Plummer’s call is inspiring because of—rather than despite—its willingness to call out difficulties and eschew naiveté.
In an era of increased self-segregation and polarization, an informative and passionate call for cross-racial friendship.
Psychologist Plummer (Racing Across the Lines: Changing Race Relations Through Friendship, 2004, etc.), the chief diversity officer at UMass Medical School and UMass Memorial Health Care, believes that cross-racial friendships—a term the author prefers to “interracial,” because “it speaks to the conscious action that has to be taken in these kinds of relationships”—are key to “bridging our widening racial divide.” However, such friendships are not straightforward or simple. Stereotypes can interfere with the intentions of well-meaning people to make friends with those from different backgrounds, and people tend to self-segregate because “people simply enjoy doing things with folks racially and culturally similar to them.” Institutions where we forge friendships often remain de facto racially segregated (Plummer includes an astute analysis of churches). When people do forge cross-racial friendships, they often report that those friendships feel—in some inarguable but hard to articulate way—different from friendships with same-race people. The tools people rely on to sustain same-race friendships don’t always translate well to cross-racial friendships. For example, though humor usually helps cement friendships, race-based humor can be offensive. Plummer’s source base is rich and persuasive. She draws on multiple national surveys, anecdotes, and historical examples of cross-racial friendships, like that of Eleanor Roosevelt and May McLeod Bethune. Vignettes from the author’s life—including a sadly quotidian story about a restaurant hostess who couldn’t imagine that she and her husband might be meeting white friends for dinner—leaven the sometimes-awkward academic prose. Plummer focuses more centrally on the subtitular challenges of friendship than on its benefits. Yet her own life testifies to the rewards of cross-racial friendship: It is from friends that people learn “how to truly hold multiple perspectives.”
Plummer’s call is inspiring because of—rather than despite—its willingness to call out difficulties and eschew naiveté.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8070-2389-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2018
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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