Evenhanded and astute essays on race.
A critical examination of weak points in American democracy.
Johnson, author of When the Stars Begin To Fall: Overcoming Racism and Renewing the Promise of America (2021), served as a White House Fellow, military professor, and speechwriter. From a churchgoing culture he learned that everything happens for a reason and that there is always an explanation when God’s will doesn’t make sense— “The Lord works in mysterious ways.” These credos also apply to democracy, he says. When it seems comfortable “coexisting with slavery and oppression and dispossession and state violence—well, that is just democracy working in mysterious ways.” Except for banning slavery, legal barriers to Black equality were not eliminated until the civil rights acts of the 1960s, which proved a bonanza to Republicans as most white Southern Democrats switched parties, eliminating the minority status that Republicans had held since before the New Deal. It’s no secret that Black people overwhelmingly vote Democratic and that while only half of white people identify as Republicans, they account for 95% of the party’s congressional members. There is no shortage of Black conservatives, including Johnson’s father, who advocate self-help and suspicion of government, but they rarely vote Republican. No radical, Johnson writes that America remains more or less a land of opportunity where energetic members of its historical minority, like himself, do well, but most can’t escape traditional if extralegal pressures of hostile white institutions—police et al. Asian Americans, meanwhile, have outclassed many whites, who resent their superiority in education and income but hold them up as a “model minority.” Johnson paints a lucid picture of how minorities negotiate values we are supposed to share and reframes issues like voting and policing to reveal warning signs of problems that reasonable citizens both white and Black are nowhere near solving.
Evenhanded and astute essays on race.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780063346451
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
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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