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Setting

The epic anthology series revolves around the intertwining lives of students at a fictional international black college, Fort Exodus University (The Fort), located on a tropical island in the middle of the Atlantic (canonically located at Cabo Verde). The fortress was converted into a college campus at the intersection of the Harlem Renaissance, the Back to Africa movement, and the creation of HBCUs in the 20s. The campus is funded by nations that participated in the transatlantic slave trade as a form of reparations. Each donates a percentage of its GDP to a tiny African island serving over 100,000 black students from across the world. America is the school's biggest funder and debtor. While constitutionally the school is not supposed to be swayed by any nation’s interest, America tends to ensure that its interests are being met. It is a global ivy mentioned in the same vein as Harvard and Oxford and graduates students who go on to be presidents, CEOs, and diplomats diversifying even the highest caste of the increasingly globalized world.

The school is what every American college campus wishes it was. Amazing facilities with the best teachers, more than enough housing, a beach and a drinking age of 18. It has every single grad program imaginable. Tuition is free*. Culturally it’s if New York was even more diverse but racially homogenous. There is no official language so it’s common for students to create their own pidgin language to communicate along with their high-tech translators. It is a campus of immigrants concentrated on a Westernized education hoping to make a change for their people but curiously always coming up short.

Characters

There are over a hundred nuanced characters, each with their own beautifully crafted backstories told from their perspective. The author paints sonder (the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries, and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you) as a rebellion against the rampant individualism of capitalism. This is combined with the interconnected lives of the globally dispersed African groups creating an immersive experience where each character feels like a missing piece of a puzzle to another. They all must grapple with the fact that they are what WEB Dubois would call the talented tenth, but their talents integrate them into the empire rather than opposing it. To obtain liberation they have to give up the promise of their education. They question whether to give up a life of financial security and prosperity and higher social, economic, and political status to oppose the university which is teaching them to assimilate.

Summary

Despite its history, a black school, on an African island, which was helped founded by black luminaries, does not provide an education for black people. It is one that allows them to have equal opportunity in the machinery of oppression. To be black ceos who perpetuate slave wages, staunch capitalists, black attorney generals cops and judges, black faces defending the remnants of white supremacist institutions by disappearing black and brown communities, stem students helping create weapons for lockheed martin, helping arm the black senators, representatives, and presidents who use the weapons to defend an empire responsible for their oppression domestically and globally. These students stand to inherit the keys to the ruling class and will at some point need to fight against the university to defend their ideas of Panafricanism and liberation before facing down American imperialism. Children giving up a guaranteed comfortable life, attending the most prestigious school in the world, to fight for an idea.

Unlike other stories on progress and social justice, this story takes a more immediate approach. They fight the battles, create the cultures, and abolish the systems to achieve a liberated society. The story ends with an anarchy of the globally dispersed celebrating in the streets as for the first time in centuries, they've obtained an unambiguous victory. As if the promised land was on earth and thy kingdom come was not a line to be repeated but a mission to be completed.

Review

This book is horrible. The racial reincarnation plot line spits in the face of the ancestors who fought for the progress we have made. By having souls like Martin Luther King and Harriet Tubman and other figures return as human beings who are anything but worthy of praise is disrespectful. The idea that change can be made quickly is ahistorical and such an approach would only further the burnout of activists who do not achieve immediate gratification in their work. There are too many perspectives for a coherent piece. It is too idealistic and the racial analysis is lukewarm at best. It is clear that the author who is educated by American higher education is only attempting to critique it because of a self-righteous desire to do public interest when loans put him in big law. Too many of these characters decide not to march in the footsteps of the people who came before them and because of it end up making mistakes that put us back more than push us forward.

But for what it is worth. I have never in my 23 years ever even imagined what the day would look like where black people win. The final scene where they party across continents for three months was a nice thought. But even fiction has some reality to it and there's nothing real about us ever making it to that day. Books like this, our history, they are supposed to paint a bleak outlook for our lives. this is just naive.