Sometimes contrarian, sometimes controversial, Kennedy’s arguments merit consideration in a riven discourse.
A collection of essays on Black politics and history by a noted legal scholar.
Early on, Harvard Law School professor Kennedy observes that “social relations are complex and messy.” This is true, and people are complex and messy as well. One of Kennedy’s subjects, for example, is Frederick Douglass, who transformed himself from “racial pessimist” to “the most remarkable racial optimist in American history,” having first viewed the Constitution as a thinly disguised instrument of slavery and then taken the view that, under the influence of William Lloyd Garrison, the document was actually anti-slavery in nature, at least in part. Language changes, too. Having lived through several eras, Kennedy calls himself a “Black/Negro/Colored/African American” man born in the year of Brown v. Board of Education. In an essay that is certain to raise consternation among some readers, Kennedy defends the use of the N-word “for pedagogical purposes,” writing, “I am simply unwilling to defer to arbiters of opinion who, armed with superficial knowledge, rigidly insist that this or that term is correct or incorrect in the face of a rich and complicated historical record that reveals a wide pattern of usages.” He adds that a lawyer distracted by the ugly language of the N-word or similar racial slurs “is a lawyer with a gaping vulnerability.” Other pieces that are less likely to invite debate concern the role of policing in Black neighborhoods. In Kennedy's view, the problem is less the police per se than “poorly regulated police” whose role is to threaten and control more than to protect and serve. Some of the pieces are of a historical survey nature: telling readers who Elijah Muhammad was, reviewing the runaway slave law of the pre–Civil War era, and so forth. They are less memorable than the author’s denunciations of “antiracism gone awry” and small-step racial justice laws that “are attentive to the pluralism that infuses American practices.”
Sometimes contrarian, sometimes controversial, Kennedy’s arguments merit consideration in a riven discourse.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-31604-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
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
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