Three books about serious topics

THREATENED CHILDREN: Rhetoric and Concern about Child Victims by Joel Best looks at how our culture became consumed by the fear Evil Wants To Kill Our Children. Best argues activists in the 1970s followed a standard template for getting attention, focusing on the worst possible outcomes (rape and/or murder of kidnapped kids), imply they’re way more common than they are (most missing kids are runaways, and most return home fairly soon) and then demand Someone Do Something (it reminds me a lot of how the myth of POWs still in Vietnam developed).

Best concludes this approach found a willing audience because after the upheavals of the 1960s and the political instability of the 1970s, lots of Americans worried about their kids getting killed by urban violence, getting pregnant due to Free Love, turning gay or losing their chance at success due to the weak economy. Rather than deal with the big issues, focusing on individual maniacs out to kill kids made fear manageable. As Best put it in a later article, while there aren’t any cases of randos poisoning Halloween treats, the myth endures because it’s comforting: just protect your kids one night a year and they’re safe!

The only weakness in the book is that coming out in the early 1990s, Best thought the wave of concern had peaked. Instead we’ve had Amber alerts, To Catch a Predator, and now QAnon (which fits with fictional 1980s descriptions of Vast Pedophile Rings). Still, this was worth reading.

BUILT FROM THE FIRE: The Epic Story of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, America’s Black Wall Street by Victor Luckerson covers the thriving community Oklahoma’s black residents built in Tulsa, the massacre that destroyed Greenwood and what happened next. Luckerson covers some of the surviving families down into the present day (he wrote this when a couple of infants from 1921 were still alive) and the blows that rained down in Greenwood in the intervening decades.

After the massacre, the city turned down outside offers of financial aid for the Greenwood residents, saying Tulsa would take care of its own, then refused to appropriate any money of its own to take care of them. The city also tried to pass ordinances that would have made rebuilding Greenwood impossible. Small wonder, as Luckerson says, there’s been speculation the goal from the first was to get the black community away from that desirable downtown land.

Later, urban redevelopment and the interstate highway system used eminent domain to destroy much of the surviving community. Culturally, while the events are now much better known, they’ve also been culturally appropriated: one clothing company uses names of two of the Greenwood black residents even though it has no connection and HBO’s Watchmen made no attempt to connect with survivors (though Luckerson credits the series for the historical details it uses). Very good.

SURVIVOR INJUSTICE: State-Sanctioned Abuse, Domestic Violence, and the Fight For Bodily Autonomy by Kylie Cheung argues that not only do the legal system and prison-industrial complex make things worse for rape and abuse victims — which I certainly don’t disagree with — but that it’s impossible for them to ever do right: because of ingrained patriarchal, misogynist attitudes, because some cops are rapists or abusers themselves, and because the system now allows abusers to sue their accuser. Cheung’s solutions are to defund the police and the prison-industrial complex in favor of a better social safety net (making it easier for abused spouses to walk out), making rape trials civil rather than criminal (a lower standard or proof and the victim can collect damages) and shifting to a restorative justice model where we focus on what the victim needs to become whole (unless she wants the rapist in prison, then Cheung says no way).

While a lot of this is familiar stuff to me, the details of many cases — abuse victims sued, rapist cops, a rape victim forced to pay child support to her rapist — are still horrifying. I’m not so sure about some of Cheung’s solutions such as encouraging organizations to resolve sexual assault and harassment in-house, without recourse to the law; given organizations can be just as misogynist as the cops and so many organizations cover up incidents (for example), I can’t imagine why she thinks this will work (however I’ve checked a book she recommended on the topic out of the library). I also have little quibbles such as her getting the details of the Kitty Genovese killing wrong, using the Washington Times as a source for a harassment charge (they are very right-wing and not reliable), or complaining that superhero movies reduce viewers to sheeple waiting for Iron Man or Superman to save them (an old argument and one I think is bullshit). All that said, this is still a sharp, thought-provoking book on the topic.

#SFWApro. Cover by Gil Kane, all rights to image remain with current holder.