, they had been forced to live on ‘broken, rocky’ land, which just happened to sit atop an ocean of oil. By the 1920s, their fortunes took a turn for the worse when dozens of Osage and their allies were poisoned, shot, and otherwise murdered.
“Journalist David Grann spins an infuriating, true tale that’s almost stranger than fiction. He breathes urgent life into a century-old story about race, greed and the tragic transformation of the American West. This riveting puzzler charts the evolution of U.S. law enforcement, from small teams of frontier lawmen and private detectives to the early days of the FBI when J. Edgar Hoover was ‘boyish.’ Filled with a dizzying cast of characters, Grann’s work is a heartbreaking, mind-boggling page-turner for those of us who want their nonfiction to read more like novels.”
Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio are developing a film adaptation, Variety reported.
In 1994, Dennis McAuliffe, Osage, a Washington Post copy editor who teaches at the University of North Carolina, wrote “The Deaths of Sybil Bolton: An American History,” a book about what came to be known as the Osage Reign of Terror, after discovering that his grandmother was one of the victims.
“As they say in the newsroom, great stories bear repeating,” McAuliffe told Journal-isms this week by email. “David wrote ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ so well, with so many new details and with such sensitivity to the Osages, that maybe no one will have to write another Reign of Terror for another 25 years, or ever. His book was very well received by the Osages, and he’s made many visits to the Osages since the book came out. The hope is that the same can be said of the planned Scorsese-di Caprio movie. We’ll see.”
Ernest Holsendolph
Ernest Holsendolph, a retired business writer and editor for Fortune, the New York Times, the Plain Dealer in Cleveland, the old Washington Star and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has “Let ME Tell It!” (Dr. Jackie S. Henderson, publisher; Your Family Research & Publishing; $20 paper).
“The hope is that this book will draw interest from schools and teachers who might see it as a way to inspire kids to write, with attention to the importance of business and economic reporting — sometimes overlooked,” says the book’s back cover.
” ‘A liberal education holds the key,’ he always says.”
In 2013, as the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington approached, Journal-isms told the story of how Holsendolph and his colleague David Pike, working on the lowly Community Page of the Cleveland Press, covered a contingent from Cleveland who went to the march (scroll down). “It was my FIRST big story, and arguably the most important story I ever covered,” Holsendolph said.
In the book, Chris Roush of Talking Biz News asks Holsendolph, “What would you recommend today to a black journalist who was interested in covering business?”
He replies, “I would counsel young blacks who are interested in business or any other specialty, from arts criticism to science to politics, to seek out the stars on the paper who do those jobs. Talk to them about how they got there, what about the specialty that turns them on. The youngsters must solicit the aid of the senior writers.
“Not enough of our senior writers are inclined to mentor and actively serve as role models, but we ALL are flattered to be asked questions by someone who admires us from afar. That kind of inquiry can awaken the mentoring instincts in some cases. I say seek out the BEST in the specialty because among them you will find that kind of inspirational enthusiasm you seek.”
Jorge Ramos
Jorge Ramos, Univision’s longtime anchor and, during the 2016 presidential campaign, a foil for Donald Trump, has “Stranger: The Challenge of a Latino Immigrant in the Trump Era” (Vintage, $15 paper; $14.99 MP3 CD on Amazon; $8.99 Kindle on Amazon).
Ramos, a native of Mexico, states upfront, “This is not a book about Donald Trump. But his entry into politics and his rise to power are directly related to the growing anti-immigrant sentiment thriving across the United States. It’s as bad as I’ve ever seen it since I first arrived here in 1983.”
He provides a gripping reconstruction of the 2015 news conference in Iowa at which candidate Trump briefly had him thrown out.
“[W]hen there’s a politician such as Donald Trump who consistently lies, who makes racist, sexist and xenophobic comments, who attacks judges and journalists and who behaves like a bully … you cannot remain neutral,” Ramos advises his fellow journalists. “To do so would be to normalize his behavior.”
One of the questions Ramos prepared for Trump hasn’t received much attention: “Why build the largest wall on earth between two countries — 1,954 miles long — if more than 40 percent of undocumented people either come by plane or overstay their visas? Wouldn’t this be a monumental waste of time, money, and effort?”
Jose Antonio Vargas, a Filipino native, notes in his own book (see below), that he told NBC’s Chuck Todd in 2016 “that Asians, not Latinos, are the fastest-growing undocumented population in the country and urged him to ask Trump how building a wall on the southern border would protect Americans from undocumented Asians who flew here and overstayed their visas. . . . Asians have passed Latinos as the largest group of new immigrants to the U.S.”
Ramos also discusses the future of Spanish-language media in the United States.
