A spirited and informed assessment of American racism beyond headlines and politics.
Sharp essays on race relations from the era between the Civil Rights Act and Black Lives Matter.
Like many Black cultural critics, Walton (Mississippi: An American Journey, 1996, etc.) sees Trump-era racism as the culmination of decades of American bigotry, fueled by Jim Crow and the Southern Strategy. His goal is to show how persistent the problem has been even during what many perceived to be the calmer waters of the 1980s and Obama era. The opening essay, first published in the New York Times in 1989, calls out the bigotry and fearmongering of George H.W. Bush’s campaign ad featuring Willie Horton, a Black convict. A well-turned profile of the Rev. Al Sharpton focuses on his street-level appeal amid efforts to diminish his profile in the wake of the Tawana Brawley case. Walton explores how various occasions have given whites license to broadcast their racism, from a 1957 article by William F. Buckley defending segregation to a PBS documentary on George Wallace to the case of Christian Cooper, a demure New York City bird-watcher on whom a white woman called police simply because he wanted her to follow dog-leash laws. In the title essay, he explains why decades of “going along to get along” conduct by Black people haven’t improved race relations, asking for a society “that no longer privileges white psychic stability and emotional comfort.” Walton is plainly inspired by James Baldwin’s fury and some of his rhetorical approaches—one essay is framed as a letter to a white friend. But Walton is too resigned to thunder for change the way Baldwin did. Nor does he call for broad policy prescriptions, though he does reasonably ask why Black people have been largely denied access to the economic boom within the tech industry. Only by claiming respect for themselves rather than waiting for whites to confer it on them, he argues, can Black Americans avoid becoming the “collateral damage of a public system that fails more often than it succeeds.”
A spirited and informed assessment of American racism beyond headlines and politics.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781567927283
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Godine
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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