A relevant, occasionally eye-opening collection of Q&As on race and privilege.
Candid conversations about race and policing with key figures in media, sports, and social justice movements.
Activist and former NBA player Thomas follows up his 2018 interview collection, We Matter, with Q&As informed by the turmoil of 2020 and 2021, with a similar assortment of interviewees: athletes (Isiah Thomas, Steph Curry, Breanna Stewart), media figures (Yamiche Alcindor, Jake Tapper), and family members of Black men killed or brutalized by police (Willie McCoy’s brother, Rodney King’s daughter). The prompts for discussion include George Floyd, defunding the police, the January insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and the intersection of White supremacy and evangelical Christianity. The overall tone of the interviews is skeptical and dissatisfied with the lack of systemic change despite growing media attention. When Thomas tells the son of Black Panther Fred Hampton that “after Trump, Biden was a breath of fresh air,” he snaps back, “I still ain’t breathing.” The sharpest rhetoric comes from activist and broadcaster Marc Lamont Hill, who pushes against softening the phrase “defund the police,” likening it to shifting from abolishing slavery to “reform the plantation.” Trumpism, most of Thomas’ interlocutors agree, is just a more visible manifestation of White supremacy that’s been part of American life from the start. Though the intensity and relevance of the conversations are clear, especially with members of victims’ families, Thomas rarely sees his role as more than teeing up his interviewees to share experiences or familiar talking points, which blunts the overall impact. That's why his Q&A with entrepreneur and NBA team owner Mark Cuban stands out: Thomas actively challenges Cuban to use his wealth and position to extract meaningful change from police and fellow team owners, and Cuban’s earnest but evasive replies reveal just how steep the challenge is. Other interviewees include Sue Bird, Rex Chapman, Chuck D, and Jemele Hill.
A relevant, occasionally eye-opening collection of Q&As on race and privilege.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63614-056-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Edge of Sports/Akashic
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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