A powerful, well-researched indictment of racist media in the United States.
A scholar explores the role of the media in perpetuating systemic racism in this nonfiction book.
“Overly employed culturally racist stereotypes of Blackness,” Gammage writes in the book’s introduction, erroneously place "the burden of health and life disparities” on Black women. Reality television, she argues, with ample examples at her disposal, too often presents Black women as violent and threatening and feeds into narratives popular among white audiences that Black women “are chronically unhealthy and in need of social control.” This racist imagery, she convincingly notes, draws on a long history of the media’s racism, the origins of which can be traced back 500 years to the enslavement of Africans in the Americas. Whether it’s newspapers and print advertisements of the colonial era or the television and social media of today, “racially abusive media” has long shaped and reflected institutionalized systems of racial subjugation. As evidenced by the nearly 20-page bibliography, not only does Gammage have a firm command of the relevant scholarly literature on media studies—the topic of her first book, Representations of Black Women in the Media: The Damnation of Black Womanhood(2015)—but also on the history of Black health care. From enslavers who believed Black women faked illness to avoid work to television images of “crack mamas,” racist stereotypes of Black women in the media have played a key role in denying equitable access to medical care. While much of the book surveys the sordid arena of racist imagery, the final chapter examines the ways Black women in contemporary society have co-opted social media as a tool for empowerment “that celebrates Black pride, beauty, resistance, and resilience.” A professor and chair of Africana studies at California State University Northridge, Gammage expertly blends her erudite analysis with an engaging writing style that avoids academic jargon. This emphasis on accessibility is complemented by an ample assortment of tables, graphs, charts, and other visual aids that provide an abundance of data that supports her arguments regarding racism in the media and health disparities among Black women.
A powerful, well-researched indictment of racist media in the United States.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781942774075
Page Count: 216
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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