A largely surface-level study of modern Black communities.
A Black scholar uses ethnographic data to describe the plight of Black communities in modern America.
In this analysis of modern Black life, Anderson, a professor of sociology and African American studies at Yale, examines how Black people of various class levels navigate what he calls the “white space” of mainstream America. According to the author, Americans automatically connect Black people with the negative concept of “the ghetto,” regardless of where these individuals actually reside or where they come from. Anderson claims that associating Black folks with poor, crime-ridden communities “has burdened Black people with a negative presumption that they are required to disprove before establishing mutually trusting relationships with others.” As a result, Black American males, especially, are overly policed and underemployed. The author also notes how many Black boys lack father figures, which, the author asserts, contributes to their interest in a life of crime. Writing about how these problems are particularly challenging for “ghetto” families that identify as “street” rather than “decent,” terms the author says were used by his interview subjects, Anderson also argues that the power of the image of the ghetto in the White imagination ensures that even middle-class and upper-class Blacks constantly have to fight for fair treatment and against racism. Although the book purportedly draws on “ethnographic fieldwork” Anderson conducted for his previous work, the author not only fails to describe his methodology; he also goes pages without mentioning a single piece of original data. His analysis is highly descriptive, rather than analytical, and he focuses mostly on individual actions—and, in particular, the actions of Black, able-bodied males—more than the pervasive structural inequalities that plague Black Americans. Many of his points are solid and worthy of further discussion, but they have been more rigorously explored by previous scholars.
A largely surface-level study of modern Black communities.Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-226-65723-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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