Other views on the book:
Carlos Lozada, Washington Post: “Though he writes that being Latino in America today means a life of persecution and discrimination, Ramos argues that long-term demographic shifts in the United States ‘will end up overwhelming xenophobia, rejecting the radical extremist groups, and the United States can continue with its tradition of ethnic diversity, multiculturalism, and acceptance of immigrants.’
“Such visions must be juxtaposed with Ramos’s admission that he was entirely mistaken about 2016. ‘I said, so many times and with such great confidence, that Trump would never make it to the White House without the Latino vote,” Ramos acknowledges. ‘But I was wrong.’ He points out that close to half of the 27.3 million Latinos eligible to vote in the 2016 contest stayed home. ‘What happens in the Latino community is our own fault,’ he writes. ‘It can’t be blamed on anyone else.’ . . .”
Gregg Barrios in the Texas Observer: “Ramos stands tall in the ranks of other renowned investigative journalists, such as Elena Poniatowska and Oriana Fallaci, both of whom he says he admires.
“For this reader, he is a journalistic brother in arms to the late Mexican writer, diplomat and polemicist Carlos Fuentes, who also spoke in defense of immigrants and wrote with insight and conviction of the contentious relationship between the United States and Mexico.
“ ‘There is a beautiful word in Spanish that I believe defines our role exactly: contrapoder.’ Ramos writes near the end of Stranger. ‘It literally means ‘against power’ and at the same time it means to confront that power. That is the role of a journalist in a democracy like ours.’ . . .”
Dr. Manuel Flores, Corpus Christi (Texas) Caller-Times: “The book is amazingly candid and simple to read, but it also is disheartening and sad because of what America has become under the Trump presidency. . . .
“With personal reflections, he reaches out not only to immigrants but to those who have a negative view of them. He is determined to prove that Latinos are part of the fabric that makes America great and in ‘Stranger’ he may have accomplished that goal. . . .”
April Ryan
April Ryan, veteran White House reporter for American Urban Radio Networks, has “Under Fire: Reporting From the Front Lines of the Trump White House” ($24.95 hardcover; $23.99 ebook)
Most journalists of color will be familiar with the clashes between Ryan and the Trump White House, as well as the neglect by the Trump administration to issues of concern to African Americans, all recounted in this book. The public clashes have so resonated they have raised Ryan’s profile and made her a sought-after speaker and a CNN commentator.
“Often these days, people react first before understanding what they are talking about,” Ryan writes. “I have often been called a ‘race baiter.’ Of course, it’s just the opposite. I bring up questions related to race to inform the public so that things can improve, not worsen. I’m not a race baiter, but I hope to be a race informer. Those who make such an unfounded accusation need to do their research and understand the complicated history of race in this country before slinging that ugly term.”
Few journalists of color would disagree, though some may wish this book were more tightly edited.
“Under Fire” has been mentioned in passing more often than it has actually been reviewed. However, Publisher’s Weekly said in September, “Although plagued by self-doubt, insults, death threats, dismissals by male journalists, and the president’s characterizations of the media as the enemy of the people, Ryan champions her craft and perseveres amid the chaos.
“She clearly portrays the unrelenting stress of being one of the few black reporters on the prestigious White House beat, pulling back the curtain on the ’emotional taxes’ that African-American people endure daily in the workplace. This account will be an inspiration to those who have to fight similar battles.”
Albert Samaha
Albert Samaha, a criminal justice reporter at BuzzFeed News, has “Never Ran, Never Will: Boyhood and Football in a Changing American Inner City” (PublicAffairs, $28 hardcover).
“Never Ran, Never Will” was longlisted last week for the PEN/ESPN Literary Sports Writing Award , which carries a $5,000 prize. Samaha spent two seasons with a youth football team in the Brooklyn, N.Y, neighborhood of Brownsville, as the team members’ community is threatened by violence, poverty, and the specter of losing their homes to gentrification, in the words of the publicity material.
“I wrote this book because I wanted to explore why some kids made it out and some didn’t,” Samaha writes in his introduction. ” . . . And did escaping tough circumstances also have to mean turning your back on the neighborhood? In my reporting on disenfranchised communities across the country, I repeatedly came across people who’d dealt with the fear of poverty or crime, learned lessons from their circumstances that helped them grow into successful adults, and then found themselves drawn back to their homes. . . .”
In fact, reviewer Samuel G. Freedman wrote Nov. 2 in the New York Times, “The team’s head coach, Chris Legree, who was motivated to found the Jaguars by his participation in the Million Man March, has sent four players into the N.F.L., others to college scholarships at top-rung football schools like Syracuse, and dozens to scholarships at elite private high schools like Poly Prep. But despite his ardent, paternal efforts, which Samaha captures vividly, Legree has also watched about 30 former players end up in prison. One of Legree’s best players ever was shot dead at age 19. . . .”
