Scan barcode
A review by lesserjoke
Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America by Ijeoma Oluo
3.0
Although I agree with nearly everything that author Ijeoma Oluo opines in these pages, I've found it somewhat lacking as a single cohesive argument. Her stated thesis, that white men are so privileged by American society that many of us can achieve success with minimal contribution of the relevant factors needed by most women and people of color, strikes me as probably self-evident for certain readers and requiring a rigorous explanation for others. But Oluo doesn't really present that sort of case here, instead offering a range of social justice-oriented essays that don't always speak to the topic at hand.
The anger directed against athlete-activist Colin Kaepernick, for instance, seems like a great illustration of white fragility and entitlement. But who exactly is mediocre in this scenario? A point could be made about the objectively lower talents of the players -- some but not all of them white -- who have been recruited for NFL teams while Kaep remains sidelined for peacefully protesting police brutality, or about how non-racialized social causes don't receive the same pushback from fans, yet this writer appears more interested in describing the injustice of his blacklisting on its own terms than in exploring the connections to her title. Other areas of the text similarly call out racism and/or sexism without specifically keying in to the acceptable mediocrity of white men.
I'm aware of the irony for a white male reviewer like myself to critique this book and give it a less-than stellar rating. But I take no issue with the actual conclusions, merely the effectiveness of how they have been argued herein. I think that absent the attempt at an overarching structure to awkwardly squeeze in all the topics that Oluo wants to address, I would feel a lot more positively towards this project as a whole.
[Content warning for death threats, slurs, and suicide.]
--Subscribe at https://patreon.com/lesserjoke to support these reviews and weigh in on what I read next!--
Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter
The anger directed against athlete-activist Colin Kaepernick, for instance, seems like a great illustration of white fragility and entitlement. But who exactly is mediocre in this scenario? A point could be made about the objectively lower talents of the players -- some but not all of them white -- who have been recruited for NFL teams while Kaep remains sidelined for peacefully protesting police brutality, or about how non-racialized social causes don't receive the same pushback from fans, yet this writer appears more interested in describing the injustice of his blacklisting on its own terms than in exploring the connections to her title. Other areas of the text similarly call out racism and/or sexism without specifically keying in to the acceptable mediocrity of white men.
I'm aware of the irony for a white male reviewer like myself to critique this book and give it a less-than stellar rating. But I take no issue with the actual conclusions, merely the effectiveness of how they have been argued herein. I think that absent the attempt at an overarching structure to awkwardly squeeze in all the topics that Oluo wants to address, I would feel a lot more positively towards this project as a whole.
[Content warning for death threats, slurs, and suicide.]
--Subscribe at https://patreon.com/lesserjoke to support these reviews and weigh in on what I read next!--
Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter