These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). Racism is not supremacism as such, he holds, but both can be defeated with the new Black consciousness that both of them fear.Ī provocative addition to the literature of race, racism, and resistance. Here, Gordon broadens the discussion to include intersectionality and the “understanding that race is connected to a multitude of other ways of living in the Euromodern world, including class, gender, indigeneity, and sexuality,” with new discriminations at each juncture. Nonetheless, the author has a keen understanding of the supremacist playbook, which draws on a range of old-school and neofascist sources to arrive at the maxim that the only way to make oneself superior is to make another inferior. The author sometimes paints with too wide a brush, as when he asserts that “whites want everything,” a charge that would certainly risk alienating well-meaning allies. Gordon stretches a bit, though in the end convincingly, to incorporate the film Black Panther into this evolution. He suggests that small-b black consciousness accommodates this system, whereas what is needed is “to become actional, to fight against oppression”-i.e., to take up the cause of a capital-B Black consciousness that repudiates all ideas of White supremacy and Black inferiority. Furthermore, argues the author, that racism exists on the left as well as the right. “Racism is the institutional production of nonhuman status to groups of human beings,” writes Gordon, head of the philosophy department at the University of Connecticut, “with the consequence of a ‘race’ or set of ‘races’ being treated as inferior or superior to others.” Certainly, that is manifest in most working definitions of White supremacy, although, as he adds, these days most adherents of that doctrine prefer somewhat blander terms such as alt-right or white nationalism. An Afro-Jewish philosopher looks at Black consciousness and the struggle against pervasive White supremacist social structures.
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