Lovable Racists, Magical Negroes, and White Messiahs

Description

In this incredibly timely book, David Ikard dismantles popular white supremacist tropes, which effectively devalue black life and trivialize black oppression. Lovable Racists, Magical Negroes, and White Messiahs investigates the tenacity and cultural capital of white redemption narratives in literature and popular media from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Help. In the book, Ikard explodes the fiction of a postracial society while awakening us to the sobering reality that we must continue to fight for racial equality or risk losing the hard-fought gains of the Civil Rights movement. Through his close reading of novels, films, journalism, and political campaigns, he analyzes willful white blindness and attendant master narratives of white redemption—arguing powerfully that he who controls the master narrative controls the perception of reality. The book sounds the alarm about seemingly innocuous tropes of white redemption that abound in our society and generate the notion that blacks are perpetually indebted to whites for liberating, civilizing, and enlightening them. In Lovable Racists, Magical Negroes, and White Messiahs, Ikard expertly and unflinchingly gives us a necessary critical historical intervention. Acknowledgments Foreword by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting Introduction Chapter 1 Good Slave Masters Don’t Exist: Lovable Racists and the Crisis of Authorship in Twelve Years a Slave Chapter 2 Constituting the Crime: White Innocence as an Apparatus of Oppression Chapter 3 “We Have More to Fear than Racism that Announces Itself”: Distraction as a Strategy to Oppress Chapter 4 “Only Tired I Was, Was Tired of Giving In”: Rosa Parks, Magical Negroes, and the Whitewashing of Black Struggle Chapter 5 Santa Claus Is White and Jesus Is Too: Era(c)ing White Myths for the Health and Well-Being of Our Children Coda Notes Index