If I were to re-read Odysseus’ trials with Circe and the many other women of his travels home from the Trojan War, I would get a sense of the scope of Mitchell Jackson’s journey toward an understanding of his own behaviour toward women in that crazy off-kilter society in which he grew up in Portland, Oregon.

Jackson knows his relations with women are very problematic. He promises but he cannot deliver. Emotionally. In commitment. Even giving women basic respect. But he doesn’t seem to pay for it until his daughter grows up and his behaviour fills him with guilt and dread.

Jackson’s memoir/thought experiment “Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family” at times reads like The Odyssey, at other times like Dante’s visit to the underworld, and so much like a satire of American life.

This is no satire.

It is his life and the recollections of the many men in his family who did time in the slammer, or had a life “gangbanging”, or drug addiction, or early death. This is an “All-American” family in spite of what white supremacists would like us to believe. This is a story of one not particularly unusual black family in America.

As a youth Jackson navigates between the aspirations of his mother that he get an education and create a stable life for himself and the lives of his many male role models whose great achievements will have been to survive gangstas, gangs, a complex judicial system, the opportunities of dealing in drugs.

His own family, though, is mired in violence and drugs and splintered family relations. That Jackson himself didn’t do upwards of five years in a high security prison was unusual in his family.

Are they bad people or to be admired when they succeed given the rules of the game?

Whether or not you took up drug dealing in his neighbourhood, you had to take sides and create a survivable persona. You had to speak a certain way. You had to walk a certain way, and you had to pay homage to dangerous characters.

I grew up in a somewhat bullying environment, and some would say I learned these characteristics well. But how would my survival skills stack up in Jackson’s neighbourhood? Hmmm....

Talk about navigating the shoals of Scylla and Charybdis. Jackson learns the subtle art of selling dope as a high schooler and uses it to finance his education. But this lands him in jail and only fast talking saves him from losing his place in college.

Jackson is an athlete, as are many of his friends. But the bob and weave on a basketball court doesn’t prepare you for navigating your emotions, the anger you store up inside of you for the father who wasn’t there, for the other father figures who lied, who beat up your mom, who built a business as a pimp, and then tore it down with drug addiction.

Finding your feet in this community is harrowing to say the least and it seems Jackson struggles with it to this day.

I found this book terribly difficult to read. Much of the gangsta dialect simply defeats me.

But, what writing! ( )

Telling of a black man's experience growing up in Portland, OR. important to read in many ways, but he spends a third of the book or so discussing his abuse and use of women and it made it challenging to respect and listen to the rest. ( )

this was intense. it's one of the hardest books i've read in a while. he asks a lot of his reader, and i tried to step up to the task but i'm not sure i didn't fall short at times. it's really hard to rate because of that and because of everything below.

this is tough in a few ways. the content is mostly really raw, and his language is very deliberately street language, which can be hard to follow. at intervals, though, the content and language are academic. he flows between the two styles in a way that makes it obvious that he is comfortable in both worlds, and it feels a little like he's poking the reader, wondering if we could pull off something like that, and as well as he can. (no, no i could not.)

that said, he writes really well and really engagingly (interestingly?) about hard topics. this was a hard read and a long, slow read, but at no time was i bored or frustrated or wanting to be done already. his style is impressive. his ability to live in both worlds, and make sense of both worlds, communicate life in both worlds - it's all on full display in this book.

for me, personally, i had the hardest time with his section that glorifies pimps. i think he would say that he was trying to represent how he saw them when he was younger, before he came to understand the harm they do to women and the community, and so he wasn't glorifying them. but it really didn't read like that, not all the time. maybe it's my own bias coming in or that i have a particular sensitivity to this topic (it's true, i do), but he still - to some extent - seemed to put these rapists and abusers on a pedestal, even while understanding their violence. (he did also seem to say that because they weren't - to his knowledge; but i have a hard time believing this - gorilla pimps, they weren't so bad. it's true that gorilla pimps are worse, but there's no excuse for trafficking in women and girls, full stop.) i tried really hard in this section (which was much longer than i was remotely comfortable with) to try to see his point of view and not jump to conclusions. but i can't get around there just being no excuse for violence like that, for hurting women and girls. abusers who abuse aren't given a pass because of their history and their childhoods. in no way do these men have it easy, but that isn't a reason to ruin these girls and women. and he glosses over the fact that for so many of these pimps, they're targeting and turning out girls in their own communities, continuing a cycle of violence in communities of color. when he did bring up statistics about trafficked women and girls, they weren't explained, and so actually read even more mild than the truth is. i do have compassion for these men and can see them, even, as victims. but that doesn't make it ok or excusable for them to become victimizers themselves. i can see, though, to some extent, that there is more gray and nuance than i may have understood years ago, when working with the girls and women who are traumatized by these men.

