Burning All Illusions

Paula Giddings
May 2002     ISBN: 1560253843

Featuring selections by insurgent American writers from a range of political and personal points of view, Burning All Illusions illuminates The Nation's steadfast commitment to racial justice. The writers in this anthology have addressed these questions not to embitter but to provoke, educate, arouse, and inspire. James Baldwin once wrote that "the story of the Negro in America is the story of America.... It is not a very pretty story." Baldwin and others in this collection shed light on the ugliness of American racism to certify that it is intolerable, that America can and must do better.

Selected contributors: Sherwood Anderson, James Baldwin, Derrick Bell, Horace R. Cayton, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, LeRoi Jones, Martin Luther King Jr., Claude McKay, Carey McWilliams, Adolf Reed Jr., Oswald Garrison Villard, John Edgar Wideman, Roger Wilkins and Howard Zinn.

"The Nation's editors--from its abolitionist founders to the present--have provided space for those persistent and too often lonely voices inveighing against the evils of racial injustice."

--Derrick Bell

"The collection's great time span, encompassing Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the periods before and after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, and the variety of the writers presented make for great depth and broad perspective on the issues surrounding the gross contradictions of racial inequities and espoused traditional American values."

--Vernon Ford, Booklist

"The race problem in America is like the weather: no one seems able to do anything about it, but that hasn't stopped anyone from discussing it. The difference is that no two people have quite the same thing to say on the subject. This last point is driven home by the 77 essays that make up Burning All Illusions: Writings from The Nation on Race, edited by Paula J. Giddings, author of two other nonfiction books and a professor of African-American Studies at Smith College. Not all of the writers represented in Burning All Illusions are black; not all of the essays are even pro-black (one piece, originally a letter to the editor from 1916, is titled 'Lynching Defended'). But all are, to one degree or another, and in a variety of ways, interesting.... Among the more memorable ones are Adolph Reed Jr.'s two-part examination of Louis Farrakhan's career--and its significance; LeRoi Jones' view of boxing in the era of Sonny Liston and Cassius Clay (who was not yet Muhammad Ali, just as Jones was not yet Imamu Amiri Baraka); Patricia J. Williams' sardonic take on the Million Man March; Langston Hughes' classic 'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain'; Derrick Bell's discussion of the Freedom of Employment Act, conducted partly through a dialogue with his outspoken fictional character, Geneva Crenshaw; and Roger Wilkins' clear-eyed defense of affirmative action. In some ways, maybe the saddest thing revealed by Burning All Illusions is how little the race problem has changed. W.E.B. Du Bois' 1956 essay 'I Won't Vote' has much in common with James Baldwin's 1980 essay 'Notes on the House of Bondage,' which he could have titled 'I Will Vote, But I'm Not Too Excited About It.' Du Bois writes, 'There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.' The shock of reading such a passage, which was published nearly half a century ago but might have been written last week, is one of the many reasons to pick up this book."

--Clifford Thompson, Black Issues Book Review

Paula Giddings is Professor of African-American Studies at Smith College. Her books include In Search of Sisterhood: Delta Sigma Theta and the Challenge of the Black Sorority Movement and When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post and Jeune Afrique (Paris), among other publications.