‘All Eyes Are Upon Us,’ by Jason Sokol - The New York Times

‘All Eyes Are Upon Us,’ by Jason Sokol - The New York Times

Race and politics from Boston to Brooklyn

reviewed by David Levering Lewis [biographer of W.E.B. DeBois]



If, as many believe, America’s experiment in postracialism is over, then “All Eyes Are Upon Us” is a prescient book that offers a great deal to explain a national self-deception of stunning brevity. According to Jason Sokol, whose anecdotally rich first book, “There Goes My Everything,” tracked white Southerners variously coping in the civil rights era, historians have paid insufficient attention to the Janus-faced ­responses of white Northerners to the struggles of black Americans. To be sure, monographs by James Goodman and Thomas Sugrue have explored the dark side of Northern race relations. They found that although the dominant racial philosophies of whites in the North and South were antithetical, opportunity for a majority of black men and women in the North was not very different from what it was in the South.