A bold, incisive book on heavy topics with a call to action for a more equitable future that doesn’t center White men.
The author of So You Want To Talk About Race takes a close look at the perils and constraints of White male identity.
In the U.S., a country built on slavery and exploitation, millions of Americans insist that our political, economic, legal, and educational systems are meritocracies when they clearly aren’t. While everyone else has to excel in order to get by, writes Oluo, we reward mediocre White men’s bad behavior: “We have, as a society, somehow convinced ourselves that we should be led by incompetent assholes.” White male mediocrity sustains “a violent, sexist, racist status quo” and robs others of greatness and keeps them powerless and poor. When average White men fail to reap what they believe is their natural birthright, they turn their rage not on elite White men but rather on the women and people of color they blame for their loss of opportunity. Not surprisingly, White men are currently the “biggest domestic terror threats in this country.” As the author clearly shows, “today’s titans of white male mediocrity” are part of a long line of “arrogant, entitled, irresponsible, willfully ignorant bullies” in powerful positions. Understanding this history, Oluo believes, is a prerequisite for survival and for enacting the systemic change that is required to alter the situation. She traces mediocre White men across centuries to the present, including the bloody U.S. westward expansion and cowboy mythology that fueled Native American genocide; male feminists; the two-facedness of Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and the often vicious Bernie Bros; the war on higher education; racism in the NFL; and mediocre White men in the workplace. A gifted storyteller and thorough researcher, Oluo analyzes these histories, many of them lesser known, with solid scholarship and useful pop-culture references.
A bold, incisive book on heavy topics with a call to action for a more equitable future that doesn’t center White men.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-58005-951-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
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
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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