A closely observed, well-argued examination of how athletes have used their fame to advance civil rights.
Sports journalist Steele probes the long history of civil rights protest on the part of athletes in America.
Former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick figures at the center of the story, though he is just one player in a rich heritage of athletic activism. The author begins with Paul Robeson, who began his career at Rutgers with letters in football, track, baseball, and basketball. “Sports had put him on the national radar,” writes Steele, “but his many other pursuits throughout segregated America had kept him there.” Part of the price Robeson paid for his activism was the loss of his passport, as happened to boxing great Muhammad Ali as he refused induction into the military. Steele notes that Kaepernick’s protest began not by taking a knee but simply by refusing to stand for the national anthem, which might have gone overlooked had a reporter not asked about it; taking a knee added urgency to the issue while costing Kaepernick a spot on the roster. “The very nature of his protest, of course, lent itself to categorizing the reactions along racial lines,” writes Steele. Many Black athletes came to his defense, such as Jim Brown and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, while many White athletes insisted that Kaepernick was dishonoring the country by his actions. Yet race is not a monolith. As Steele writes, Tiger Woods has made a long career by going along to get along, palling around with Donald Trump—one of Kaepernick’s most furious detractors—in his devil’s bargain. At the time, “the bar of expectations for Woods was essentially on the floor.” There it remains, while, Steele predicts, just as the nation came around to accepting Tommie Smith’s and John Carlos’ raised fists at the 1968 Olympics, in 50 years, Kaepernick will be commemorated as a warrior for civil rights.
A closely observed, well-argued examination of how athletes have used their fame to advance civil rights.Pub Date: July 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4399-2173-9
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Temple Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
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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