With some substance, but mostly aid and comfort for the defund-the-police movement.
The author of Understanding Mass Incarceration returns with a plaintive critique of the surveillance state.
In addition to conventional prison, writes Kilgore, we now face e-carceration, “the application of a network of punitive technologies to social problems” that “deprive people of their liberty.” These technologies include ankle monitors and other tracking devices as well as security cameras, cellphone tracking, facial-recognition software, and a host of other techniques and tools. They also can be used in ways that are not strictly related to the punishment at hand. As the author explains, e-carceration technologies are often deployed with rules attached that make it difficult if not impossible for the detained to find employment or housing, and, as always, they disfavor ethnic minorities and the poor. All of us are subject to these technologies to one degree or another: It’s been estimated that in London, a walker in the inner city will be photographed 200 times by security cameras in a single day. Kilgore observes that this machine surveillance means that police departments, especially in places that are cash-strapped, can offload the costs of personnel. In one case study, he examines the devolution of the police force in Camden, New Jersey, a place overwhelmingly poor and inhabited by people of color. With surveillance technology in place, policing was essentially outsourced, and the machine fed itself. Camden began issuing citations for camera-recorded petty offenses that skyrocketed from 28,000 in 2013 to 125,000 in 2014, citations that “provided opportunities to collect more data on the local population, which could be fed into the array of local and national databases Camden was joining.” The author makes many significant points, though readers must take into account that he himself is a veteran of the penal system, jailed for crimes committed on the part of the Symbionese Liberation Army.
With some substance, but mostly aid and comfort for the defund-the-police movement.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-62097-614-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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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