Prometheus 6

I'm glad I'm not the only one that notices stuff like this.

As Carr says of the remnants of the Klan still to be found in Indiana in the early 2000s, "These were failed, damaged people, and joining the Klan was how they made themselves feel better, and it was deeply sad."

"Deeply sad"? Perhaps so, but one does quickly tire of Carr's insistence on inserting her own opinions -- most of them banal and gratuitous -- at every turn. When she blurts out, at one point, "This is the unbearable part -- facing the fact that my grandparents went along with it," it's all the reader (OK: this reader) can do not to throw the book across the room and shout, "Get off it!" Self-righteousness is everywhere, and invariably it's self-serving. As was true previously of Ball and McWhorter, Cynthia Carr has written a book not about the subject ostensibly at hand but about herself.

A journalist returns to her hometown to uncover the meaning of a horrific lynching.
By Jonathan Yardley
Sunday, March 26, 2006; Page BW02

In certain precincts occupied by certain members of the American intelligentsia, it has for some time been quite the fashion to ferret out racists in one's familial woodpile and then to write books about them. The ostensible purpose of these books is to provide intimate, confessional evidence of the degree to which racial prejudice has infiltrated every conceivable corner of American life. Their obvious if unstated purpose is to show how the (white) author has triumphed over his or her sordid ancestral inheritance to become a person of impeccable credentials on matters racial. Though all due modesty and claims of imperfection are expressed, the reader is expected to stand and cheer as, at book's end, the author's heroic achievement is revealed in full.

Two of these books were lavishly applauded in all the right places and festooned with important awards. Edward Ball's sublimely self-congratulatory and self-serving Slaves in the Family (1998) was given a National Book Award. Diane McWhorter's somewhat more subdued but equally self-serving Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2001) was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. In such cases, one is always left to wonder whether the prize judges are applauding the winners or themselves, but there can be no doubt that those two were honored less for their actual literary merits, which are slender, than for the correctness of their authors' views and, by no means least, those authors' eagerness to clad themselves in handsomely tailored hair shirts.

Now comes journalist Cynthia Carr with Our Town . It is set in the Midwest (Indiana) rather than South Carolina (Ball) or Alabama (McWhorter), but otherwise it is mostly of a piece with its two celebrated predecessors. Clearly modeled after both of them, it purports to tell what its subtitle calls "the Hidden History of White America" by exploring how its author's grandparents may or may not have been complicit in, or at least friendly witnesses to, a horrific lynching in August 1930 in the small Indiana city of Marion. The unfortunate truth is that evidence of Carr's forebears' involvement in the atrocity is slender and shadowy at best, the raw material for a magazine article at most. In order to stretch it into what frequently seems the longest book ever written, Carr is forced to look elsewhere, especially to the Ku Klux Klan, the sordid past and present of which she examines endlessly without managing to add an iota to what we already know about it.