Significant legal history with lessons for all citizens.
A sharp history that shows the precarious nature of American citizenship.
As law professor Frost demonstrates in this crisp, concise book, the revocation of citizenship from native-born or naturalized individuals often stems from the desire to deprive individuals and/or groups of their political and civil rights, with an eye toward deportation. The overarching intention is to shape society to the prevailing ideological moment, to ensure that anti-establishment forces don’t “taint” the nation’s “purity” or challenge the hegemony of White leadership. Frost uses the stories of individual actors, from Emma Goldman to Robert E. Lee to Dred and Harriet Scott, to fill out the bigger picture of the government’s assault upon—or at least selective reading of—the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. It’s a sorry tale that Frost narrates engagingly, digging into the ever shifting racial boundaries of citizenship as well as the unconstitutional deployment of denaturalization initiatives. Frost explores how a wide range of factors, including race, ethnicity, and religious and political preferences, have sparked the state to intervene to maintain the status quo. “Denaturalization is most often associated with totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union,” writes the author. “But by the end of the twentieth century, the US government had denaturalized at least twenty-two thousand people—more than any other democracy before or since. The effect of the denaturalization campaign was to silence those who might otherwise have taken on leadership positions in politics, journalism, and the labor movement. By publicly targeting [certain] men and women…the government hoped to intimidate into silence tens of thousands of foreign-born citizens who were similarly vulnerable.” In the 21st century, the citizenship debate continues to be heated and controversial—but still revolves around the state’s power to deny the rights of “undesirables.” The takeaway is that citizenship is conditional, a fact that is hardly news for Dreamers across the U.S.
Significant legal history with lessons for all citizens.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8070-5142-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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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