This formidable collection of essays offers a profound alternative vision for a more equitable future.
A professor emeritus reimagines Western notions of race, crime, and justice in this volume of essays.
Not only has America failed to adequately say “I am sorry” to the “descendants of Africa’s Eve,” writes Pettiway, it has also “never said, ‘Thank you,’ ” to the African American writers, artists, thinkers, and “ordinary people who worked with little recognition but who deserve great praise.” This prologue, which simultaneously challenges America’s self-perception and celebrates the lives of Black men and women, sets the tone for the poignant collection of 11 essays. Divided into four parts, the book begins with an analysis of “The Preliminaries,” highlighting the failures of American institutions to protect Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and others, and emphasizing that the current paradigm of crime and justice as well as its historical foundation in white supremacy “ain’t workin’.” The volume’s second part consists of four essays that reflect on race and include an astute analysis of what Pettiway calls “white juju,” which refuses to interrogate Eurocentric worldviews, and condemns, rejects, and refuses to understand those who do “not wish to participate in a cultural universe that satisfies, and is driven by, white values.” Essays in the work’s third part employ an extended metaphor on Alice in Wonderlandto explore issues of crime, and the book’s final section urges a reconceptualization of justice that rejects a preoccupation with retribution. Pettiway is a professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University, and his research draws on his academic pedigree, boasting a 25-page bibliography and almost 500 endnotes. Yet the strength of this volume lies not in its impressive scholarly underpinnings, but rather in the author’s humane, honest, and piercing writing style. As one of the only fully ordained Buddhist monks in the Gelug tradition and as founder of a monastery in Indianapolis, Pettiway blends his astute understanding of criminal justice and sociological theory with a Dharmic spirituality and a philosophical embrace of radical definitions of love, justice, and liberation.
This formidable collection of essays offers a profound alternative vision for a more equitable future.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9798989182008
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Meishin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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