A well-researched case promoting the value of antiracist education.
Hagopian, a veteran educator, outlines the assault on antiracist curricula in this nonfiction work.
Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, James Whitfield—the first Black principal to serve at Texas’ Colleyville Heritage High School—penned a thoughtful email criticizing systemic racism and calling for his community to unite against ignorance and hate. While the message was embraced by many, it drew the ire of a local, unsuccessful candidate for the school board, who then launched a campaign that painted Whitfield as a left-wing radical hellbent on indoctrinating students. The campaign worked, and Whitfield would shortly thereafter be suspended, and later let go, from his position. This book highlights the stories of educators like Whitfield, who bravely defy pressure to remain quiet on issues of racism, while surveying state and national efforts to censor educators attempting to teach Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ histories endorsed by a consensus within the scholarly community. These “truthcrime” laws, a term coined by the author, ban “divisive concepts” and other vague categories that target marginalized histories. Promotors of “uncritical race theory,” per Hagopian, emphasize historical and contemporary narratives that deemphasize racism “as only sporadic and merely the product of individual bias” as they reject institutional analyses that point to systemic power imbalances. The author provides a compelling account of how a politically and economically powerful minority have been able to enact book bans and curriculum censorship. He also celebrates individual educators like Whitfield who have stood up for antiracist educational practices despite public bullying campaigns against them. In so doing, the author highlights strategies other educators can use in “truth teaching,” such as encouraging critical thinking skills that prompt students to view sources from a myriad of perspectives. An educator with more than two decades of experience in public schools, Hagopian is the editor or co-editor of multiple books on education and social justice. The text’s inspirational anecdotes spotlighting teachers who have defied public pressure to teach antiracist lessons are undergirded by the author’s solid foundation in pedagogical best practices and supported by more than 500 research endnotes.
A well-researched case promoting the value of antiracist education.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9798888902950
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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