PositiveThe New YorkerThis is the central preoccupation of Morgan’s novel: the way that African-Americans have been forced off track, literally and figuratively, to the psychological, political, and material advantage of whites. The resulting book is enormously flawed, ceaselessly interesting, and strangely tremendous, its moral imagination so capacious that it overshadows its many missteps. Morgan recounts the long history of American racism, which is also the long history of America: liberty and bondage, settlement and expansion, white prosperity and black subjugation, the Great Migration and mass incarceration. In the face of our national faith that individuals can lift themselves up by their bootstraps, The Sport of Kings insists that this history constrains us all in ways we have barely begun to acknowledge, still less to escape.
