Turn off the TV and get in the streets

Do you ever read a book and you're like "That was pretty good; not sure I got much out of it"? That's essentially how I feel about Onesha Roychoudhuri's The Marginalized Majority: Claiming Our Power in a Post-Truth America. I feel a bit bad about that, since it's a well-written book that makes a lot of smart arguments about identity, media, people power, and other sorts of things that are very relevant to my interests. But it's also very definitely pitched towards the sort of politically informed-but-uninvolved left-liberal that I was three or four years ago, so I feel like most of what I got out of the book was perhaps some improved ability to talk about things like popular misconceptions about protests that might come in handy next time I need to persuade well-meaning left-liberals to stop reading the New York Times and go find some activism to do. 

 

This feeling, to me, seems like a bit of a disservice to the book, precisely because a lot of the stuff that I feel I already know I learned in left spaces, and this book does a really excellent job of pitching some of that knowledge to liberals in terms that mainstream progressives are fairly comfortable with. Like, I think there's probably a lot of people that really need to hear this sort of breakdown of why most media reporting on whether or not protests are "successful" is 110% hot stinking garbage, who unfortunately might not listen to it coming from grassroots socialist or anarchist organizers because they think we're just a bunch of scruffy radicals. Like, the book reads like it's coming from a few degrees to the right of Naomi Klein, but there were certain bits where I wondered if perhaps the author was pitching things a little more lib than where she really is coming from--especially when she discussed her time working for an abusive publication that, to me, sounded just like the revelations about AlterNet that came out in 2017, which I remember Sarah Jaffe posting about on Twitter. I looked it up and it turns out that a) Roychoudhuri did, in fact, write for AlterNet and b) AlterNet is entirely behind a paywall these days.

 

Anyway, it's a pretty good, quick read if you're interested in issues of media failure and public mythmaking, and also probably if you're a sad liberal who watches SNL and then despairs about how that doesn't seem to have made anything better. In which case, I recommend reading this book and then joining an organization, like find a City Council campaign to volunteer on or check out your local SURJ chapter or something.