Many people think my being known for kicking myself in the nuts prevents me from saying anything smart. Well, a guy known for stapling his ballsack to his legs (among many other things, like his fantastic recent standup/multimedia special, Bucket List) says otherwise! So there!
This is easily one of the cooler things that has happened. I am a very, very long-time appreciator of Steve-O and Jackass, and let me say this guy is just the GOAT. Much love and thanks for repping the book to him!
The question is why haven’t you, dear reader, read it? You read my crap all the time! You’re doing it right now!
Here’s a couple of reviews:
“An accessible path into a new way of thinking about racism”
Peter Coffin, here, guides the reader into a straightforward premise: That racism, far from a static fact of human nature, has been molded and shaped into a tool that keeps people apart from each other. The trick, for an American audience, is in how he characterizes both the racism we're well-familiar with (vis a vis chattel slavery and its subsequent heritage), but also its mirror image. He identifies the market forces that shape a straightforward, good idea ("we should stop treating black and brown people badly") into new ways to be racist, ways that fit the needs of a very small number of rich people at the rest of our expense.
If you're tired of yelling on the Internet and voting for the Right Person only to see nothing change, this book is for you. If you've got some nagging feeling that, for all our "progress" since MLK, people don't really seem all that better off, this book is for you.
One more:
“A Dialectical Analysis”
Woke Ouroboros takes a different and humanizing approach to criticism on liberal and neoliberal ideas of identity. Coffin does not downplay the real marginalizations and inequalities that exist along social lines, however nor is there a mincing of words when it comes to how the capitalist class co-opts these issues to perpetuate itself at the expense of the majority of people. The solutions put forth by ruling class ideology, in a nutshell, serve power, even when they claim they do not. And power plays all sides, so both pro and anti woke teams end up serving a similar function. Everything from representation to imperialism is examined using a truly dialectical Marxian analysis without moral judgement. And as the title suggests, it is primarily framed around how Wokeism, in the identity politics sense, ends up in a similar place as the right-wing ideology it claims to critique, and how this fits into a larger capitalist structure by design. I'd recommend this book to anyone who wants to dig deeper into the sinister nature of our system in order to understand it.
Thanks again to Steve-O and also to all of you for your support! Again, Woke Ouroboros is available here!
For those without Amazon Prime membership (and therefore have to pay for shipping w/Amazon), there are 49 NEW copies of Woke Ouroboros available on Thriftbooks. Why should you care? Because Thriftbooks has free shipping if you spend $15!
And their price is only $1 different than Amazon's price for Peter's book.
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/woke-ouroboros-segregation-and-essentialism/38189268/?resultid=aa414974-3288-4fc1-b4fe-8a708704b354#edition=66093570&idiq=60104371