Stony the Road by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Hey have you played Disco Elysium? It’s a video game with this character in it named Measurehead, who is a physically and verbally imposing man blocking your passage to a critical location. When you talk to him to try to get by, he greets you by saying “YOUR BODY BETRAYS YOUR DEGENERACY,” (capital letters are sic) and the conversation goes downhill from there. Measurehead, as befits his name, is also an absolutely huge racist who spouts intricate nonsense about phrenology and haplogroups to justify his belief that people of his specific ancestry are destined to claim dominion over the world. I was put in mind of Measurehead several times while reading Stony the Road because much of it is an exhausting, uncomfortable deluge of propaganda used by white people in the years after Reconstruction to portray Black people as inferior or even subhuman as a pretext for curtailing the rights they’d only recently been granted upon the (nominal) end of slavery in the US. It’s not the same as the blatherings of Measurehead—who, in a grimly amusing inversion, is what we would call Black (Disco Elysium’s geopolitics parallel the real world’s but are not the same) and praises the “ham sandwich race” for inventing such wonders of the world as eugenics and munitions before asserting their modern-day decadence and softness consigns them to the dustbin of history—but it certainly rhymes. Reading about the “race scientific” distinctions between “monogenesis” and “polygenesis” in Stony the Road was like listening to Measurehead talk about the “three categories of race”A representative sample of this description: “THERE ARE THREE CATEGORIES OF RACE: TYPE A, TYPE B, AND THE VILE C-F RACE CAULDRON OF PEDERASTY. [TYPE A] ARE THE SEMENESE, THE AREOPAGITE, AND THE OCCIDENTALS – EXCLUDING THE MAUN OF COURSE. THE MAUN ARE RIDDLED WITH ECZEMA TO THE POINT WHERE THEY FIND IT IMPOSSIBLE TO SMILE. THEY ARE ALL LACTOSE INTOLERANT – A COMMON RESULT OF INBREEDING…”

in Disco Elysium. Meticulous categorization, fractally nuanced rabbit holes of sterile intellectualizing, every one terminating in a dead end.

I read this book for my book club because some people in it were curious about the throughline between Reconstruction and the moment we find ourselves in now. For me, a blinders-on ignoramus who typically avoids learning about history unless compelled to (this book club has been very good for that), much of the information was new, or at least the organization and sheer weight of it was. Despite that my high school history education was generally at least somewhat willing to acknowledge the US’s racist history, I don’t recall its being very explicit about what exactly happened between the Civil War and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s that resulted in that movement being so necessary. Stony the Road is very explicit about this: overwhelmingly so. This is appropriate, because it successfully conveys that the propaganda was overwhelming—and largely successful in its goal of convincing people in the South that Black people were too childlike and naïve to be trusted with their own fate, too savage and violent to be trusted with white society, or, paradoxically, both.

Aside from describing all this propaganda, the other main branch of Stony the Road is concerned with the multiple efforts (both in parallel and sequentially) on the part of Black people to construct a counter-narrative in the form of a “New Negro,” emancipated not only from slavery itself but also from the abjection it entailed. The New Negro was cosmopolitan and literary—and disconnected from less “cultured” more-recently-emancipated or Southern Black people. This last might be why none of these reinventions had the desired effect. To use the twenty-first-century term, they lacked intersectionality. And I was surprised to see that the term “respectability politics,” or as it appears here, “the politics of respectability,” dates back to the late 19th century. The educated, “civilized” New Negro was respectability politics all the way, and the failure of that approach echoes even today in accusations of “acting white” and how some “conscious” rap music tries to draw a line between less and more respectable forms of Black self-expression.

What Stony the Road didn’t do terribly well for me was synthesize all this into a really cohesive understanding of the so-called “Redemption” period in which the “redeemed” Southern states managed to say, essentially, “No thank you” to the changes effected in Reconstruction. Some of this came through subsequent Supreme Court rulings that took the sting out of Constitutional amendments and legislation intended to make Black people (or at least Black men) more equal under the law. But some of it was just flatly “extra-legal”: the KKK, lynchings and other acts of terrorism as so-called law enforcement looked the other way. In one startling statistic, Gates mentions that the Black voting populations of Louisiana and Alabama decreased from over 100,000 to under 10,000 in the years following Reconstruction. He lays out, in some form or another, many of the various mechanisms by which this occurred, but it’s sort of up to the reader to connect the dots between those mechanisms, and I don’t think they’re even all represented. (For example, I seem to recall poll taxes being a significant part of the curtailing of Black voting rights but they are not mentioned at all in this book.)

Stony the Road did a good job of filling in some significant gaps in my knowledge of American history. But it was for the most part not very engaging to read, and it did only a halfway-good job of assembling its material in a way that really made sense of it. Notwithstanding, of course, that racism is mostly senseless in the first place.