Freedman concludes, “ ‘Never Ran, Never Will’ proves the continued salience of urban sports as a subject for exploring larger issues of race and class.”
Separately, Samaha returned two years ago to his birthplace for BuzzFeed. “I went back to the Philippines to see the farm my family left behind, and to try to understand why they — and most of the country — have rallied around a president most Westerners see as a violent, dangerous despot. . . .”
Jose Antonio Vargas
Jose Antonio Vargas, who shared in a Pulitzer Prize while at the Washington Post and then went on to become an advocate for the undocumented, has “Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen” (Dey St./HarperCollins, $25.99 hardcover; $15.99 trade paperback; $12.99 ebook; $20.99 digital audiobook).
“Dear America serves as the most comprehensive follow-up to three works in particular: Vargas’s 2011 New York Times Magazine essay, ‘My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant’; his 2012 Time cover story, ‘Not Legal Not Leaving’; and his 2013 film, Documented,” Janine Joseph, who like Vargas grew up undocumented, wrote in the Atlantic.
“More notably, the book is Vargas’s first long-form piece of writing that tries, through the use of vignettes, to distinguish his private self from his public persona. Both a journalist and an activist who founded the nonprofit Define American, Vargas notes that he’s often regarded as the ‘most famous undocumented immigrant in America.’
“In other words, he’s aware that his life story will never be entirely read as just his own; still, that doesn’t stop him from attempting to tell that story through memoir — a genre that requires an extended introspection of the self. . . .”
Some might find Vargas’ account of keeping his secret while working at the Washington Post more relatable.
“Since the beginning of my journalism career, there was no escaping the fact that I was lying about myself so I could survive in a profession depending on truth-telling,” Vargas writes. “After decades of internalizing the dominant, nagging narrative that ‘illegals are taking our jobs,’ I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that I was taking another person’s livelihood.
“One way I reconciled the lies I told myself was by taking my work very seriously: getting every fact right, insisting on context, telling the truth as much as the truth could be ascertained. I may lie about my status as an undocumented worker, but my work is true. . . .”
Post editorial writer Jonathan Capehart, who interviewed Vargas in September at a Washington bookstore, told him, “Reading this book, I realize I didn’t know you at all — and that was by design.”
Vargas, born in the Philippines, also wrote that black women in the Post newsroom “formed a kind of sisterhood: they championed one another, and, for some reason, they all ended up guiding me in some way.”
By contrast, though some would befriend and help him, “when I was growing up, I associated white people with people who make you feel inferior, people who condescend to you, people who question why you are the way you are without acknowledging that you, too, are a human being with the same needs and wants. . . .”
He credits novelist Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye for his early understanding that in the United States, “White as the default, white as the center, white as the norm, is the central part of the master narrative. The centrality of whiteness — how it constructed white versus black, legal versus illegal — hurts not only people of color who aren’t white but also white people who can’t carry the burden of what they’ve constructed. . . .
“Black writers challenged me to find my place here and created a space for me to claim,” Vargas continues. “Reading black writers opened doors to other writers of color, specifically Asian and Latino authors (Carlos Bulosan, Sandra Cisneros, Arundhati Roy, to name just a few) whose work was often even more marginalized than that of black writers. . . . ”
Vargas also expresses his disappointment with immigration coverage. “To an undocumented immigrant who happens to be a journalist, what has made the past few years even more maddening is how generally uninformed journalists are about immigration.
“With some notable exceptions — including the insightful work by Dara Lind at Vox and Cindy Carcamo at the Los Angeles Times, not to mention Maria Hinojosa at NPR’s Latino USA, Univision’s Jorge Ramos, and the syndicated columnist Ruben Navarrette Jr., to name just a few — the mainstream media’s coverage of immigration is lackluster at best and irresponsible at worst, promoting and sustaining stereotypes while spreading misinformation. Television is the worst culprit. . . .”
Still, Vargas’ own story resonated most with Jennifer Szalai, who concluded Sept. 19 in the New York Times, “ ‘Dear America’ is a potent rejoinder to those who tell Vargas he’s supposed to ‘get in line’ for citizenship, as if there were a line instead of a confounding jumble of vague statutes and executive orders — not to mention the life-upending prospect of getting deported to a country he barely remembers.
” ‘I was in a toxic, abusive, codependent relationship with America, and there was no getting out,’ he writes. ‘Who am I without America? What would I be without America?’ The terrible irony isn’t lost on him; decades after arriving to these shores, he has yet to breathe free.”
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View previous columns (after Feb. 13, 2016).
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