Required reading for any American serious about dismantling systemic racism.
An impassioned analysis of America’s failure at racial integration as a failure of democracy.
Decades after the many successes of the civil rights movement, why hasn’t America dismantled racism? According to Baker, a novelist who has taught at a variety of universities, it’s because we’ve never employed the only real solution to the problem: integration. The author argues that integration is “the most radical, transformative idea in US politics,” once properly understood, and he endeavors successfully to deliver that understanding. This is not an easy task considering that many Americans are invested in the systems that “perpetuate racism,” but Baker provides plenty of illuminating examples to bolster his argument: A company hires diversity consultants but won’t diversify its C-suite. We want to end the national crisis of school desegregation, but we shrink from the idea of busing. Baker defines integration as full rights of self-determination and participation for all black Americans and other groups historically excluded by race, “in every facet of national life.” A gifted storyteller, the author writes with the urgency of what’s at stake—i.e., the very survival of our democracy. Denying black people rights has been the “flaw in the design of America we have been struggling to resist” for 400 years, and Baker dissects critical junctures in the nation’s history when integration could have ameliorated racism, from the Continental Congress through the election of the first black president. He offers incisive analysis on a variety of topics, including politics, sports, gentrification, and pop culture, and he examines such pivotal figures as Shakespeare, Frederick Douglass, the Black Panthers, Public Enemy, and Colin Kaepernick. Scholarly yet accessible, this book is a wake-up call for a country that would rather celebrate how far we’ve come than focus on how far we still have to go to eradicate racism.
Required reading for any American serious about dismantling systemic racism.Pub Date: June 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-56858-923-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bold Type Books
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
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
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