No one who reads this will doubt that the Second Amendment has particularly deadly dimensions in minority communities.
A professor of sociology and government offers a study of gun laws and their racial implications in three states.
Though sometimes overly academic, Carlson’s account points to an important social problem: The Second Amendment right to carry a firearm is unequally applied to members of different ethnic groups. In particular, African Americans, such as Philando Castile, may be authorized to carry concealed weapons, but that fact did not keep a white police officer from gunning him down at a traffic stop. “The proliferation of guns,” writes the author, “disproportionately harms African Americans who are feloniously killed, injured, and traumatized by them at rates that exceed manyfold those of other racial groups in the United States”—and that especially includes state harassment, usually by police. Carlson demonstrates in an argument that centers on Arizona, California, and Michigan that police officers and leaders tend to support gun rights, and far more so than the public; in particular, they oppose widespread bans. This seems a curious stance given that an armed society is certainly more lethal than an unarmed one, “but police nevertheless appear willing to live with the consequences of a widely armed society.” This is generally as true in “gun-restrictive” California as it is in “gun-lax” Arizona. In the West, Carlson ventures, a tradition of law enforcement being used in the service of ethnic oppression—mostly of Hispanics and Native Americans—has translated into oppression of all minorities. This has not lessened in the least with the arrival of Donald Trump, since he “represented the populist stitching together of hard-knuckled policing with gun rights patriotism,” earning the support of the Fraternal Order of Police and the National Rifle Association. Ultimately, Carlson writes, “structural racism intersects with gun policy to aggravate, rather than ameliorate, vulnerabilities facing communities of color.”
No one who reads this will doubt that the Second Amendment has particularly deadly dimensions in minority communities.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-691-18385-5
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
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
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