"The Broken Heart of America" Book Review

“The Broken Heart of America” is one of the longest books I’ve ever read at least it felt that way and I nearly put it down not because it was badly written but because it made me embarrassed, sad and angry all at the same time. Embarrassed because of how much of it I didn’t know and how little I have really done to help, sad because of the number of people hurt and killed by the type of racism that is discussed in this book and angry because it’s still happening. But I am glad I read the entire book “The Broken Heart of America,” in part because it is information that I need to know, but also because of the epilogue that reminded me, and all of us that the people of this city haven’t given up. The past is what it is, but the future isn’t written. We don’t have to continue to ignore things, we don’t have to let things happen just because that is the way it is and the first step, the one that makes all the others possible, is knowing the truth. The truth of who we were and of who we are now.

Some of the many events in “The Broken Heart of America” by Walter Johnson

In many ways, “The Broken Heart of America” by Walter Johnson is simply a list of terrible things that have been done to people of color in and around Saint Louis. It starts with two major groups being targeted: native Americans and black people. The former drop out of the narrative as the story nears modern day for sadly obvious reasons, but the injustices towards black people do not stop, or really even slow as you near the modern day in Saint Louis.

There are far too many to list, so I will point out a few as symbolic, and that struck me because of the costs or because of the proximity to our time. Things like Unions putting in clauses that jobs had to be given to white people before black people, laws to keep people from living in specific neighborhoods and many other blatant racist laws that continued far to recently including some clauses that are illegal still being in covenants today and while they can’t be enforced, they sent the same message as always.

One that struck me as funny in the darkest way was that after the Supreme Court say that you couldn’t specifically exclude black people from buying homes in white neighborhoods the state allowed people to sue if someone did something that lowered the property value of people’s homes. That included selling your home to a black person. Meaning that they could make it all but impossible to buy a home in that neighborhood even though the only reason that values would go down and the only reason that the law existed was racism.

Of course Ferguson, MO has to come up. But while I had heard some of it, I had missed much of the absurdity. From the police regularly ticketing people for walking in the street when there are no sidewalks to police riots in which peaceful protesters are assaulted while the cops chant who runs these streets. And the mayor only being willing to say they shouldn’t have said that.

And then there are larger stories that take on a more sinister tone when you understand. Like the willingness of the city to sign contracts to move corporations or sports teams into the city that required the removal of large parts of the city and the idea that they could remove entire neighborhoods not only because they were “blighted” but because they were near “blighted” neighborhoods. And the urban development that might sound good if you don’t pay attention but forces huge number of people out of the cities.

Finally, there are the national stories that are worse in Missouri than in most places. The biggest of those likely being the payday loan companies along with other predatory loan companies that are designed entirely to put poor people into perpetual debt so that they can loan absurdly low amounts of money and be paid forever.

What did I think of “The Broken Heart of America” by Walter Johnson

This book was unpleasant to read. Even after having been largely freed from the idea that racism is something that America has mostly dealt with, the clear and obvious racism in so many areas becomes something that is hard to imagine. And yet it’s not a perfect book. The book covers so many ideas and places that it doesn’t really focus on any of them. And many of these events need far more information to see what really happened. It also was hard sometimes to tell what time period events were happening in. This had its own sort of value as thinking that something must have happened a hundred years ago and then finding out it was happening in the last twenty makes a point. Finally, as important as looking at race is by focusing so entirely on it to the exclusion of so many other things, it can paint an unfair and unbalanced picture. And I think that having the counterarguments of what happened in a few places might have helped understand the defenses in order to dismantle them.

Conclusion

This is a book that I want as many people as possible to read, but also one that is hard to recommend. Besides being exhausting, it is dense in a way that will probably limit the amount of people welling or able to read it and those are the people who most need to read it. People who don’t seem to understand or see the connections between the past and the present. People who don’t understand the mental cost that people of color pay in addition to the economic and physical ones. But if you actually want to understand and want to be better. If you want to know why people are still angry and deserve to be, then this is worth reading.