Latest update November 12th, 2024 12:03 AM
Nov 29, 2020 Book Review…, News
Book: Blackout
Author: Candace Owens
Critic: Glenville Ashby, PhD
Kaieteur News – Candace Owens has been hailed by conservatives as an eloquent and arrant voice for truth.
For others, especially the radical left, she is pilloried as a provocateur, an expedient tool of a social structure that had systemically oppressed the black community, of which Owens is a member. With impartiality tossed out, neither group can, nor is willing to objectively critique Owen’s views. This is unfortunate because there is much to glean from her work. It is now up to the discerning reader to make a veritable assessment.
A formidable orator, Owens is equally effective as a writer and raconteur. She is economically succinct and poignant. She is anecdotal, introspective, and even self-critical. She chronicles her early years and the role of family in defining her personhood.
She recalls indelible tales, one of racism during her school years, and one interaction with her grandmother that proved epiphanic. Interestingly, Owens was not always the unswerving conservative she is today. But ever inclined to analysis, a trait that is clearly evident in ‘Blackout,’ she began to revisit her values.
Her Occam’s Razor is her disregard for psychosexual and sociopolitical theories on racial oppression advanced by the likes of Dr. Frances Cress Welsing and Dr. Franz Fanon. Not that her views on race are Pollyannish. She does offer a clear path to empowerment. She acknowledges that a post-racial America is still distant. But she does not see a racial narrative in every struggle.
Race, she avers, has been weaponized by the Left to control an unsuspecting community. This political sleight of hand, according to Owens, has disempowered blacks making them victims of a delusion forced upon them. Of leftist politics, she writes, “Progressive policies have led to regressive results for black America. Democrats see inherent racism and struggle in everything, thereby destroying all racial progress that has been achieved thus far.”
America is still paradisiacal, she argues, an oasis among broken nations. Despite its checkered past, America is a place of opportunities that beckons the ambitious and the industrious. The culture of victimhood has blinded the black community producing shells of a people in the process. Owens promulgates a different approach to empowerment. Firstly, blacks must be aware of their alliance with a political party that has gutted their historically conservative culture, a culture that, in the harshest periods – slavery and Jim Crow – kept the black family intact. The Democratic Party has never been friends of blacks and to this day, advances an agenda that is antithetical to black tradition, culture and lore. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Ghettoized communities have become fiefdoms of corrupt, career politicians, mostly Democratic, who peddle in racial politics. After decades of Democratic control, black communities have little to show.
Owens singles out the welfare system and ‘the public school trap’ as instruments that smother black mobility. She delineates how these institutions militate against black endeavorus. Today, the Democratic ‘carrot’ to the black community, in the form of reparations, free health, student loan forgiveness, free college tuition – more free stuff – is reminiscent of Roosevelt’s 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act (part of the New Deal). Owens states: “What is most surprising about the many ways in which these policies hurt black Americans is that it did nothing to quell their willingness to vote in even larger numbers for Democrats again in 1936 – helping Roosevelt cruise to a landslide victory.”
Black support for the president had all to do with the administration’s promises, its good intentions, and “little to do with the truth that the New Deal policies caused disproportionate harm to the black community.”
Of the abysmal failure of pubic schools, Owen pens: “[T]hough choosing the best school for our child should not be a politicized issue, it has certainly become one, as Democrats have convinced blacks that opting out of these institutions would spell disaster.”
She elaborates: “Although numerous polls show that black Americans favour school choice (via vouchers that would allow parents to transfer the government funding already allocated for their children’s education from a public school to a private school, charter school, or other institutions of their choosing), left-wing politicians have nonsensically waged this option as an infringement on civil liberty [making] the extraordinary claim that voucher system favours white families and is thus responsible for segregation in public schools.”
She dismisses this argument as “classic leftist misinformation campaigns, which control and constrain black progress.”
Owens speaks of a perverse brand of liberal politics that has seeped into black culture with cataclysmic consequences. She traces the history of the Democratic Party. A sore picture she paints. Unbeknownst to many, the KKK was very much the face of the Party that today boasts of tolerance. Of its checkered past, she writes: “Through rigorous policy and reforms, Republican President Ulysses Grant fundamentally annihilated the Klan but…years later they experienced a rebirth.”
She adds: “Release of the film ‘Birth of a Nation’…that told the story of the brave sacrifices that the Confederate Klansmen had to make to protect the South, reignited the Klan. The film, an adaptation of the book The Clansman, a book written by Thomas Dixon Jr., a dear friend and classmate of incumbent Democratic president Woodrow Wilson, a racist, made the extraordinary decision to screen the film in the White House.”
Owens views are grounded in her faith. “There were Bible studies every week, prayers before every meal, and more rules than I felt were necessary,” she recounts of her upbringing. “Everything centered on the concept of respect and how even our smallest actions were manifestations of character.”
During that period, she learned to unburden herself from the weight of victimhood. She recalls the travails of her grandmother who “lived in a constant state of physical pain [but] never once had she or my grandmother ever complained.”
Of her folks, she pens: “They did not complain as children, nor did they complain as adults, not even as they were forced to contend with the world’s problems in addition to their own.”
Owens is self-deprecating, at times. “Yet, there I was, with a full-fledged victim mentality, upset that life hadn’t been fair to me. It was pathetic.”
Victimhood, she sees, is worn as a badge of honor by the Left.
“True Liberalism,” according to Owens, “pursues principles like the right to vote, right to life, freedom of speech.” She continues: “I will make an argument that liberalism has only ever been practiced by conservatives in this country.”
She resounds that The Left has become moral arbiters, the Thought Police, eager to alienate and blacklist dissenters.
She defines leftism as “any bad political philosophy that seeks to infringe upon individual liberties in its demand for a higher moral ground.” She explains, “The issue with leftism is that moral goodness is, of course, subjective. In essence, there is nothing more illiberal than leftism.”
Owens rejects the argument that “the government, after years of slavery and Jim Crow should eliminate black debt by subsidizing black housing, and otherwise funding black lives, arguing that a painkiller cannot eliminate cancer, and that no short-term fix, no Band-Aid over the deeply infected wound will ever fix the underlying problem plaguing our community.”
She views conservative speaker, Larry Elder, as an important voice that shaped her beliefs, recalling his fact-based response to a charge levelled by a liberal host that blacks were under threat by a racist police force. She cites Elder’s argument that health of the black community rests in the family: “In 1890-1900, a black person…was more likely to be born to a nuclear intact family than a White family.”
Owens was “stunned” to learn “that even during the traumatic periods of slavery and segregation, black families were more intact than they are today.”
Owens, through her podcasts, writings and Blexit (a movement she founded to empower urban minorities) promises to challenge the status quo. Her deliberations against socialism, her philosophy on faith, her thoughts on slavery, Black Lives Matter, and feminism make a compelling read.
‘Blackout‘ is that thought-provoking. But slowing the metastasis of left-wing politics is still a daunting task. Many a conservative, Owen included, have been censored and de-platformed by liberal big tech companies, such as Twitter and Facebook. But with this dangerous flirtation with Orwellianism and McCarthyism, Owens’ message might just get support from unlikely quarters.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)
Feedback: [email protected] or follow him on Twitter@glenvilleashby
Copyright © 2020 by Candace Owens LLC
Publisher: Threshold Editions
An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Available at Amazon
ISBN 978-1-9821-3327-6
Ratings: ***** A Must-read.
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