BOOK REVIEW: AJ Rice's 'The White Privilege Album'

If you have a reader on your Christmas gift list who enjoys irreverence, mixed with satire, and liberally smothered in facts, then the newest work offered by A.J. Rice, The White Privilege Album: Bringing Racial Harmony to Very Fine People…on Both Sides is highly recommended.

This is Rice's second entry in what will hopefully be a long series of offerings where he takes on both the absurdity and destructiveness of politically correct censorship and "woke" culture. His first effort was the 2022 release of The Woking Dead which became an Amazon Bestseller.

Having been represented by A.J. and his team at Publius PR, I have long been aware of his prowess in the field of media relations. What people like J.K. Rowling and James Patterson should be grateful for is that Rice has a "day job" and doesn't have time to make his foray into writing a full-time vocation. It leaves room on the shelves for their works.

The White Privilege Album's title is a hat tip to both The Beatles and "Boomers" by using the famous 1968 White Album, a sprawling offering from John, Paul, Ringo, and George that offered tracks as classic and differing as While My Guitar Gently Weeps (with the famous Eric Clapton guest guitar solo) to Helter Skelter (the tune seen by Charles Manson as foretelling a coming race war). In coopting the title, Rice riffs like Clapton with biting humor and demonstrates that Manson's race war might well have arrived in the form intolerance and cowardly self-censorship.

Smartly organized into twelve chapters that by their title mock our society's obsession with having months, weeks, or days named for some group or cause perceived as maligned or aggrieved, Rice starts with "January Privilege" where he takes on various subheadings such as "Diabetes Exposed as Racist," "Math is Racist, and You Know It," and "Did White People Invent Ebonics?" Each section is at once related to the whole, but also self-contained. This makes the book a fun pickup from the end table, nightstand, or from the top of the tank in the loo.

What I enjoyed the most about this book is Rice's ability to make tragedy fun. It was nearly a decade ago in a book I wrote with Charlie Kirk (Time for a Turning Point) that we pointed to the extraordinary threat that political correctness posed to our nation's freedom of speech and, beyond that, to all other forms of personal liberty, as well. This was before the term "cancel culture" had been widely introduced into the vernacular. In the time since that book was released, we have witnessed the damage to public figures and to regular people in our personal lives who have dared to stand up to political correctness. Forget those who stood up against it deliberately, how about those who have crashed into it unintentionally? Lives and careers have been ruined over seemingly harmless gestures, absent any malice aforethought.

Rice points out the seriousness of all this by making us laugh at its foolishness. He has become the Voltaire of his time. He picks up the excessiveness of the PC movement by the ankles and beats them over the head with it, all the while smiling and making the reader smile, too.

An example can be found in the February Privilege chapter where he discusses a 2022 forum held at Washington University in St. Louis, facilitated by staffers Cynthia Williams and Jewel Stafford. The purpose was to explore the "coded language of professionalism." One of the contentions was that requiring workers to show up on time led to "marginalizing people of color in the workplace." They refer to employees as "contributors" and are seeking ways for them to bring their "full selves" to the job site and advance effective workplaces.

Rice opines: "Apparently it is not racist to take the position that nonwhite people are incapable of adhering to standards of conduct most children have mastered by the time they enter middle school…if "contributors" don't show up-if they aren't on time for an important client meeting-how can their "full selves" contribute or "advance" anything? …It's been said that most of life is just showing up-but if you can't even manage that…"

In the eighth chapter titled "August Privilege," Rice takes on the subject of the book's subtitle in "Addressing the Very Fine People." Here he tells both the true story and the fictionalized PC version of President Trump's remarks after the fatality that took place at a political rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August of 2017.

In retelling the actual story, Rice begins by noting that "When the truth doesn't support the narrative of the Woke Left (his term of art), the Woke Left pushes untruths to blur the truth." This calls to mind the great line about the newspaper industry coined in the classic John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart film, The Man Who Shote Liberty Valance: When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. Rice points out that this is exactly what happened with Trump's post-Charlottsville remarks and how the legend of the statement persists to this day. He further writes:

"For the Woke Left, any opposition is not only intolerable but also immoral. You are a bad person-a "Nazi"-if you disagree with the Left. On everything!"

The story of Charlottesville has become a case study for the corruption of mainstream media and politicians who have been falsely using the story right up through the 2024 election. By retelling it here, and by making part of the book's title, Rice has clearly, and appropriately, planted it as a flag that represents intolerance and reminds all fair-minded Americans, on both sides, just how dangerous political correctness, wokeness, and cancel culture (forgive the redundancy) can be.

This book is positively delicious for anyone who insists upon learning and laughing at the same time. Read it in a single sitting or savor it over many (seat location left to reader's discretion), but whatever you do, read it. As a fellow author who has written things that have made people both laugh and think, I bend the knee herein to my friend A.J. Rice whose mastery of the art leaves me feeling more protegee than peer. 

Brent Hamachek is the VP & Associate Publisher for Human Events Media Group and the author of numerous books including Dissidently Speaking. Change the Words. Change the War (Available in all formats on Amazon). He is also a Board of Director for Bridge Charities, an organization dedicated to helping young people learn how to think critically, engage constructively, and solve problems instead of argue over differences.