A useful book for those aiming to combat latter-day bigotry, with its many targets and manifestations.
Firsthand reports on hate crime and its victims in the age of Trump.
Why does the sitting president not use his bully pulpit to denounce anti-Semitism, sexism, racism, xenophobia, and so forth? Because, insists civil rights lawyer and commentator Sethi (Georgetown Univ. Law Center), “he is a racist and a sexist, and his ideologies are white supremacy and greed.” Even if you don’t share that sentiment, it’s hard to dismiss Sethi’s belief that hate crime—motivated by the wish to do harm to people who are somehow different from the mainstream—is markedly on the rise. However, that belief often lacks hard evidence to back it. Although the FBI collects data on the incidence of hate crime, “their figures are grossly incomplete,” in part because reporting from local police agencies is voluntary and one person’s hate crime may be another’s exercise of First Amendment rights. Consequently, violations go underreported or unreported, which this collection of testimonials aims to redress by validating the reality of those crimes and the great harm they do. Student government activist Taylor Dumpson, for instance, writes of the racist threats and subsequent trauma that resulted from her having been elected student president as an African-American at American University. “We need to lean into discomfort,” she writes, “because nothing happens when we’re comfortable.” A Christian Lebanese-American in Tulsa recounts a series of violent assaults on the part of a neighbor who assumed her family was Muslim and who received the equivalent of a slap on the hand for his misdeeds: “They sent him back home, next door to the family he terrorized.” Many of the speakers in these pages locate hate crime in a pattern of fear at the loss of white privilege, about which Sethi sensibly notes, “these Americans have to…understand that the projects of justice and equity are not assaults on their racial identity.”
A useful book for those aiming to combat latter-day bigotry, with its many targets and manifestations.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62097-371-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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