An important addition to debates at the intersection of race and technology.
How the fight for racial justice has evolved in the era of “the rapid democratization of technology.”
Hill, the host of BET News and Black News Tonight, joins forces with historian Brewster, the founding director of the West Point Center for Oral History, in this intellectual examination of how racial injustices are viewed and enhanced through the use of social media. The authors look at our current culture of citizen surveillance and the “ubiquity of video evidence of racism,” scrutinizing a series of timely examples of racial confrontation captured on camera. In assessing the history of George Floyd, for example, Hill and Brewster weigh the downward trajectory of his life against a discussion on the nation’s history of slavery and the advent of Black separatism and social reform movements. They also ask why it took a live video portraying deadly violence to elicit the kind of sympathy and outrage that would shift our national conversation on race. The authors discuss abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth and films like The Birth of a Nation (1915) to further elucidate the plight of Black people throughout American history, including far too many examples of violence in our current era. They deliver a sharp assessment of the social media photojournalistic “influencer” culture, in which the history of anti-Black violence can become rewritten as “ideas get massaged and pulled like taffy” into “new applications or modifications that befit the times.” The result is a fascinating juxtaposition of history and contemporary affairs that offers a “more realistic, unfiltered picture of Black life.” Thanks to video technology, “long-held claims of racially motivated police and vigilante violence now have the evidence that they formerly lacked.” Throughout, the authors intelligently contrast momentous historical events with current atrocities, showing that while progress continues, there is much more work to be done to combat racial injustice.
An important addition to debates at the intersection of race and technology.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982-18039-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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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