systemic racism – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

The Trayvon Generation: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

By Scott J. Pearson | February 19, 2023February 19, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

It would be hard for me to be critical of this book, but fortunately, I do not need to be. I listened to it in audiobook form and progressed through it quickly. It reads like a series of sermons – jeremiads of sorts – admonishing us to value human life in every form. As alluded to in the title, they focus on concerns about race. As an American white man, I am systemically complicit and…

Native Son by Richard Wright

By Scott J. Pearson | January 9, 2021January 9, 2021 by Scott J. Pearson

Historically, this work was written before the Civil Rights era (1940) and shed light on the terrible social circumstances that pervaded African-American life in the North. Set in Chicago shortly after the Great Migration, it portrays what we now would characterize as systemic racism – the realities of a dysfunctional society. A black everyman has his life cast away by a lack of opportunity to make his life count for something. It can remind today’s…