An Okay Book

Another two months, another book down.

This time around, it's Time Wise's "Speaking Treason Fluently," a follow-up to his "White Like Me" book of essays. I heard of Wise a while ago and was interested in seeing what he had to say en masse. This is ALMOST his latest work.

For those of you not "in the know," :quotefingers: Wise is... someone, a consultant I think, who talks a lot about racism. I mean, a lot. I mean, all the fuckin' time. He's also white, in case you couldn't tell. It's rare hearing a white dude talk about racism and not sound like a douche doing so, and Wise almost pulls it off, with some minor stumblings.

Wise's whole deal is that white people have privileges in America, privileges they take advantage of daily, even when they don't realize it. And even though society has progressed (mostly) since outright racism, there are still vestiges around us that keep minorities down.

He backs this up with a solid mix of logical arguments (which isn't hard since racism itself is pretty goddamned illogical) and stastical stuff, though some of his info is outdated in this book. But the studies he uses (for example, criminal studies that show that white people are more likely to possess drugs in traffic stops, even though blacks are overwhelmingly stopped more often) are very effective. Too bad they will mostly fall on deaf ears, because racists usually have earworms and stuff.

Wise uses language well enough to avoid launching walls of text at you, but he runs into another problem. Wise repeats himself. A lot. Not as much as the Chomp, but he usually swings by the same sets of arguments over a span of essays. It's not overly repetitive, but you do notice the repetition. And if it's one thing, I repeat, one thing I really hate, it's repetition. STOP DOING THAT.

OKAY.

He's also pretty good when he stays in his statistical, professional element, but when he delves into certain tangents, he can sound like a bit of a magoo. Case in point: He devotes an entire chapter to defending Barry Bonds. Yeah, him. Barrold, you see, was victimized by racism, and it doesn't matter anyway because the records suck because most of them were taken when whites shut blacks out of ball.

I think the essay was written before the Roidmuffin admitted under oath that he took roids ("unknowningly" :quotemarks:), because he attests that Barry never even admitted to taking them. Well he did. He definitely dog did. Then he tries to argue that roids don't make you a great player, which is missing the point (they allow great players to hit more HRs than they would, which was the entire fucking problem with Barry). As for his Negro League argument, well, I don't know what he wants to do about that because there's no way to prove that the great Negro Leaguers would have done better or worse if the MLB was integrated from the start. It's irrelevant anyway because they have done a lot since integration, including holding both the legit and illegit titles of Homerun King.

But other than that, Wise usually is on point and entertaining. He's even better when he speaks (his cadence, in particular, is cool to watch). In print, though, he suffers a bit from repetition and the occasional odd tangent.

If you're at all interested in racism in modern America and are prepared to learn some shit you might not already know, you should check this one out.

And that, as they say, "is that." :fingers break doing quotemarks: