According to Archer, Black America is still at the back of the bus.
A review of the racial consequences of passenger transportation policy in the United States.
Archer, a law professor at New York University and the president of the American Civil Liberties Union, illustrates the oft-told story of the government’s complicity in racial discrimination and segregation with a focus on highway construction, street planning, and mass transit. “In the history of the United States,” she asserts, “transportation infrastructure is, and always has been, a political act.” Bluntly put, it is “white supremacy by another means.” With racial inequality endemic to America, it is no surprise that interstate highways in cities divide Black from white communities, streets are arranged to prevent Black people from driving into white neighborhoods, punitive policing disproportionately targets Black motorists and pedestrians, bus transit is highly racialized, sidewalks are fewer and poorly maintained in Black neighborhoods, and regional rail lines mainly serve white commuters. Archer deploys numerous examples from cities such as Birmingham and Indianapolis to describe the racial consequences of transportation policy while highlighting court decisions that have either reinforced racism or left it unchanged. Of particular concern are Supreme Court rulings that require a finding of intent, rather than overwhelming statistical evidence, to demonstrate racial injustice. Only a single chapter, however, is devoted to a serious legal analysis. Archer calls for a reparative approach that compensates for prior disadvantages and proposes mandatory Racial Equity Impact Assessments for all policy initiatives. Little is said about how this would work. Nevertheless, Archer deftly documents the detrimental effects of transportation policy on Black mobility and does so while acknowledging governmental policies (such as mortgage redlining) that have also contributed to Black inequality. Given her legal activism, one wishes that she had more critically attended to transportation politics and, by doing so, elaborated a path toward a just transportation policy agenda.
According to Archer, Black America is still at the back of the bus.Pub Date: April 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781324092131
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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