Wise, essential instruction for all who seek redress for the inequalities that persist in America.
A powerful examination of White assumptions about Black people and the obstacles that stand in the way of social justice.
“One way or another, the white world tries to convince people—even Black people—that there’s no need to organize for racial justice like Black Americans have always done.” So writes Henry, an activist and columnist for Religion News Service. Sometimes the argument takes the form of “racism is not a problem here.” As the author observes, this usually hinges on negative definition—e.g., we’re not racist in New York because we’re not Southerners, or we’re not racist in the South because we don’t belong to the KKK. Henry embarks on a searching exploration of unspoken beliefs about Black people. In the company of the family of longtime White friends, he looks into the thesis that there is “some extraordinary violent impulse unique to Black people,” voiced by one family member who became a police officer. A second encounter with the family occurred when they asked that politics not be discussed at the table, to which Henry responds, “When white people demand the privilege to sit comfortably in restaurants and theaters…without having to consider the violence that pervades their society…they invoke a consumer-capitalist tradition that stretches back to colonial times.” A fellow seminarian ventured the thought that slavery wasn’t so bad, since some slaveholders were nice folks; another White interlocutor encouraged Henry to “get all the facts” surrounding the death of Philando Castile. After presenting these cases and others, Henry demonstrates how White people can be allies, first by not declaring themselves to be so but instead awaiting acknowledgment of that status by Black people. He also encourages a kind of separatism. “Black people may need to rethink the fight for the proverbial seat at the table in white institutions,” he writes. “We need tables of our own.”
Wise, essential instruction for all who seek redress for the inequalities that persist in America.Pub Date: March 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-23988-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Convergent
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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