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The first thing to say about Ijeoma Oluo’s
Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America is that it has been misclassified. It is listed as a work of nonfiction, and thanks to some creative gaming of Amazon’s genre tags, it is, as of my writing, America’s No. 1-selling new release in “economic history” (the audiobook version is No. 2). But it is properly speaking a work of fantasy. Indeed, in its intricate, quasi-sociological discussion of a world that does not exist but that possesses an uncanny resemblance to our own, it resembles the work of Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino. Unfortunately, not only Oluo herself but most of her reviewers appear to have missed the trick and are laboring under the delusion she is describing reality. That