Driving While Black
Reading like political screeds of the most strident sort, these first two chapters yet capture the attention with their cogent and au courant message about political corruption, governmental incompetence and racial injustice.
The first story is like Orwell’s “1984” as told from the viewpoint of the enigmatic O’Brien. The totalitarian government under its glorious leader uses a variety of tactics to weed out and murder its subversive citizens. The strategies—from trumped up charges to rape to torture—seem violent to the point of being surreal. Its horrifying to believe that such things exist in today’s world. Yet we read about such things happening every day, that the real monsters aren’t imaginary beings out of Lovecraftian lore, filled as that was with nightmarish creatures and indifferent gods. No, the real monsters are mankind, whether in his eager willingness to indulge in debauched cruelty or his fervent desire to uphold a police state he knows is corrupt.
The second story is about Black Lives Matter, only set in Africa not the United States. It’s a sad reminder that being born black is to live with a permanent mark of Cain set on the skin and a bull’s eye on your back. The writer is a defiant, young black man who despises his parents’s passive acceptance of an unjust system and sneers at those black people who act as sell outs.
It’s an all-too-familiar story set on foreign shores and told in intelligent, sophisticated language that avoids puerile quadriliteralism. I was quite admiring of this fictional character’s verbiage but wished he avoided reading posts on his online feed. Naturally, he was going to get a lot of vitriolic backlash. The best thing to do is to go about his work and avoid the trolls.
The first story is like Orwell’s “1984” as told from the viewpoint of the enigmatic O’Brien. The totalitarian government under its glorious leader uses a variety of tactics to weed out and murder its subversive citizens. The strategies—from trumped up charges to rape to torture—seem violent to the point of being surreal. Its horrifying to believe that such things exist in today’s world. Yet we read about such things happening every day, that the real monsters aren’t imaginary beings out of Lovecraftian lore, filled as that was with nightmarish creatures and indifferent gods. No, the real monsters are mankind, whether in his eager willingness to indulge in debauched cruelty or his fervent desire to uphold a police state he knows is corrupt.
The second story is about Black Lives Matter, only set in Africa not the United States. It’s a sad reminder that being born black is to live with a permanent mark of Cain set on the skin and a bull’s eye on your back. The writer is a defiant, young black man who despises his parents’s passive acceptance of an unjust system and sneers at those black people who act as sell outs.
It’s an all-too-familiar story set on foreign shores and told in intelligent, sophisticated language that avoids puerile quadriliteralism. I was quite admiring of this fictional character’s verbiage but wished he avoided reading posts on his online feed. Naturally, he was going to get a lot of vitriolic backlash. The best thing to do is to go about his work and avoid the trolls.