Given the powerful evidence they present, it seems a small price to pay for centuries of wrong—though “an admission that the...
Can whites and blacks ever coexist peaceably in America? The answer, to judge by this depressing essay, seems to be no.
Martin Luther King Jr. suspected that the issue of equality was insoluble largely because whites were “deeply racist” and were unwilling to address their racism. Historians Adams and Sanders (The Private Death of Public Discourse, 1998) give no reason to think King wrong, arguing that “our history is largely the product of an elemental desire of America’s white citizenry to keep blacks at arm’s length and deny them entry to white society.” Though that “largely” is debatable, the authors catalogue the many manifestations of that desire: the long history of slavery; the relentless drive of early-19th-century leaders such as Thomas Jefferson to expand American territory precisely in order to spread slavery; the long indifference of the North to the slave trade; the determined efforts of state voting commissions to evade 15th Amendment guarantees; the nationwide imposition of Jim Crow laws; and the continuing de facto separation of the great mass of African-Americans into a permanent underclass. Though significant gains were made during the decades of civil- and voting-rights activism, the authors acknowledge, many advances were just as significantly undone with the rise of the “New Federalism” of Ronald Reagan and company, who saw to it that “the search for racial equality had nearly disappeared from the nation’s domestic policy agenda” by the early ’90s. Bill Clinton was heralded by black voters, but his eight years in office revealed a constant “inability to get things done” on their behalf, and the present administration seems unwilling to recognize that a problem exists, despite the disparities between African-Americans and nearly every other ethnic group in nearly every facet of social and economic life. In light of this legacy of ill treatment, the authors close by making a reasoned if somewhat cursory case for reparations.
Given the powerful evidence they present, it seems a small price to pay for centuries of wrong—though “an admission that the majority of white citizens seem unwilling to make.”Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-019975-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
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
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