Potent and relevant pieces by a groundbreaking Black politician.
A compendium of works by the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Congress.
A former teacher, Chisholm represented Brooklyn’s 12th congressional district for seven consecutive terms, from 1969 to 1983. This collection of her writings is divided thematically into eight sections, including education, criminal justice, racism and civil rights, and women’s rights and leadership. The preface provides a sweeping introduction by Fraser, director of the Shirley Chisholm Project on Brooklyn Women’s Activism at Brooklyn College. “Public oratory,” Fraser convincingly writes, “is at the center of the Black freedom struggle, serving as one of its most valuable weapons.” The first of Chisholm’s writings here is a 1973 address she gave, titled “The Necessity for a New Thrust in Education Today,” in which she said, “Our primary function as educators must be to break from tradition when that tradition does not serve the present or retards the future; to reorient our school systems…in terms of imparting to our students and children a sense of self-respect, a sense of hope, a sense of belonging, a sense of power.” The importance of education for Black people serves as a consistent theme in Chisholm’s speeches, as does women’s activism. She was a rare voice who argued against spending money on weapons, writing, “I do not think I will ever understand what kind of values can be involved in spending $9 billion…on elaborate, unnecessary, and impractical weapons when several thousand disadvantaged children in the nation’s capital get nothing.” Chisholm’s bracing collection could not be more timely, with Vice President Kamala Harris vying for the office that Chisholm hoped to win in 1972, when she ran as the first Black woman to campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Potent and relevant pieces by a groundbreaking Black politician.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9780520386983
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
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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