What’s the Problem Now? Black Grievances and White Guilt by Michael Brandow

New English Review Press is pleased to announce the publication of our fiftieth title: What’s the Problem Now? Black Grievances and White Guilt by Michael Brandow.

Michael Brandow gives us a personal survey of Jim Snow America, where all social ills are blamed on whiteness and black citizens are showered with preferences and excuses. This is the “lived experience” of an older middle-class white American negotiating the racial battlefield, told with unsparing frankness and considerable wit.
—John Derbyshire, author of We Are Doomed, novelist, critic, and proprietor of the weekly podcast Radio Derb.

What’s the Problem Now? Black Grievances and White Guilt is an old white guy’s witty and insightful account of his struggle to survive in New York City without becoming a racist. Unlike so many others in these uptight times of stifling seriousness and cartoonish certainty, he hasn’t forgotten how to laugh at his race, or at another race. Anecdotes from a lifetime of “culture clashes” with black people are set against playful, non-dogmatic reflections on hot-button issues like black identity, white self-loathing, and racial conflict. This old white guy may not be a racist, but he admits our current infatuation with blackness has made him numb with “racial boredom.” A tragicomedy for people of all shades.

MICHAEL BRANDOW writes on society, the arts, and canine culture. He is the author of four books on subjects ranging from public policy to social history, memoir, and political commentary: New York’s Poop Scoop Law (Purdue, 2008); A Matter of Breeding (Beacon Press, 2015; Duckworth, 2016; Hakuyosha, 2019); Gone Walkabout (Amazon, 2019); and his latest title, What’s the Problem Now? Black Grievances and White Guilt (New English Review Press, 2023). He has contributed to many publications, including the New York Times and the New York Post. He began writing art and social criticism for The New Criterion at its founding in the 1980s (including his most recent “Found, or appropriated?”), and for Peter Collier and David Horowitz at Heterodoxy in the 1990s. Recent essays for Quillette and the Village Voice have been listed in The Best American Essays (“Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction”). He has been interviewed by many outlets, including The New Yorker (“Talk of the Town”), The Brian Lehrer Show, and the BBC (“Newshour,” BBC Radio London, &c.).