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A review by miguel
The Red Record by Ida B. Wells
5.0
Ida B. Wells's germinal argument against lynching and in favor of due process and equal protection under the law is stupendous, prescient, horrifying, and shameful. America's national shame is far beyond chattel slavery and extends to the absurd racial injustices today, which have far more in common with "lynch law" than chattel slavery or Jim Crow.
Wells's journalistic skill makes The Red Record an important model for the in-house style of news-editorial magazines like The New Yorker. The political importance of the text, then, coincides with the formal value. Wells brings the statistics she draws from the records of lynching alive with vivid narrativization in the method readers have come to expect by talented contemporary essayists. Wells, then, truly paints red the records she consults.
The text's contemporary resonance makes it all the more difficult to read. The spectacular murders of Black men, women, and children without due process and equal protection under the law are constantly circulated in news reports and via social media. Worse, still, often these murders are perpetrated by agents of the law. Wells argues that those who possess institutional power must assert that power to stop lynching. The same could be said today, as those judicial and governmental officials sit, at best, paying lip service to the plight of Black people in this country, or at worse in complete denial.
Wells's journalistic skill makes The Red Record an important model for the in-house style of news-editorial magazines like The New Yorker. The political importance of the text, then, coincides with the formal value. Wells brings the statistics she draws from the records of lynching alive with vivid narrativization in the method readers have come to expect by talented contemporary essayists. Wells, then, truly paints red the records she consults.
The text's contemporary resonance makes it all the more difficult to read. The spectacular murders of Black men, women, and children without due process and equal protection under the law are constantly circulated in news reports and via social media. Worse, still, often these murders are perpetrated by agents of the law. Wells argues that those who possess institutional power must assert that power to stop lynching. The same could be said today, as those judicial and governmental officials sit, at best, paying lip service to the plight of Black people in this country, or at worse in complete denial.