The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

From journalist and New York Times bestselling author Charles Blow comes a powerful manifesto and call to action for Black Americans to amass political power and fight white supremacy. Race, as we have come to understand it, is a fiction; but, racism, as we have come to live it, is a fact. The point here is not to impose a new racial hierarchy, but to remove an existing one. After centuries of waiting for white majorities to overturn white supremacy, it seems to me that it has fallen to Black people to do it themselves. Acclaimed columnist and author Charles Blow never wanted to write a "race book." But as violence against Black people--both physical and psychological--seemed only to increase in recent years, culminating in the historic pandemic and protests of the summer of 2020, he felt compelled to write a new story for Black Americans. He envisioned a succinct, counterintuitive, and impassioned corrective to the myths that have for too long governed our thinking about race and geography in America. Drawing on both political observations and personal experience as a Black son of the South, Charles set out to offer a call to action by which Black people can finally achieve equality, on their own terms. So what will it take to make lasting change when small steps have so frequently failed? It's going to take an unprecedented shift in power. The Devil You Know is a groundbreaking manifesto, proposing nothing short of the most audacious power play by Black people in the history of this country. This book is a grand exhortation to generations of a people, offering a road map to true and lasting freedom.

About the Author :
Charles M. Blow is an acclaimed journalist and op-ed columnist for the New York Times who appears frequently on CNN. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Fire Shut Up in My Bones. He lives in Atlanta. J. D. Jackson is a theater professor, aspiring stage director, and award-winning audiobook narrator. He is a classically trained actor, and his television and film credits include roles on House, ER, Law & Order, Hack, Sherrybaby, Diary of a City Priest, and Lucky Number Slevin. He is the recipient of more than a dozen Earphones Awards for narration and an Odyssey Honor for G. Neri's Ghetto Cowboy, and he was also named one of AudioFile magazine's Best Voices of the Year for 2012 and 2013. An adjunct professor at Los Angeles Southwest College, he has an MFA in theater from Temple University.

Review :
"In cogent arguments bound together by his customary incandescent prose, Blow explores how the white backlash towards the Great Migration that never really ended." -- "NPR" "Blow is in fact making an argument, not just offering a lament...[and] reminds that America's mobility has not always meant progress." -- "Washington Post" "Valuable as a thought experiment alone but also an 'actual plan' for effecting lasting political change." -- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)" "A must-read in the effort to dismantle deep-seated poisons of systemic racism and white supremacy." -- "San Francisco Chronicle" "Blow is one of our most penetrating thinkers and brilliant essayists, and in The Devil You Know he is putting it all on the line." -- "Henry Louis Gates Jr., New York Times bestselling author" "Blow's powerful writing is always stirring, but perhaps never more than in this timely, often personal call for the building of a better tomorrow." -- "Town & Country"