I'm struggling to come up with topics to write about when I return to this website. That's becoming less frequent because of the struggle. I need to find ways to break the writer's block. So, my latest idea is a recurring blog entry called "What I'm Reading". This may include my most recent books or articles.
I recently finished Howard French's Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War. French centers Africans and enslaved people across the Americas in the story of the rise of the West and modernity, including the dominance of European countries benefitting from the Atlantic Slave Trade and later colonialism, ending with the United States. French's book was published in 2021, when several other texts examining how we tell stories and understand our world were prominent, including Hannah Nikole-Jones' 1619 Project.
French's premise is: (this is a rough interpretation) our modern retelling of history of the West, its development, the creation of great powers in the Americas and Europe, do not center or accurately portray the importance of enslaved people, Africans, or their struggle for liberation. I find this point undoubtedly correct and agree with French. I found French's telling of the dynamics in Western Africa during the burgeoning slave trade, and the complex societies and peoples of Africa, interesting and enlightening. French shows readers how Europe's development of the Atlantic slave trade and its colonialist projects through the 20th century were rapacious and extractive. The slave trade transformed the social fabric of African societies in harmful and lasting ways and French demonstrates how colonialism interfered and stalled the continent's growth. One topic that stuck out was the Kingdoms of Kongo and Ndongo and their relationship with Portugal and the Catholic church. I don't have the book on hand so I'm recalling this from memory - one ruler of Kongo developed an advanced bureacracy by sending designated persons to Portugal to learn the language and some to be trained in Catholic theology.
Needless to say, I'm having trouble recalling details of the book and this review is rough, but I needed to start somewhere. Though I agree with French that the we teach the history of the rise of the West and modernity needs to accurately center Africans, enslaved persons, and liberated peoples, the book and his argument seem jumbled by the ways it crisscrosses centuries, times, stories, and at times may stretch accuracy of historical events to make a point. That does not necessarily take away from the central thesis of his book, but it makes it harder to point to this Born in Blackness as a potential seminal text.
Moving on to other topics, I enjoyed Ned Reskinoff's Winter 2026 story in Dissent Magazine, The Left Needs Bureaucrats. Reskinoff argues the Left needs to invest in staffing municipal, state, and later federal government, in order to foster competent technocrats and build a better world. Zohran Mamdani's historic win in NYC is a first step. Critically, the new mayor has set out to staff his administration with proven leaders, like Lina Khan, formerly chief of the Federal Trade Commission, and the former NYC sanitation commissioner, Kathryn Garcia. Implementing the vision of the left and social democratic politics requires doing the daily hard work, generating lasting results for citizens. Reskinoff emphasizes this is as much a battle against cynicism and anti-bureacratic forces from the left as it is against the right.