Writer John Safran is both a doc­u­men­tar­i­an and a come­di­an. His book God’ll Cut You Down: The Tan­gled Tale of A White Suprema­cist, A Black Hus­tler, A Mur­der, And How I Lost A Year In Mis­sis­sip­pi takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to fig­ur­ing out racism in Amer­i­ca. The book is a long-wind­ed inves­ti­ga­tion into the bru­tal mur­der of a white suprema­cist, Richard Bar­rett, by a black man, Vin­cent McGee, that may have been over sex. The Aus­tralian Jew­ish author was first intro­duced to the sub­ject in the course of his TV series, Race Rela­tions. As Safran doc­u­ments his jour­ney to solve the mys­tery of the racist man’s mur­der, he fla­vors the book with sub­ti­tles like ​“Under a Hunch­back Tree Drip­ping Green Fur,” ​“Pre­cious the Otter,” ​“The Clob­ber­ing Sun,” and ​“Because I’m a Moron.” It takes a deter­mined read­er to get through Safran’s saucy, sar­cas­tic irrev­er­ence and the com­pli­cat­ed web of char­ac­ters while try­ing to make sense of Mississippi’s jus­tice sys­tem and social order. It’s chal­leng­ing to find a lik­able char­ac­ter to care about. But God’ll Cut You Down is a wor­thy read because prob­ing old racial ani­mosi­ties rais­es cur­rent ques­tions as the usage of the Con­fed­er­ate Flag rages on. Safran would have no tan­gled tale if we could all get along.