America: The Black Point of View (BOOK REVIEW)
America
The
Black Point of View
by
Tony Rose
Amber
Books
Paperback,
$21.95
572
pages, Illustrated
ISBN:
978-1-937269-50-0
Book
Review by Kam Williams
“I come from a place
that is so invisible that you can hardly see me. Yet, I am despised,
hated and feared more than anyone or anything... I live in the
underbelly of America and I am poor and have nothing. I am a Black
man... and I am invisible, until someone kills me...
This book is essentially
a children's story. A story of millions of children locked away in
the segregated, red-lined ghettos and housing projects of America. I
found out early on that this was not going to be an easy book to
write.
I wanted to write an
autobiography about... the horrific murderers, pimps, gangsters,
rapists, child abusers and thieves that I grew up with... [but] I
soon realized that I could not write about me as an
African-American... without writing about White America.
I also wanted to write
about what it was like for a child... in the real ghetto, the
projects... where, contrary to how poor Black people are always
depicted, there was no God, no church on Sundays, and no singing in
the choir.”
-- Excerpted from the
Introduction (page 1)
Tony
Rose is the CEO of Amber Communications Group, the largest
African-American publisher of self-help books and music biographies.
He is also the author of several books and an NAACP Image
Award-winner as publisher of “Obama Talks Back:: Global Lessons.”
So,
it probably comes as quite a surprise that a man of such considerable
accomplishment would hail from a humble background. In fact, Tony's
upbringing in Boston back in the Fifties and Sixties was way worse
than merely modest, given how he and his sister were raised in a
rough Roxbury ghetto they were lucky to survive.
His
absentee-dad was rarely around after being caught molesting his
daughter, not that the heroin addicted-pimp/Mafia hit man would have
made much of a role model. Consequently, Tony's mom was totally
dependent on that bi-weekly Welfare check from the government. And up
until she lost her mind in 1965, the emotionally-abusive woman was
fond of routinely reminding her kids that they were “black and
ugly” and that nobody wanted them. Charming.
Nevertheless,
Tony was wise enough not to lay all of the blame for his nightmarish
childhood on his parents, since so many of his friends had to deal
with similar dysfunction. After all, he describes the Whittier St.
projects where he grew up as “a red fortress filled with screaming
children, cold brutal gangs and women.”
Therefore,
he decided to open his memoirs with a 100+ page blistering attack on
the 70% of White America that remains ostensibly indifferent to the
country's shameful legacy of slavery, segregation and institutional
racism . For, their destructive by-products exact a continuing toll
as evidenced in the African-American masses' ongoing suffering in
squalor due to a seemingly-irreversible cultural collapse.
“America:
The Black Point of View” proves to be a very timely tome, as it
even addresses the epidemic of shootings of unarmed blacks like
Travon Martin, Jordan Davis and now the 9 Charleston churchgoers by
cowardly whites. The author points out that “the weak white coward
is not interested in going up against the real black gangster, they
know the difference; but, they use the real black gangster as their
excuse” for killing the innocent and the defenseless.
Following
that damning digression, Tony proceeds to relate his own
heartbreaking life story, warts and all, in a vivid fashion that just
jumps off the page. The jaw-dropping opus covers only his formative
through teen years, a period he spent doing everything from killing
roaches to subsisting on celery soup to standing up to neighborhood
bullies.
Overall,
an alternately poignant and powerful autobiography that is as much a
riveting overcoming-the-odds memoir as it is a searing indictment of
the United States as a racist society.
To
order a copy of America: The Black Point of View, visit:
