An astute, provocative survey of toxic assumptions about race and how to effectively challenge them.
How to identify and resist some of the most common and insidious racial prejudices.
“This book is designed for activists,” writes Dibinga, a professor of intercultural communication, and dedicated to “those who want to know not only what lies they were told about Black people but also why those lies were told and why those lies continue to be told.” The author provides a mix of analyses of the lineage of particular racial stereotypes, interviews with those who have endured discrimination, exercises for readers who want to assess their own biases, and even poetry articulating the author’s passionate take on the impact of bigotry and enduring faith in the power of education and love to overcome the evils of irrationality and hatred. One of the greatest strengths of the book is Dibinga’s frank engagement with the everyday expression—and destructive consequences—of racial assumptions. The author accessibly frames the features of contemporary stereotypes via historical precedents, and we never lose sight of the topic’s intimate, urgent relevance to the psychological and physical well-being of Black Americans. Access to health care and fair treatment by the judicial system, for instance, are critically shaped by racial assumptions, and these assumptions are formed, in part, by the media we consume and its overt or covert insinuations about racial being. The author’s discussion of cinematic depictions of race is particularly incisive. Dibinga also provides illuminating commentary on the need for an evolving understanding of what genuine inclusivity would look and sound like. He reminds us that Blackness is a fluid social construct brought into being in relation to other racial categories. With serious, loving care, the author demonstrates, we can do much better in constructing that identity and in seeking a more just and vital social understanding. Michael Eric Dyson provides the foreword.
An astute, provocative survey of toxic assumptions about race and how to effectively challenge them.Pub Date: July 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781633888784
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
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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