In my latest book review for The Objective Standard, I write about a newly re-discovered memoir by an escaped American slave named John Swanson Jacobs, whose better-remembered sister Harriet also wrote a famous memoir of her days in slavery. Unfortunately, this new book is hampered by the editor's woke Newspeak:
Comments like these are symptomatic of Shroeder’s approach—which combines the gibberish lingo of Critical Race Theory with the nihilism (or as Shroeder prefers, “Black radical antisentimentalism”) of the 1619 Project—and these severely mar the biographical essays and explanatory notes in the book. Consider Shroeder’s assertions that “[the] sentimental mode that is hardwired into the liberal contradictions of American national fantasy. . . makes scenes of pain serve as both embodiment of Black inhumanity and proof of Black humanity,” or that Six Hundred Thousand Despots “radically rewrites the humanitarian contract between reader and text.” To the extent these phrases mean anything, they aren’t true.
Faddish jargon like this is bad enough when it’s merely distracting, but Shroeder’s efforts at profundity repeatedly cross the line into the ridiculous. At one point, for example, he says that “slaveowners enacted their violence in the marketplace by breaking the bodies of the enslaved down into parts (field hands, long fingers for picking cotton, and so on).” Presumably, if using a term like “field hands” constitutes “breaking the body,” Douglass was also breaking it when he wrote “Men of Color, to Arms!” during the War, and Garrison was equally to blame when he prayed, “Let us shiver to atoms those galling fetters, under the pressure of which so many hearts have bursted [sic]. Let us not shackle the limbs of the future workmanship of God.”
In another place, Shroeder interprets Jacobs’s farewell letter to his slavemaster, Sawyer, in an equally bizarre way. Jacobs wrote, “when I have got settled I will give you further satisfaction,” which Shroeder sees as “a play on words,” because “[the term] ‘settled’ often meant putting things in a desired order and closing an account,” and he concludes that Jacobs was really “call[ing] for reparations.” Actually, it’s more likely that Jacobs just meant...settled.
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