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IN OUR SHOES

Name: IN OUR SHOES
Author: Brianna Holt
ISBN: 9780593186398

ON BEING A YOUNG BLACK WOMAN IN NOT-SO "POST-RACIAL" AMERICA

by Brianna Holt ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2023

A commendable, colloquial perspective on a continually fraught topic.

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Essays exploring unjust conditions faced by Black women as well as what White people should do to dismantle racism.

“In this part memoir, part cultural critique,” Holt writes, “I have done my best to describe what it means to be a young Black woman navigating ‘post-racial’ America through my memories, recollections, and experiences.” The author, who has worked for BuzzFeed and written for Rolling Stone, the Guardian, and other publications, signed a book deal after her 2020 New York Times op-ed about celebrating Juneteenth went viral. Now 27, she focuses on cultural appropriation in society and especially on social media. “Black women’s style and swag are often stolen and then praised on their white counterparts,” writes the author, “rendering Black women invisible, or worse, denigrated for the very things white people have stolen from them.” Holt posits that “the idea that we live in a post-racial society” may be responsible for the widespread belief that “unity or simple notions of togetherness are solutions to solving racism and creating a more just world for Black people….But that simply isn’t the case.” Drawing from more than 100 sources, including studies, videos, tweets, and interviews she conducted, Holt illustrates insidious examples of how “whiteness often practices self-preservation,” which leads to numerous deleterious effects on Black women. The chapters bear titles such as “Leave the Box Braids for the Black Girls” and “The Road to Healing On- and Offline,” and all close with descriptions of actions necessary for improvement. For example, Holt writes, White women “must self-reflect and acknowledge their own blind spots, while simultaneously counteracting them by making space for, showing up for, and passing along opportunities to Black women.” Holt offers particularly potent critiques of unconscious bias in the workplace and the many flaws inherent in White feminism.

A commendable, colloquial perspective on a continually fraught topic.

Pub Date: April 11, 2023

ISBN: 9780593186398

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Plume

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023

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ABUNDANCE

by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2025

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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Helping liberals get out of their own way.

Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

Pub Date: March 18, 2025

ISBN: 9781668023488

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Avid Reader Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BUSINESS | U.S. GOVERNMENT

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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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.