Blackout

I didn't know anything about Candace Owens before starting this book, other than perhaps hearing of her in passing. My grandmother told me about a “really good book” she was reading and I agreed to read it too, to see if we could find some way of not talking past each other in our political conversations. I read this book in its entirety, which I wouldn't have bothered to do if I hadn't promised my grandma I'd read it.

After reading the book, my understanding is that Candace Owens's primary motivation was to convince the reader that:
1. Democrats are holding black Americans back, and doing so on purpose.
2. Welfare is bad and has destroyed the black family dynamic.
3. Trump is heralding a new era and has done a lot for black people, so vote for him in 2020.

She cherry picks examples to find the worst of history or the most ridiculous of present day, without considering broader context. She frequently primes the reader on what to think by declaring something good or bad, then describing it. Most frustrating of all, she doesn't thoroughly examine anything. If welfare is bad - tell me more. How is welfare structured? How many people are on welfare and how stay on welfare? Of those, how many have medical concerns? How many have children? What kinds of jobs are people on welfare able to get in their geographical area and with their qualifications? Are they good jobs that will pull them out of poverty? Are there elements of welfare right now that are making the choice between welfare and a job harder? Is there something that could be done to help them forward - counseling, education, technical learning? Just what would happen if you suddenly took welfare away? How would people suddenly be better off? None of this is considered.

Education is also one of her subtopics, but she points to poor schools and lack of choice as the problem. She doesn't delve into any solutions like better funding for these schools through a re-evaluation of how our taxes are put to work for education, or the emphasis that's been put on early childhood education, or helping parents at home. Instead she points to an example like Ben Carson, who went from having bad grades to becoming a surgeon, like anyone has the capacity to become a surgeon if they just try hard enough.

She doesn't propose any real solutions or evaluate solutions proposed by others, just points at problems and then points at the Democrats as the primary reason for those problems. I found her welfare-bashing especially interesting because she describes starting out in a terrible apartment with her family, then being helped by her conservative grandparents who lived in a nicer area. Is everyone just meant to have grandparents that can help them in their time of need?

Speaking of which, Owens does nothing to address the issue of lost generational wealth through slavery and then racist official policies that held black Americans back when it came to housing and entrepreneurship. She dismisses racism as basically an issue of the past because it's not as serious now without slavery. In her section on feminism, she also dismisses the issue of sexual harassment/assault by pinpointing a few cases where women lied, without giving any time to the many legitimate cases (which I found especially interesting after watching Bombshell) and the way those cases are frequently ignored or silenced.

Trump is mentioned in small doses throughout the book, but the book ends with a push that because Trump tells it like it is and because black unemployment rates fell during his presidency, he has done a lot for black people and should be re-elected. Also Democrats are awful. That's it, that's why Trump should be supported. This book was released in September 2020, so this is another example of blatantly ignoring the broader context - the Trump administration handled the pandemic terribly and communities of color have been disproportionately affected. Other than during the times of Lincoln, she also doesn't provide any examples of the Republican party helping black people.

I seriously doubt she would succeed in convincing anyone who hasn't already decided these things were true. Not anyone who has paid more attention to the world at large anyway. In the first conversation I had with my grandma about this book, I described the number of issues that I found with the way Owens presents her arguments. My grandma's response was “Well I read to read, not analytically like you do.”

I'm a left-leaning independent. I hate the fact that our country is locked into a two-party system. I want to find some common ground on these issues for the sake of progress and to have less fraught conversations with certain family members. But this book couldn't provide that - it was impossible to take it seriously.