WE ARE THE LEADERS WE HAVE BEEN LOOKING FOR

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WE ARE THE LEADERS WE HAVE BEEN LOOKING FOR

Name: WE ARE THE LEADERS WE HAVE BEEN LOOKING FOR
Author: Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
ISBN: 9780674737600

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2024

A powerfully eloquent, concise book.

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A Princeton professor of African American studies examines “Black democratic perfectionism” and its significance to the ongoing political struggle.

Glaude, the author of Begin Again and Democracy in Black, first presented this work at the 2011 Harvard W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture Series. Though he had initially intended them as musings on how the Obama presidency had affected “the form and content of Black political struggle,” when revisiting the essays a decade later, he realized that the ideas they expressed had become even more germane in the aftermath of the Trump administration, the pandemic, and the concomitant resurgence of racism and xenophobia. His first essay explores “the role of the prophetic and the heroic in African American democratic life,” examining the work of Martin Luther King Jr. within a framework that also includes pragmatist John Dewey. King was no savior, writes the author. Rather, he was a flawed human who followed the stirrings of a powerful moral imagination and acted on ideals that had no guarantee of succeeding in the real world. In the second essay, Glaude turns his attention to Malcolm X. Using the Emersonian idea that society should limit its reliance on heroes, the author suggests that Malcolm X was a “wounded, vulnerable Black man” fighting within a collective for liberation rather than a “shining black prince.” The author concludes with an exploration of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizer Ella Baker’s beliefs about leadership. Far from being magical or mythical, the power to enact change is a grassroots phenomenon that comes from individuals becoming “problem-solving agents” and acting collectively as servants of justice. Though they speak directly to tendencies within the ongoing Black political struggle, the wisdom these important essays offer about the true nature of democratic action is equally relevant to all Americans seeking to rebuild a ravaged democracy and its broken institutions.

A powerfully eloquent, concise book.

Pub Date: April 16, 2024

ISBN: 9780674737600

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Harvard Univ.

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | U.S. GOVERNMENT | ETHNICITY & RACE | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES

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ABUNDANCE

by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2025

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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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

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BUSINESS | U.S. GOVERNMENT

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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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.