SUMMER OF OUR DISCONTENT

Examining the deeply rooted events contributing to the unrest of 2020.

Cultural critic Williams has argued that although racism is real, race itself is not. In this set of linked essays, he again voices his hope that one day America will be truly integrated, “not as stereotypes or avatars of broad social categories, but as living individuals, in all our fullness and contradiction.” There is much work to do to bring about that possibility, for the summer of 2020 was governed by the twin specters of the Covid-19 pandemic and George Floyd’s murder. Both, Williams ventures, fueled the growing need to “revolt against something,” right-wingers seizing on the first to protest stay-at-home and masking orders, left-wingers seizing on the second to speak out against institutionalized racism. Yet, he wonders, why did this “mass attunement to racialized injustice” happen in the case of Floyd and not in the cases of, say, Ahmaud Arbery or Trayvon Martin? Williams advances provocative theories, one of which positions Floyd as a twofold figure, the one a man having a very bad day, the other a nearly Christlike symbol who bore the weight of America’s original sin by dying as he did. Williams reserves some of his criticism for aspects of cancel culture and left wokeness, such as the “total lack of skepticism” that surrounded actor Jussie Smollett’s invented account of being racially attacked in Chicago, a hoax, Williams holds, that robbed the left of a certain amount of moral high ground in the age of Trump. Throughout, Williams keeps a gimlet eye on the American obsession with race and remains optimistic—“I am convinced that the authentically color-­blind society is the final destination every Western society must assiduously direct itself ­toward”—although he acknowledges the difficulty of arriving at that day.

A thoughtfully reasoned contribution to the literature of race and racism in our time.