A bracing and thought-provoking study of race and class clashes in American history.
Jeter, a former Washington Postforeign correspondent, examines the fraught history of race and class in America.
“What is to be done now,” asks the author, “as the country disintegrates into political chaos and those of us who are fully awake wait anxiously for the rest of the nation to join us in reclaiming this land from the bloodsucking capitalists who have robbed us blind?” In these pages, Jeter presents readers with a far-ranging survey of American history to trace tangled and interconnected stories of race and class relations going back to before the U.S. Civil War. The author refers to his project as “a journey through time” undertaken to “assess what has been wrought by this ferocious, 150-year class war between the Americans who built the country and those who own it.” Focusing on racial issues, Jeter looks at incidents such as the 1898 racial massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina, in which “white supremacists overthrew the progressive, interracial government on the pretext of Black male predation despite a lack of any evidence.” On the labor relations side, he walks readers through events like President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1935 signing of the Wagner Act, recognizing the right of employees to bargain collectively with their employers, which, among other things, was a signpost moment in the long “antagonistic relationship” between the American Federation of Labor and Black American workers.
Jeter’s narrative skill is remarkable; he writes with both passion and clarity about the ways “the white settler elite has historically deployed…false accusations to stir up murderous passions, creating a smokescreen for dispossession.” The picture he paints of America’s ruling capitalist oligarchy constantly pitting workers against each other along racial lines is vigorously convincing, even when he lapses into over-generalizations: “White workers typically respond to financial uncertainly by abandoning the class struggle to instead punch down on African Americans, who they invariably see as a threat to their racial identity and the privileges afforded to it.” His narrative’s main weakness is its sprawl, which blunts its focus. The book bounces all over the last 150 years, from the death of Ethel Rosenberg to the murder of Emmett Till to the Korean War to the Montgomery bus boycott to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling to President Clinton’s repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to Charleston mass shooter Dylann Roof—Jeter even makes a detour to discuss a dispute he had with an acquaintance over a personal loan he was late in repaying. The author manages to draw connecting threads between most of these subjects, but the sheer number of data points may leave some readers yearning for more focus. Still, the power of Jeter’s insights is consistently stunning, and his rhetoric is often thrillingly sharp, as when he describes “Black respectability politics increasingly promoted by an African American bourgeoisie that, however well-meaning, operated from a misguided understanding of Black laborers as a defeated people whose best chance was to obey white folks and hope for the best.” All of these insights are enlisted in the cause of exposing the “the gaping spiritual wound left by a battery of invectives, bullying, and profiling.”
A bracing and thought-provoking study of race and class clashes in American history.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Drum Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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