i wonder, too, about not living in portland and reading this. so much of it seems portland specific, but maybe you just skim over those parts if you don't know where he's talking about? he names things that you might not know (like streets or neighborhoods) if you didn't live here, and that seems like something that would be or maybe should be edited differently.

but for all of this - this is a powerful, thought provoking book.

when i moved to portland it was to near the area he talks about. i have a special affinity for north portland, although i never saw it the way it was when he grew up there. the bookstore he mentions as part of the gentrification of mississippi ave was my bookstore, although the change largely happened before i moved in. still, i don't know how to think about that; about how something that i loved and is wrapped up in all kinds of positive feelings for me personally can be associated with and pointed to as evidence of a new, white neighborhood.

there's a lot that i need to continue to process about this book.

and the last thing - this makes two books in a row for a particular book group where there are end notes in the book, but no notation in the text of the book itself to indicate to the reader that there are endnotes. is this a new trend? if so, i capital h hate this with a burning fiery passion that might even surpass my love of the oxford comma in force and magnitude.

"At the risk of sounding profane, America's civil religion is whiteness." ( )

It was great to read a book that gave philosophical, sociological, historical and psychological context to a life barely escaped by the author and not escaped by many who mattered and to read about 3rd chances and 4th chances take. It was great to read about transformation.

Jackson says "revision is a philosophy." If it is it is a hopeful one, a decent one, a non-racist one. This book took a lot from me, in the best ways. I was a criminology major, and the sociological underpinnings of sex work (including pimping) is something I have read about widely, and many years back wrote about. I found myself returning to source texts, both academic and non-academic and to some basic philosophy texts, mostly Immanuel Kant. Jackson did a great job stitching together separate but related disciplines to provide a framework for the paths taken by the people around him, both biological and chosen family and close friends. This lens is something I have not seen before, and it broadened the way I look a social dynamic that needs to be altered without being destroyed. As it is, it serves no one. I did ding Jackson a bit for the prolonged hagiography of several pimps. He talks a good game about how terrible pimping is, and he deploys feminist theory admirably, but he goes on and on about the brilliance and swagger of these men, thereby creating a monument to men who survived by helping to degrade and kill women. The story of his late aunt and the men around her (an apologia for this guy pimping his woman and exposing her son to terrible things) pissed me off and made me sad in equal measure. Jackson may want to do some further thinking about that. I am not saying pimps are necessarily monsters to their cores (though many are), or that you can't celebrate what is good in these individuals, but he celebrates aspects of pimp life that are very much a part of the problem. He really needs to read some more Audre Lorde IMHO.

This is the second time in recent weeks I have had something to say about GR reviewers. As an ally I can't not call this out, even though I recognize its kind of jerky. It was so interesting to me that when the white people in Educated did TERRIBLE things even though they had other options for success handed to them Goodreads reviewers sympathetically expressed that the author should get over it, accept that you can love people who are toxic but that the toxicity meant that she must distance herself from her family. When Jackson wrote about black people who did terrible things and did not have other options for success handed to them many GR reviewers attacked him and the people he had grown up thinking of as family. Several reviewers said that his longing to stay connected to people he knew had done bad things was evidence not of love (as with Westover) but instead evidence this was a con job. This even though working against even greater odds than Tara Westover (whom I greatly admire, this is not her fault) Jackson turned his life around. Jackson is demonstrably better educated than me , and I am guessing most reviewers, and he writes about important things and teaches at Columbia. To many reviewers, despite his Herculean accomplishments, he is still just a drug dealer not an exemplar. Bad news reviewers, y'all racist. You are free to not like the book, it is very different than Educated, but on this point, the missing of loved ones who are still doing bad things and the admiration of accomplishments despite a lot of people and structures dragging you down, the only real distinction is that Jackson is black. ( )