An uncompromising yet accessible rejoinder to conventional wisdom about race and violence in the U.S.
A sharp alternative history of Black responses to white supremacy.
Jackson, a professor of Africana studies and author of Force and Freedom, fuses solid research with an urgent authorial voice, bringing a fresh perspective to the haunted history of American race relations. “This entire book consists of examples of Black people refusing lies, violence, theft, mockery, or second-class citizenship,” she writes. “It shows how our refusal denies whiteness and white supremacy their power and unearned authority.” In five thematically interlaced chapters, Jackson encourages readers “to think outside the binary of violence and nonviolence.” She argues that self-defense must be understood along the spectrum of resistance, including force, communal protection, and refuge in rituals of flight and joy. She examines the simmering of liberationist thought, exemplified by the Haitian revolution’s aftermath and the abolitionist era. “The late 1850s were precarious times,” she writes. “Black and white leaders sensed a breaking point regarding the institution of slavery in America.” The author also explores “the powerful relationship between Black women and force in the face of anti-Black violence,” unearthing startling stories of self-defense against the backdrop of horrific flashpoints—e.g., during the “Red Summer” of 1919 and the 1957 Little Rock integration crisis. By the late 1950s, writes the author, “the overall mood of Black Americans across the South was that white violence had to be met with force.” Jackson astutely examines the temptations of migration or flight, “a constant refrain or remedy in African American history” because “leaving is a form of refusal...something Black people have done in response to white supremacy for centuries.” This taut and fiery discussion focuses on historical research (with occasional repetition) and transformative figures (often little known) along with hard-won insight from Jackson’s personal experiences.
An uncompromising yet accessible rejoinder to conventional wisdom about race and violence in the U.S.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781541602908
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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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