Review: `I have no right to join the chorus, for the only thing worse than a bigot is an ingrate.'
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 17, 2014
James Francis Johnson breaks all records for fascinating preparation to become a notable author. Movie star handsome, a fitness trainer, and an author of challenging works, Johnson was born in Philadelphia, raised in Levittown, a misfit who loathed people of color, became a roadie, got jobs as a printer while crisscrossing the country, pausing West Palm Beach, Denver, Chicago, Boston, and Hollywood, drank a lot, and finally saw that his variation of semi-literacy prevented him from finding the world as it is rather than as he had been coached to see it - ultimately entered self taught literacy at a university level, went on to gain a biology degree from the University of Massachusetts, and settled in to writing some of the most interesting transformative words about our society and the way we perceive and misbehave, especially on the subject of racism. This rather extraordinary man turned his life around, changed camps on racism (the subject of this book), and now thrives as a fitness trainer and author in Denver, Colorado. At age 54 James Francis Johnson has lived several lifetimes. His imprint on American literature is a strong one waiting to be discovered by readers beleaguered by a country (and world) that has fallen apart.THE EDUCATION OF A WHITE BOY is an autobiography: it is also a lesson in how to address racism problems, and `by opposing, end them' to reference Hamlet's Nunnery soliloquy. Yes, we are treated to the early years of the author's life including his own racism against African Americans, but it is after his self entry into learning to read that he discovers Black History and changes his hate for blacks to hate for whites who have abused (as did he) and continue to abuse African Americans. As he so eloquently writes, `a drifter knows little about the big picture, and, yes, I should have gone to college. I spent so much of my impressionable youth looking at society from the lowest angle that I came to distrust middle-class America. If, on graduating high school, I was not college material, then now, while on the road, I spat at the very idea of the ivy-covered walls of academia out of loyalty to my fellow street people and rage against the privileged, educated people who blew past us on the sidewalks. My permanent worldview was being formed on pure resentment.' `I have learned a lot of life lessons from Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, W.E.B. Du Bois, and especially the Big Three of African-American Literature - Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin.' And to quote from the book description, `In the end, this is a love-story between the author and the books and essays - the best of the Western Canon, which, in his opinion, include African-American writers -- that helped transform him from an ignorant, superstitious boy into an articulate, enlightened man.'I love this timely book and hope that it becomes part of the reading of every citizen of this country -no, of the globe. James Francis Johnson is a very important writer and blogger. Watch him rise, but read him now! Grady Harp, May 14