Activists involved in equitable policing, judicial reform, and victims’ rights will find value in Neely’s account.
A sociologist examines murders of Black women that have gone unnoticed, unsolved, and forgotten.
Her account fueled by the murder of a 16-year-old girl in Detroit, Neely opens with appalling statistics: Black girls and women make up 7% of the U.S. population, but “they were three times more likely to die by homicide compared to white females.” The violence has a certain circularity: law enforcement agencies assume that those Black girls and women brought the crimes onto themselves through drug use or prostitution. Chillingly, they’re considered less than human, whence Neely’s title, “used as a classification in homicide cases comprising victims whom police view as having little to no value as human beings.” When the crimes are investigated, the police are often in a hurry to find a perpetrator—and often an innocent person goes to jail while the real perpetrators, often serial criminals and murderers, get away with it; knowing this, those real perpetrators have little incentive not to commit further crimes. In the case of that 16-year-old, decades passed before the true killer was tried and sentenced and the wronged man freed. “Had Detroit police valued the life of Michelle Kimberly Jackson, Eddie Joe Lloyd would not have lost eighteen years of his life to prison, the deaths of other potential victims would have been prevented, and the families of those victims would be spared the unbearable pain of losing a loved one,” Neely charges. That all this happened speaks, she adds, to systemic racism, a habit of mind that even Black officers buy into. Neely concludes with the thoughts that greater advocacy for those forgotten women is needed and that cold cases are often opened through citizen action and, more recently, podcasts that demand accountability.
Activists involved in equitable policing, judicial reform, and victims’ rights will find value in Neely’s account.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780807004562
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
