John A. Williams’ Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light is another book I found out about from Kali Tal’s list of Militant Black Science Fiction. It’s a strange and bleak book, published in 1969, and set in a near-future 1973. An official of a “moderate” civil rights organization, frustrated at entrenched racism, goes to the Mafia to order a hit on a white cop who has killed a black teenager. From this act of revenge, things escalate into a full-scaled race war in the cities of America. The book is powerful, as a cry of frustration with no easy answers. Along the way, we get a nuanced, insightful sense of race relations and racial history in America–including a look at the position of Jews and Italians, who have only been admitted into whiteness on sufferance. Not a perfect book by any means, but a disturbing and thought-provoking one. Cops still kill black men with considerable frequency today, and nearly always get away with it. It’s happened three times in Seattle alone, in as many years. I’m not favoring an-eye-for-an-eye retribution, and the paths such vigilante action might lead us down; but after reading Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light, I can’t help wondering about it just a little.
Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light
John A. Williams’ Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light is another book I found out about from Kali Tal’s list of Militant Black Science Fiction. It’s a strange and bleak book, published in 1969, and set in a near-future 1973. An official of a “moderate” civil rights organization, frustrated at entrenched racism, goes to the Mafia to order a hit on a white cop who has killed a black teenager. From this act of revenge, things escalate into a full-scaled race war in the cities of America. The book is powerful, as a cry of frustration with no easy answers. Along the way, we get a nuanced, insightful sense of race relations and racial history in America–including a look at the position of Jews and Italians, who have only been admitted into whiteness on sufferance. Not a perfect book by any means, but a disturbing and thought-provoking one. Cops still kill black men with considerable frequency today, and nearly always get away with it. It’s happened three times in Seattle alone, in as many years. I’m not favoring an-eye-for-an-eye retribution, and the paths such vigilante action might lead us down; but after reading Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light, I can’t help wondering about it just a little.