An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

An intriguing premise that unfortunately didn't deliver (for me). Too many underdeveloped threads, too disjointed overall. It wasn't clear who his audience is: mostly scholarly in tone and content, but his authorial snark and jargon (“dope”, “stan”) feel out of place. His sportsball and pop-culture chapters make little sense to those of us immune to those vices – I ended up just skipping whole sections because I had no idea who any of those people are, or (more importantly) what their cultural/ethnic identity is: paragraphs about Famous-So-And-So doing such-or-such a cultural appropriation make no sense if I don't know whether So-And-So is Black, Indian, White, Other.

The early U.S. history chapters were the best: informative, thoughtful (Mays is a genuinely moral person who cares about nuance and complexity). Enough to bump 3.2 stars to 4. I'm glad to have read much of it, just not all of it, if that makes sense.