The latest book by US writer and social commentator Roxane Gay is a compilation of her newspaper and magazine columns written over a 10-year period of significant cultural perturbation, spanning the Black Lives Matter movement, the Me Too movement, the Trump presidency, the Covid pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, the attack on the Capitol, and the increase in political polarisation in the US and beyond.
Variously playful, earnest and enraged, these pieces include commentary on current affairs, analyses of books and films, celebrity profiles, and advice to readers dispensed by Gay in her My Work Friend column in the New York Times. What unites them is a centring of the lives of marginalised groups, and a focus on how these lives are represented and understood in the culture more generally.
It takes courage to proffer opinions on these subjects, and like many with a large public platform, Gay has sometimes been subjected to online harassment. This in turn may have affected her perception of the possibilities for good faith political debate. “After being on the receiving end of enough aggression, everything starts to seem like an attack,” she reflects. But she has continued to follow the example of her mother, “who always stood her ground and was unapologetic about her beliefs”.
Some of the most visceral pieces in the book chart Gay’s confusion, grief and rage at the election of Donald Trump and her growing horror at his chaotic presidency. “Every single morning I am tense as I check the news, wondering what the president has tweeted overnight,” she writes.
But while Gay’s opinions are passionately felt and defended, her instinct is towards political tribalism rather than open inquiry. The individual pieces are short – most only three or four pages long – and anthologised as they are here, removed from the social context in which they were originally published, there is a flatness to them, a failure to develop a mature political vision that one might hope for from a book-length work.
Gay has a tendency to make sweeping or hyperbolic statements, and relies heavily on abstract, all-powerful causal forces, such as racism, whiteness and patriarchy, which are the dei ex machina of her political universe, always available to explain any social phenomenon. The constant appeal to these forces prematurely terminates a more considered analysis of the complex factors that might need to be understood to improve outcomes for marginalised people.
Insofar as Gay’s political stance evolves during the time period of the book, it is towards a hardening and doubling down on her support for the US progressive agenda. She writes: “If you had asked me before George Floyd’s killing if I believed in police abolition, I would have said that reform is desperately needed but that abolition was a bridge too far … Now I know we don’t need reform. We need something far more radical. Burn it all down and build something new in the ashes.”
Gay seems uninterested in the practical implications of this proposal – it feels emotionally justified, and that is enough. One could make a case that radicalism on one side of the political divide feeds off and in turn feeds radicalism on the other. But Gay is pessimistic about the possibility of any kind of rapprochement across that divide. Her conviction that truth and justice sit entirely on one side remains unshaken. In a sense, then, her writing takes her to exactly where she started: a place of moral certainty and deep despair at the intransigence of those who do not see the world as she does.
