She cannot repurpose it to mean enlightenment, and then use it in ways that evoke its established meanings.įor a book that is extremely autobiographical, there are some curious omissions. Look, I know she’s not using it in this sense, but ‘blacking out’ already means losing consciousness and enforced darkness. ‘And then I will ask again: what do you have to lose? Because I believe the answer is everything, if we do not blackout from this toxic, illiberal, progressive agenda, which has precipitated little more than helplessness.’

The very term from which the book takes its title is abused in the following manner: Joe Biden’s alleged mistakes are somehow called ‘misgivings’. ‘I determined this to be odd,’ begins one irrecoverable sentence. What happened to your call to ‘reject…the victim narrative’, Ms Owens? Black men are victims of Joe Biden: it is as simple as that. She does not explore the reasons why they might have been disproportionately affected by a bill targeting violent crime. Joe Biden, Owens says, was ‘a leading crusader and coauthor of the notorious 1994 crime bill, championing harsher sentencing policies that led to defendants’ serving longer prison terms, which disproportionately affected black men’. Most damaging to Owens’s core thesis - that black Americans have to escape the victim mentality allegedly imposed on them by Democrats - is her continual insistence that black Americans are victims of the Democrats.

She bizarrely asserts that FDR was known for ‘theatrically harping on the struggles of minorities’. She tiresomely rehashes the fact that the original Ku Klux Klan were Democrats, as if contemporary Democrats would not line up to spit on the grave of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Blackout book candace owens