Reviews for I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture

The average rating for I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-05-10 00:00:00 Nate Devries This could have been a very good, if not great book. Mainly due to the author having a huge amount of bias of the left wing acadedemic ivory tower variety, racial bias (I believe the author is one of these black "intellectuals" that every University seems to have one or two of working for them), poor research and just general stupidity there's not much worthwhile stuff to glean from this book. The main purpose of this book is supposed to have been how rumors of the conspiratorial/persecutional sort, most I wouldn't even call conspiracy theories, they border on folklore, have a history of running wild throughout the black community. She gets started trying to debunk the long standing historical belief of whites that blacks in Africa indulge in cannibalism. While to state the obvious its only a tiny percentage that do it, even now it is not uncommon. Just in the past few months I've ran across articles on BBC where blacks were killing and eating Pygmies and Albinos. Albinos from certain countries in Africa have even been granted political asylum in European countries. So cannibalism in Africa is not a fantasy or an isolated incident. She does good when she talks about how many of the most violent race riots in American history were started because of false rumors. The blacks would hear some wild story that the KKK threw a black baby in a river or whites would hear about some heinous act that a black had allegedly committed and the rumor would run through the town by word of mouth and one or both sides would go crazy resulting in many people being killed. Turner shows her perverse mental masterbatory egghead side whene she portrays the KKK as repressed gays and their penchant in the old south for referring to blacks as "boy" has to do with their alleged repressed pedophilac urges for young black boys!!! Some of the stuff that made it into this book I remember firsthand. For example the rumor that Reebok was owned by racist South Africans and helped fund apartheid in South Africa. I had a black friend that I remember going on and on about this a few times. A lot of the rumors covered in this book go into the black community believing that the KKK owns various companies that produce products that are popular in the black community, in particular clothing and shoes. Also rumors that certain restraunts and soft drinks were owned by the KKK who were putting chemicals into the food/drinks that would sterilize black men were hugely popular. Its almost comedic that so many blacks believe the KKK has any power, funding, or gumption to do things like this. They even believed the KKK owned Kool and Marlboro cigarettes! If you went to a KKK meeting you would have scared right wingers, mental patients, some very low IQ white trash and at least a couple of undercover agents, but your never going to find anybody with a controlling interest in a multi-national corporation. The author even falls for this nonsense saying the rumor that the KKK is the real culprit in the Atlanta child killings "have the most potential for accuracy", and hints that "the powers that be" were somehow working with the KKK and framed Williams for the murders. On one level Williams may have been used as a scapegoat, but nevermind that there is absolutely no evidence to support the KKKs involvement, and if you think Williams was an easy scapegoat to target what about the KKK? In many ways I think buying into this stuff works as a psychological crutch for many blacks. A real shame is this book could have focused on real legitimate conspiracies and wrongs that have been done by "the powers that be" against blacks. For example she of course goes into the belief many have, including myself, that James Earl Ray was either a scapegoat, an mkultra type mindwash victim, or was knowingly working with the system to kill Martin Luther King she never really goes into the real reasons the system would have wanted King dead. Namely he quit focusing on the world orders agenda of forced race mixing and began to focus on workers rights and protesting the Vietnam war, which of course the system is against workers rights and was pro-Vietnam war. Turner also doesn't intelligently talk about the CIA's involvement in the crack cocaine explosion of the 1980's in the black community, which I believe to be legit, never even mentioning Gary Webbs book. She also tries to claim many times that the system did many of the bad things to blacks because they were out to protect whites. You really think the Republican Party cares about middle class white families!?!? Thats definitly the wildest of all rumors covered in this book.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-06-24 00:00:00 Don Knox A great introduction to the subject. The early history of "slave tales" and myths spread by slave owners was very interesting, but then the book gets bogged down in stories about chicken joints and sneaker companies. I would have loved to have read much more about the role the media played in the Atlanta child murder cases, and the "CIA brought crack to the ghetto" story. This book would make a great introduction and first two chapters of a REAL book about how information gets filtered and transmitted throughout the Black community.