MY NAME IS TED, AND I’M A RACIST – VOLUME THREE

Neill challenges fellow liberals to rethink their approach to Trump supporters in this third nonfiction work in a series.

“I do believe Donald Trump spreads misogyny and hate,” the author writes in this book’s introduction, adding that he also believes the president to be “cruel, solipsistic, and amoral.” With that said, the author isn’t trying to persuade readers to share his view of President Trump, but rather to ask fellow progressives to examine how their own actions may have driven nominally apolitical or moderate voters towards Trump as a candidate. Central to the book’s argument is that Trump supporters have legitimate grievances against the establishment, and to reduce their support to raw “racism, sexism, and xenophobia” is an attempt to “gaslight them.” Drawing on the antiracist work of activist Ibram X. Kendi and others, Neill emphasizes that “shaming others is not a tool for social justice,” and instead calls on his colleagues on the Left to apply their core values of compassion and understanding to those with different political beliefs. Sweeping claims that Trump supporters are ignorant or morally deficient, he says, are counterproductive to a winning electoral strategy, which he argues should reach out to people who feel marginalized, rather than further alienate them. By abandoning disillusioned men, he asserts, the Left created a vacuum that was filled by promoters of toxic masculinity. This is the latest work in a multibook series on systemic racism, whose previous volumes tackled structural racism head-on from the perspective of “a well-meaning-but imperfect-ally.” Neill, a past recipient of the Martin Luther King Jr. Torch of Peace Award, has a solid theoretical foundation in critical race theory and antiracist literature, and he backs his argument with a network of scholarly citations. He’s also the author of more than a dozen SF and fantasy novels, and he balances his academic bona fides (which include a master’s degree in public health from Emory University) with an engaging, well-argued, and accessible writing style, accompanied by personal anecdotes, textbox vignettes, and Spooner’s pen-and-ink illustrations.

A convincingly argued, well-researched critique of the American Left by a fellow progressive.