Jeremy Garber's Reviews > Sky Full of Elephants

I am a straight white middle-class educated cisgender male. I check off every category of privilege possible in the USA of 2024. This book was not written for me, and it made me uncomfortable. I think that's why it was important for me to read it.

Sky Full of Elephants begins with all the white people in America walking into the sea and drowning. The book centers around Charlie, a former inmate liberated after the event, who is a master of electricity overseeing the transformation of a new United States. He receives a message from his estranged daughter who was living in Wisconsin with her white family, telling him to take her to the South where some white folks might still be alive. The rest of the story follows Charlie and Sidney as they take electric cars (because nobody drills for gas anymore) into the South and expose the beauty and the complicated realities of a post-White world.

The tough part for White readers, of course, is that this is a utopia predicated on genocide. At some points in the book Campbell seems to savor that fact, but at his best, the characters in the novel wrestle with that reality in different ways. In this new world, Black folks can laugh and dance and sing without fear of violence or reprisal. Campbell even seems to suggest that capitalism and oppression are natural features of White culture, and both have been gleefully abandoned once the White folks are gone. That's the Utopian piece, and I can see where Campbell is coming from in his imagination, but it's still an oversimplification that can lead to the very danger and violence that Campbell seems to be against. I give Campbell credit for at points questioning this violence, and for his imagination - this world is a world that I would want to live in, without question. The bigger concern is whether I would be allowed to -or whether the utopia requires the death of people like me.