Book Review: Pride

It's taken almost five months, but with Michael Eric Dyson's Pride, I've finished the Seven Deadly Sins series.

This last book is of a very different sort from the others. It's not so much a treatment of pride per se, but a discussion of race in America. Of course this topic touches on pride very deeply, and when it comes to whiteness and blackness one finds an effective place to examine both healthy and destructive forms of pride.

If you would like a thoughtful, honest and brief treatment of blackness and whiteness in contemporary North America, this is your book. After all, white privilege and the far-reaching, brutal legacy of slavery are a necessary part of any discussion of social issues in the United States. If you want a book of about pride as a sin, or about the history of reflection on pride as a sin, it's not.