She has a politician boyfriend from an old-money family. She visits elementary schools and gives motivational speeches to young girls where she extols the benefits of hard work and sacrifice.

Her unnamed narrator is a Black woman living in London and working for a financial firm. But Assembly’s brevity only attests to Brown’s copious talent, as she says in about a hundred pages what most writers couldn’t say in a thousand. But rarely have I seen a novel address these three evils so powerfully and so head-on as Natasha Brown has in her debut novel, Assembly, released in the UK in June and in the US this fall.Īssembly is a disarmingly short book, much like Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine, which Brown cites at the end of her novel as an influence. None of this is news, especially if you are a woman who has ever held a job. Living inside a capitalist system that thrives off of “global theft, racially uneven playing fields, and unidirectional wealth that rushes upward,” women have been and continue to be exploited, often providing free or cheap labor, working in sexually violent conditions, and working without many of the basic rights afforded to men. But I would add a third component to Kendi’s twins, as I see instead a tripartite monster of three equal faces: capitalism, racism, and misogyny. I’d arrived at a similar conclusion years ago, around the time I stopped identifying as a Libertarian, started to see the lies upholding many of my beliefs about the free market, and realized that subjugation and exploitation undergird capitalism as much as racism. “The life of capitalism cannot be separated from the life of racism.” Capitalism emerged alongside the growth of the transatlantic slave trade and thrived during colonialism, and the two institutions have grown together and solidified over the last four hundred years. “The origins of racism cannot be separated from the origins of capitalism,” he says. Kendi writes about what he terms the “conjoined twins” of racism and capitalism. In his bestselling book, How to Be an Antiracist (2019), Ibram X.

Assembly by natasha brown