These five related essays, originally given as the 1997 BBC Reith Lectures, showcase the subtle thinking of Columbia University law professor Williams (The Rooster’s Egg, 1995). The notion of a “color-blind” society, in which everyone is judged by their performance and behavior, rather than by their racial makeup, is one of the clichÇs of American political discourse, wielded by both right and left. Williams tells her audience at the outset of this slender but immensely suggestive volume that “I embrace color-blindness as a legitimate hope for the future, [but] I worry that we tend to enshrine the notion with a kind of utopianism whose naivetÇ will ensure its elusiveness.” Williams dissects with a scalpel-sharp wit the many layers of paradox at the heart of the American (and English) racial divide. Despite the subtitle, the racial question is not one paradox but a fabric woven of many paradoxes. Among the paradoxes she highlights are the plight of African-Americans poised between two poles—the hypervisibility of being scapegoated and the oblivion of social neglect; the O.J. Simpson case being used as a crude parody of racial dialogue; the strange fact that “whiteness” is never coded as race but treated as normative. Williams readily admits that, unlike most pundits in this overcrowded field, she has no single, simple answer, no checklist of prescriptions, nor does she give credence to the idea of a society in which all is peace and light. Rather, she offers a commonsensical plea for empathy with the Other as the first step toward bridging the gap among white, black, red, yellow and brown. Written with an unerring eye for the thought-provoking and fresh metaphor, and with a skillful blending of personal and professional observation, this is one of the most intelligent commentaries on the vexed subject of race in many years.
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-52533-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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