MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksCertainly, the mode of address advanced in What It Is is Baldwinesque in the way it seeks to take the pulse of the nation ... But the occasional pathos of Thompson’s prose, which stands in stark contrast to Baldwin’s solemn ruminations, raises the question of how seriously we’re supposed to take him ... The line Thompson attempts to toe is a difficult one. On the one hand, his memoir’s primary ethos boils down to a universalist commitment to humanize perpetrators of racism and Trumpism ... Thompson is hamstrung by an oversimplification of race and how it works, especially when combined with his commitment to studying individuals in isolation from larger political factions and social groupings. By viewing racism as something that Black Americans must unlearn just as much as whites, Thompson categorically misconstrues racial prejudice as a bad interpersonal habit and thus fails to link individual instances to larger, systemic trends ... Ultimately, Thompson wants to craft a handbook for good citizenship, a didactic guide to how decent Americans ought to get along ... What is perhaps most illuminating about Thompson’s memoir, though, is that he isn’t moved to anger by racial inequality itself, or even by the interpersonal animus that perpetuates it ... Thompson conceives of race as an obstacle to democratic American life as opposed to one of its structuring conditions, which might explain his wonder at the pervasiveness of anti-Black racism and his obliviousness to the co-dependence between structural inequality and individualist ideologies. Yet What It Is does valuably ask its readers to think about what and how we’re feeling in relation to our present politics, an exercise that might better inform the way we come to grips with them.
