Customer Reviews

I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Dr. Patricia Turner's overview of rumor in the white communities and black communities of the past is excellent. She traces themes down through time, showing us how we all are grabbed and held prisoner by what we want to believe. Her delineation of what divides "them" from "us" is thought-provoking--and we all should be greatly intrigued by the people in her book who believe what they believe, in spite of logic and factual material available to them. We need more books like this and more authors like her. This should be required reading in a wide range of courses everywhere, because rumor is alive and well.

I read this book a few years ago as part of research I was doing on urban legends. While Jan Brunvand's books are the most cited references for urban legends, he focuses mostly on ULs vectored by white, usually middle class, people. Turner, on the other hand, focuses specifically on ULs vectored in the black community. I thought this book was quite well written, and the commentary and analysis of the ULs were spot on. I highly reccomend this book

Many of the books on urban legends and rumors avoid discussion of stories told specifically within African-American communities. This book compensates for this lack of attention, and it provides interesting insights into the legends, rumors, and beliefs that Turner documents. She has arranged this book as a social history that stretches back to slavery times and extends into contemporary history. There are continuities and variations in the stories, but the overall themes remain the same. Mainly, the stories provide ways to understand how the history of racial tension in America is expressed through folklore and fantasy. In this respect, the book provides interesting ways to read the legends for psychological insight as Turner provides an interesting discussion of ways in which ideological constructs become expressed in fantasy.

This book is kinda cool. It delivers a lot of information and shocking stories that are both interesting and unbelievebale. The only thing that bugs me is the fact that the information is delivered like a book report or news broadcast. The author doesn't really go in depth or use her opinion that much and it's a little bit dry. If you like your myths straight forward, buy this book, but if you prefer a little more color, perhaps you should look elsewhere.

This could have been a very good, if not great book. Mainly due to the author having a huge amount of bias of the left wing acadedemic ivory tower variety, racial bias (I believe the author is one of these black "intellectuals" that every University seems to have one or two of working for them), poor research and just general stupidity there's not much worthwhile stuff to glean from this book.

The main purpose of this book is supposed to have been how rumors of the conspiratorial/persecutional sort, most I wouldn't even call conspiracy theories, they border on folklore, have a history of running wild throughout the black community. She gets started trying to debunk the long standing historical belief of whites that blacks in Africa indulge in cannibalism. While to state the obvious its only a tiny percentage that do it, even now it is not uncommon. Just in the past few months I've ran across articles on BBC where blacks were killing and eating Pygmies and Albinos. Albinos from certain countries in Africa have even been granted political asylum in European countries. So cannibalism in Africa is not a fantasy or an isolated incident.

She does good when she talks about how many of the most violent race riots in American history were started because of false rumors. The blacks would hear some wild story that the KKK threw a black baby in a river or whites would hear about some heinous act that a black had allegedly committed and the rumor would run through the town by word of mouth and one or both sides would go crazy resulting in many people being killed.

Turner shows her perverse mental masterbatory egghead side whene she portrays the KKK as repressed gays and their penchant in the old south for referring to blacks as "boy" has to do with their alleged repressed pedophilac urges for young black boys!!!

Some of the stuff that made it into this book I remember firsthand. For example the rumor that Reebok was owned by racist South Africans and helped fund apartheid in South Africa. I had a black friend that I remember going on and on about this a few times. A lot of the rumors covered in this book go into the black community believing that the KKK owns various companies that produce products that are popular in the black community, in particular clothing and shoes. Also rumors that certain restraunts and soft drinks were owned by the KKK who were putting chemicals into the food/drinks that would sterilize black men were hugely popular. Its almost comedic that so many blacks believe the KKK has any power, funding, or gumption to do things like this. They even believed the KKK owned Kool and Marlboro cigarettes! If you went to a KKK meeting you would have scared right wingers, mental patients, some very low IQ white trash and at least a couple of undercover agents, but your never going to find anybody with a controlling interest in a multi-national corporation. The author even falls for this nonsense saying the rumor that the KKK is the real culprit in the Atlanta child killings "have the most potential for accuracy", and hints that "the powers that be" were somehow working with the KKK and framed Williams for the murders. On one level Williams may have been used as a scapegoat, but nevermind that there is absolutely no evidence to support the KKKs involvement, and if you think Williams was an easy scapegoat to target what about the KKK? In many ways I think buying into this stuff works as a psychological crutch for many blacks.

A real shame is this book could have focused on real legitimate conspiracies and wrongs that have been done by "the powers that be" against blacks. For example she of course goes into the belief many have, including myself, that James Earl Ray was either a scapegoat, an mkultra type mindwash victim, or was knowingly working with the system to kill Martin Luther King she never really goes into the real reasons the system would have wanted King dead. Namely he quit focusing on the world orders agenda of forced race mixing and began to focus on workers rights and protesting the Vietnam war, which of course the system is against workers rights and was pro-Vietnam war.

Turner also doesn't intelligently talk about the CIA's involvement in the crack cocaine explosion of the 1980's in the black community, which I believe to be legit, never even mentioning Gary Webbs book. She also tries to claim many times that the system did many of the bad things to blacks because they were out to protect whites. You really think the Republican Party cares about middle class white families!?!? Thats definitly the wildest of all rumors covered in this book.