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THE ECONOMIC CASE FOR LGBT EQUALITY

Name: THE ECONOMIC CASE FOR LGBT EQUALITY
Author: M.V. Lee Badgett
ISBN: 978-0-8070-3560-3

WHY FAIR AND EQUAL TREATMENT BENEFITS US ALL

by M.V. Lee Badgett ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 19, 2020

Both a convincing discussion and a call to reformative action for LGBT equality across economic sectors of the world.

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A treatise on how restricting LGBT rights negatively impacts global economies.

In the latest entry in the publisher’s Queer Action/Queer Ideas series, economics professor Badgett presents a persuasive case for LGBT rights within financial arenas and how those promote broader liberties. Drawing from a wealth of research studies, the author scrutinizes the tangible losses from unfair discriminatory practices. Her argument centers around the conviction that LGBT inclusion and unilateral equality are critical to the long-term prosperity of businesses and the economy. While LGBT discrimination erodes community morale incrementally over time, the same is true “from an economic perspective”—eventually, “it adds up.” Examining education, employment, and health care, for example, Badgett clearly outlines the tremendous humanitarian benefits of workplace equality, anti-bullying school regulations, and other initiatives that pave the way to greater economic growth, improved employee retention and productivity, diversified workforces, and a healthier populace. She describes how these ideas are already gaining momentum around the world, with global brands proudly aligning with their LGBT employees with respect to fairness practices and tolerance regulations. The author is at her analytical best in her discussions of the toll inequality takes on commerce. She shows how exclusionary practices rob businesses of vital personnel and damage reputations, citing World Bank studies, interviews, and personal anecdotes from local sources alongside countries like Canada, India, South Africa, and the Philippines. In the final chapter, Badgett offers logical action items for business leaders and prospective activists as well as for readers already involved in social reform advocacy. Though the opinions and language of economists and human rights advocates may differ, the base-line goals are inclusion and equality for the LGBT community. The author’s concise, sound arguments demonstrate why it is necessary to “expand freedom and equality” across the globe.

Both a convincing discussion and a call to reformative action for LGBT equality across economic sectors of the world.

Pub Date: May 19, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-8070-3560-3

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Beacon Press

Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

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THE MESSAGE

by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2024

A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.

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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.