They Can't Kill Us All
Ratings7
Average rating4
15
Ratings7
Average rating4
Conducting hundreds of interviews during the course of over one year reporting on the ground, Washington Post writer Wesley Lowery traveled from Ferguson, Missouri, to Cleveland, Ohio; Charleston, South Carolina; and Baltimore, Maryland; and then back to Ferguson to uncover life inside the most heavily policed, if otherwise neglected, corners of America today.
In an effort to grasp the magnitude of the repose to Michael Brown's death and understand the scale of the problem police violence represents, Lowery speaks to Brown's family and the families of other victims other victims' families as well as local activists. By posing the question, "What does the loss of any one life mean to the rest of the nation?" Lowery examines the cumulative effect of decades of racially biased policing in segregated neighborhoods with failing schools, crumbling infrastructure and too few jobs.
Studded with moments of joy, and tragedy, They Can't Kill Us All offers a historically informed look at the standoff between the police and those they are sworn to protect, showing that civil unrest is just one tool of resistance in the broader struggle for justice. As Lowery brings vividly to life, the protests against police killings are also about the black community's long history on the receiving end of perceived and actual acts of injustice and discrimination. They Can't Kill Us All grapples with a persistent if also largely unexamined aspect of the otherwise transformative presidency of Barack Obama: the failure to deliver tangible security and opportunity to those Americans most in need of both.
Reviews with the most likes.
Appreciated the look at the process & inner-workings of on the ground journalism and what it takes to get a story. Also liked learning more about some of the early roots of BLM, as Lowery saw it. Don't know if the experience would be different reading rather than listening, but though the book is arranged in thematic chapters around the major horrific killings he covered, he veers all around in his thoughts and stories within each chapter, making for a very inchohesive and scattershot listening experience. Perhaps that's the the reporting work style, but it seemed disjointed and lost the arc of the storypower and then seemed to end randomly.
This book was so damn good. Another book that should be required reading if only for the way you learn how the protests organically and inorganically formed back in Ferguson and Baltimore and later everywhere else in the US. There is no sugar coating things. There is no excusing what Michael Brown was doing before his murder. This is not a book intent on bashing the police. It is more like a diary examining the days surrounding Ferguson and all the days before and after when we saw more and more videos of unarmed black men dying at the hands of police.
There was a time when I thought, why don't they just stop resisting? But I've read. I've watched. I've listened. The idea of “the talk” that all black children get from their parents broke my heart. This wasn't the first time I've heard about it. A friend actually told me how she had given “the talk” to her 10 year old black son. But that this is a thing, a necessary thing, because black families live in CONSTANT FEAR that their children will be murdered while playing outside is a heartbreaking and terrifying idea to understand.
Lowery does a really good job of both reporting and inserting his own personal feelings about the subject. I thought this book would be, for lack of a better word, angrier, but it wasn't. It is mostly tinged with sadness and passion.
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