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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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