An outstanding contribution to the historical literature of American racism and racist ideologies.
Education can be liberating. However, as this provocative survey demonstrates, it can also uphold the worst of the status quo.
“As for Sambo, whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears…there is some reason to believe that he suffered less than any class in the South from its ‘peculiar institution.’ ” The authors of that statement were Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, two eminent historians whose work is still studied today. As Yacovone, an associate at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African American Research, observes, the textbook in which that spectacularly racist—and incorrect—statement occurs was a standard for many years. Beginning with the founding of the republic, writes Yacovone, textbooks have been primary instruments for transmitting “ideas of white American identity,” even asserting that this identity is definitively White and that, as one 1896 textbook stated, “to the Caucasian race by reason of its physical and mental superiority has been assigned the task of civilizing and enlightening the world.” Current textbooks have plenty of problems, as well. Yacovone points out that only in the last decade have Texas history textbooks acknowledged slavery, and not states’ rights, as the primary cause of the Civil War. It is from history textbooks, he adds, that the terms White supremacy and master race entered the lexicon, and it has been from textbooks that excuses for the subjugation of some peoples and extermination of others have found learned justification. Even textbooks—and Yacovone has pored over hundreds—that condemned the secessionist movement were often inclined to consider the enslaved population as “a degraded and inferior people.” Interestingly, the author links some of the worst excesses to the anti-communist fervor of the Cold War era, when textbook publishers and authors were avid to erase differences between North and South—White differences, anyway.
An outstanding contribution to the historical literature of American racism and racist ideologies.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-31663-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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