Two surveys reveal that among high-achieving African-Americans, there is a new feeling of hope and optimism about race relations in the United States.
Newsweek columnist and contributing editor Cose (Bone to Pick: Of Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Reparation, and Revenge, 2004, etc.) conducted surveys of nearly 200 members of Harvard Business School’s African-American alumni association and more than 300 alumni of A Better Chance, an organization that sends underprivileged but talented teenagers to selected secondary schools to prepare them for college. Questionnaires and interviews with members of these elite groups show that they are upbeat about their potential to compete in a white world. Their answers are quoted at considerable length, as are those of other prominent blacks whom Cose interviewed about their experiences and their views. The author cites three factors as sources for the optimism he found: generational evolution, a transformation of American values leading to a widely shared ideal of racial equality and the election of Barack Obama. To categorize generational differences, Cose labels the civil-rights generation Gen 1 Fighters (blacks) and Hostiles (whites), and succeeding generations Gen 2 Dreamers (blacks) and Neutrals (whites), Gen 3 Believers (blacks) and Allies (whites) and Gen 4 Reapers (blacks) and Friends (whites). His interviews highlight their different attitudes. Today, he contends that as white racism has become unacceptable, black rage has become inappropriate. However, while the future seems bright to some, the gap between rich and poor is widening, and the number of blacks in the underclass is huge. Furthermore, while anger may be mellowing in black America, a segment of white America is up in arms about political and social changes that it sees as threatening a fondly remembered way of life. As for the spirit of hope and optimism among successful blacks, he writes, “at some point, absent real change, reality is likely to force a reassessment.” Heavily laced with anecdotes and lengthy quotes from other African-Americans, this report reads more like an accumulation of a journalist’s notes than a careful analysis of race relations in present-day America.
Pub Date: May 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-199855-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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