A carefully researched work of history that chronicles centuries of injustice while calling for an end to inequality.
A historical examination of the origins of the ever-deepening divide between Black and white intergenerational wealth.
As Arizona State University historian Schermerhorn notes, “The typical African American family has about one-sixth the wealth of the typical white family.” This is an improvement over the year of the Emancipation Proclamation, when “the typical Black family had less than two cents on the typical white family’s dollar,” but the structural reasons for the disparity have remained fairly constant: institutional racism stood in the way of accumulating wealth then, and it does so today. Schermerhorn ranges across American history to note that whenever Blacks have made economic advances, new impediments arise: a Black household in colonial Virginia was subject to twice the annual tax of a white household of the same composition, while the descendants of landholders were legally cheated out of inherited holdings because, as a court said of one, the heir “was a Negro and by consequence an alyen.” In the newly constituted United States, enslaved Blacks were legally classified “as personal property, like a horse or wagon,” with no property rights of their own. Schermerhorn finds broad discrepancies in New Deal programs, with Social Security, for instance, initially denied to farmworkers and domestic workers—a large portion, that is, of the Black workforce—while post–WWII GI Bill programs were so tilted that in 1947, “just two of 3,229 VA-backed loans in thirteen Mississippi cities went to Black veterans.” Housing covenants in the Phoenix and Los Angeles of the 1950s and ’60s confined Blacks to the inner city and low housing values, impeding the accumulation of wealth. Schermerhorn closes with a call to redress four centuries of economic damage with “targeted restorative justice initiatives” that include reparations.
A carefully researched work of history that chronicles centuries of injustice while calling for an end to inequality.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780300258950
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
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
BOOK REVIEW
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
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