Overview

An innovative, hybrid work of literary nonfiction, Lowest White Boy takes its title from Lyndon Johnson's observation during the civil rights era: If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Greg Bottoms writes about growing up white and working class in Tidewater, Virginia, during school desegregation in the 1970s. He offers brief stories that accumulate to reveal the everyday experience of living inside complex, systematic racism that is often invisible to economically and politically disenfranchised white southerners--people who have benefited from racism in material ways while being damaged by it, he suggests, psychologically and spiritually. Placing personal memories against a backdrop of social history and cultural critique, Lowest White Boy explores normalized racial animus and reactionary white identity politics, particularly as these are collected and processed in the mind of a child.

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9798200331284

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Greg Bottoms is a professor of English at the University of Vermont. He is the author of many books, including Angelhead: My Brother's Descent into Madness, The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art, and Spiritual American Trash: Portraits from the Margins of Art and Faith. Mike Chamberlain is an actor and voice-over performer in Los Angeles whose audiobook narration has won several AudioFile Earphones Awards. His voice credits range from radio commercials and television narration to animation and video game characters. Stage trained at Boston College, he has performed works from Shakespeare and the classics to contemporary drama and comedy.

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