An uneven yet useful survey of historical and contemporary forces driving the Black Lives Matter movement.
Veteran Black journalists cast a critical eye on American racial injustices in 12 reported essays.
“Movements don’t happen without a buildup,” says social justice activist Ruby Sales in a standout essay in which Charles examines the complex ties between Black churches and the struggle for racial justice. Sales’ comment sums up a theme of this hit-and-miss book: The Black Lives Matter movement—which might seem to have erupted spontaneously—has deep roots and historical antecedents, some dishearteningly similar to recent events. Bunn explores how racism has heightened Black Americans’ vulnerability in the pandemic and how the BLM movement, though associated with men like Trayvon Martin and George Floyd, grew out of the efforts of Alicia Garza, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, and Opal Tometi, women who built on the legacy of Ida B. Wells and other female activists. Gaines links modern issues such as mass incarceration and “the disrespect U.S. law enforcement has for Black lives” to earlier forms of racism, such as convict leasing and Jim Crow–era Black Codes. Harriston notes that six years before George Floyd said, “I can’t breathe,” Eric Garner shouted the same words and an officer who failed to intervene was demoted but faced no federal charges. Weaker sections offer shopworn denunciations of Trump and near-hagiography of Kamala Harris and other politicians in flat passages with too much overfamiliar or unedifying material. For many readers, however, this book may be worth it for Charles’ insightful observations on Black churches alone; one is that because Martin Luther King Jr. was a preacher, many people overestimate the role that those churches played in the civil rights struggle. As for current anti-racist efforts, Black churches “haven’t gotten a handle” on BLM. The foreword is provided by Marc H. Morial, former mayor of New Orleans and president and CEO of the National Urban League.
An uneven yet useful survey of historical and contemporary forces driving the Black Lives Matter movement.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-538-73782-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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
BOOK REVIEW
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