A flawed but insightful exposé of structural racism in corporate culture.
A Black entrepreneur explores corporate racism in this business book.
As a self-made Black businessman and licensed clinical social worker, Williams is deeply familiar with the racism embedded in American corporate culture. In this work,he reveals “the psychological and emotional consequences of being Black in corporate America.” Despite surveys that highlight the many White businessmen who do not see their Black co-workers as “deserving” of their jobs and who maintain stereotypes of African Americans “as lazy and unwilling to work,” Williams convincingly demonstrates “the reality…that Black people need to work harder than their white counterparts to achieve the bare minimum.” Even when succeeding at their jobs, Black workers continue to be ignored, particularly in decision-making circles. At just under 100 pages, this succinct book covers topics that range from ethnocentric ideas of “professional” hairstyles to imposter syndrome and tokenism to microaggressions from White colleagues who “do not see color.” Code-switching is a central topic of the author’s analysis, which argues that racist attitudes in the corporate sector view African American Vernacular English as “an inferior dialect.” In general, United States business culture, according to Williams, seeks “to erase” Blackness by encouraging African American employees to conform to White cultural norms as a prerequisite to climb the corporate ladder. This prioritization of White values implicitly strips “the average Black person of their individuality and humanity.” The volume’s final chapters examine the psychological costs of “Corporate Traumatic Stress Disorder” and call for true diversity in the business sector that celebrates differences rather than encourages a monolithic corporate culture whose default is White comfort. As U.S. corporations have increasingly included social justice messages in their advertising campaigns, Williams’ book is an important reminder of the entrenched systems within corporate America that work against Black employees even when the business publicly states a commitment to “diversity.” But while the volume provides a myriad of anecdotal and statistical evidence to bolster its claims, it lacks adequate citations. In addition, the work’s opening chapter on African American history is perfunctory and distracts from an otherwise important message on corporate racism.
A flawed but insightful exposé of structural racism in corporate culture.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-578-23685-8
Page Count: 114
Publisher: CKC Publishing House LLC
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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