Though Oluo clearly comes from a leftist perspective, she doesn’t spare Democrats from criticism. As she points out again and again, unless we are willing to come to terms with and, yes, apologize, for the transgressions of the past, it’s going to be impossible to actually create a more just and peaceful society. Fortunately, she has a deft touch, and she does an exemplary job of showing how it is precisely Americans’ collective unwillingness to acknowledge its past flaws that allows social ills to continue to fester and flourish in our current moment.

It’s sometimes difficult to draw direct lines between the (somewhat) distant past and the present. The type of book that Oluo sets out to write is one of the easiest to do poorly. Chapter 7 contends with the racist past and present of American sports, focusing in particular on football and the controversies surrounding players deciding to take a knee in order to protest racist violence. Chapter 6 looks at the power Black women have wielded in national politics and how that has always led to backlash and efforts to push them down. Chapters 4 and 5 examine issues of housing and labor, showing how white men have worked to segregate American society and the workplace, ensuring that Black people still struggle with homeownership and women, particularly women of color, still make a fraction of what men do. Chapter 2 looks at the ways in which white men have inserted themselves into feminism in order to claim it for themselves, while Chapter 3 looks at the ways in which higher education has had to endure constant assaults from powerful white men, including Ronald Reagan. And, while the west has now been fully “settled,” that image of the independent cowboy still exerts a powerful pull, and Oluo draws a line between that past and more recent conflicts, including the standoff between Cliven Bundy and his family and the federal government.Įach chapter undertakes a similar braiding of the past and the present. She shows how the idea of the cowboy-popularized by Buffalo Bill Cody and countless westerns-was fundamentally premised on violence and the extermination of Native Americans. The first chapter, for example, examines the legacy of the western colonialism. Mediocre skillfully combines rich history with contemporary political analysis. It’s a book that’s essential for anyone invested in helping to forge an America that’s not designed to work just for white men. That is definitely the case with Ijeoma Oluo’s Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America. Every so often, you come across a book that’s so bracing in its critique, so searing in its political commentary, and so incisive in its historical analysis, that you can’t help but write a gushing review of it.

Mediocre dangerous legacy