Book Review: Sky Full of Elephants

If there was no white supremacy, what would you build in its place? Of that world, what would you keep or discard? How would you truly know that it no longer exists? These are some of the questions that the book, Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell, attempts to answer.

And though white supremacy is not gone, white people are.

The beginning premise of the book is that some cataclysmic event erased white people from the face of the earth. And in its aftermath, we find Charlie Brunton who was imprisoned when the event first occurred. Charlie emerges free from prison to not only find a new world, but a new purpose to reconnect with his estranged daughter Sidney. Together, they embark on a journey to ostensibly find her mother’s side of the family. But really, Sidney is trying to find vestiges of the familiar, white dominated world, not knowing that the familiar was the original source of her father’s imprisonment and their estrangement.

Along the way, Charlie and Sydney find Black people who could be the poster children of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. In doing so, Campbell shows the utter ridiculousness of Black people who are tethered to the old ways of doing things even when white people are not around.

It harkens back to the famous Carter G. Woodson quote, “When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his 'proper place' and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit.”

Campbell also illustrates Black people, who are in between worlds. A little more sane, they lack a road map to viable alternatives and thus add soul to existing European structures.

And finally, Charlie and Sydney encounter a committed group of Black people who attempt to create a new world based on African traditions, seeking to purge themselves and society from all remnants of European taint, no matter the cost.

To avoid any spoilers, the book forces readers to question their investment in whiteness and thus America, in addition to asking how Black you are when no one is looking. It also forces us to consider one of the more cruel aspects of white supremacy in that the very people who do not benefit from it, too often become its staunchest defenders.

Sky Full of Elephants also suggests that the existential questions it raises are with us despite the occurrence of some cataclysmic event. We all will have to decide what kind of people we will be, what kind of society serves us, and the lengths we will go to make it so.