Despite some overreaching, this volume delivers resonant, real-world insights about racism.
Neill continues to explore racial bias and current political divisions in this second volume of social commentary.
Following the author’s previous installment (subtitled Racism 101), Neill here digs deeper, offering a more advanced course in racism and its manifestations across the current political spectrum. The author begins by discussing the left’s tendency, as he sees it, to focus on virtue signaling and policing language rather than true social and personal transformation. From there, he uses examples from his own life, alongside interviews with friends and acquaintances from diverse backgrounds, to critique models of Black, Asian, Latinx, and other “minority” identities. (“Of course there isn’t a model for us,” jokes Leina, an Indigenous American, in one of the standout transcripts.) Neill urges white allies to improve the ways in which they listen to and learn from friends who belong to minority groups, encouraging them to research on their own instead of turning interpersonal relationships into coursework on racism. Subsequent chapters expand to discuss “retrenchment” (the ebb and flow of progress in social justice and subsequent erosions of that progress) and include a vast “primer on America” and its positioning within popular imagination. (“Oh my gawd Ted, like, why is this next chapter, like, soooo long?” the author writes at the onset of the primer. “But don’t worry,” he adds in his invitingly goofy tone, “there are pictures!”) In contrast to the preceding volume, Neill’s target audience and intentions are clearer here; he writes specifically to white liberals in need of refined strategies (the text is even illustrated with a cartoon of someone holding back a white man with a “stop racism” sign and the caption “Lord, save us from the helpers…”). The author’s jokes and good intentions sometimes buckle under the weight of his ambition—the latter chapters’ summaries of complex discourses feel like material from a dense university textbook that needs unpacking in a classroom. However, that need for discussion is met by the fascinating interviews with people from Neill’s own life; they help to ground and energize his writing and show promise for the subsequent installments to come.
Despite some overreaching, this volume delivers resonant, real-world insights about racism.Pub Date: March 14, 2025
ISBN: 9798313810867
Page Count: 202
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
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