CHARLESTON, S.C. - Nov. 11, 2020 - A testimony of the major events that shaped and propelled black lives since Jamestown, it represents the stories of the 40 million African Americans who are the descendants of enslaved people – making it their narrative too. The poems are organized in a chronology that mirrors the history of race relations in America, beginning with a voyeur's view of the naked celebratory dance of a young bride-to-be engaging in her tribal solitary fertility beach pirouette – a scene that conveys a sense of the tranquil paradise that existed before the arrival of the barbarians. The very next poem explodes into a scene of carnage, fire, pillage and rampage as humans are loaded in ships for the journey across the Middle Passage, and from there the poems assemble to recount the decadent story of race in America – from enslavement, emancipation and Reconstruction to Jim Crow and civil rights, from the Black Arts Movement to the election of Barack Obama.
The author hopes that these poems will educate white readers on their connection to the architects of the system of slavery and all the racial horrors that are a direct result of slavery in a way that would encourage them to make a proper moral assessment on these people's role in history. The poems expose white barbarism in stark terms and the honest bluntness could lead to the mistaken assertion that all whites are racist. While the author knows all white people are not racist, they all benefited from racism thus they all must contribute to the solution – the point of these edgy poems. He states, "I know that there are many unbiased white people who are self-assured enough to know that they would still fare well in an unbiased society; they are the hope of this book."
Reading Notes from 1619 will not be a sunny stroll in the park, but rather a trek through a minefield that makes one better for having successfully maneuvered through it. Reading Notes from 1619 is perhaps the closest many readers will ever get to the pain created by white supremacy and suffered by African Americans and, it is the author's hope, that this moves many to become a catalyst for justice – now.
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Michael J Nolan
