Lowest White Boy

De: Greg Bottoms

Narrado por: Mike Chamberlain

An innovative, hybrid work of literary nonfiction, Lowest White Boy takes its title from Lyndon Johnson's observation during the civil rights era: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket."

Greg Bottoms writes about growing up white and working class in Tidewater, Virginia, during school desegregation in the 1970s. He offers brief stories that accumulate to reveal the everyday experience of living inside complex, systematic racism that is often invisible to economically and politically disenfranchised white southerners - people who have benefited from racism in material ways while being damaged by it, he suggests, psychologically and spiritually. Placing personal memories against a backdrop of social history and cultural critique, Lowest White Boy explores normalized racial animus and reactionary white identity politics, particularly as these are collected and processed in the mind of a child.

©2019 West Virginia University Press (P)2019 Tantor

Highly Recommend!

I find many recent (3-4 decades) Naturalized immigrants to our country do not know the “true” history, heck most generational Americans don’t either, but these newer immigrants tend to believe the altered history/truth told by White men, whom they came to mimic to achieve The American Dream.

I wanted to read/listen to “Lowest White Boy” before recommending to a Naturalized immigrant, Christian, person of color friend living in West Virginia, married to a White American. Highly Recommend!

Thought Provoking

It is very interesting to hear (read) a book such as this. I greatly appreciate the authors interpretations and point of view from someone other than a black persons viewpoint. I truly feel that this should be a mandatory book read for those who are studying history. It would be interesting to also hear from a mixed race couple who has a mixed raced child and how do they deal with inequalities within their lives. I truly thank you for this book, though NOT eye opening to me, but a real part of this world that needs to be spoken by an informed and well educated “white” person. The author said many things that I have always thought, but it does my heart good to hear a person of the same race say the very thing that has been in my mind for years. If I can belittle someone else and try to convince the majority, then I will be a bigger person and better in everyone’s mind! Hmmm!