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THE POLITICS OF RACIAL BETRAYAL

A timely and provocative read on power, politics and the racially charged landscape of the 2008 presidential election.

A scholarly yet accessible examination of racial loyalty and betrayal in the African-American community from a distinguished legal historian.

Kennedy (Harvard Law School; Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption, 2003, etc.) opens this energetic volume with a probing analysis of the ways in which Senator Barack Obama has been challenged to prove his blackness as he campaigns for the presidency. The son of a white mother and a Kenyan father, Obama, the author notes, has received a cool reception from black cultural gatekeepers who question his race credentials because he grew up in Hawaii and is not, in their view, a bona fide soul brother. Kennedy also cites Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Vernon Jordan as figures whose political and economic clout has rendered them suspect among the blacks and earned them the damning epithet “sellout.” The author traces concerns about race betrayal to slavery, when slaves helped thwart rebellions by alerting white plantation owners. He details the infamous case of South Carolina slave Denmark Vesey, whose planned 1822 insurrection was revealed to local whites by another slave, Peter Prioleau. In return for this information, white legislators freed Prioleau from bondage and rewarded him with a stipend that he used to purchase his own slaves. Vesey was hanged. Kennedy notes that African-Americans who’ve succeeded in the white world since the civil-rights era are increasingly compelled to pass a black litmus test. They are scrutinized by blacks, and some whites, on style of dress, speech patterns, choice of mate and allegiance (or not) to traditional black values as indicators of their racial authenticity. He devotes a riveting chapter to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In a discussion of Thomas’s jurisprudence in several controversial court decisions, Kennedy notes that the “most vilified black official in the history of the United States” has proven himself less the “quintessential sellout” than his critics have feared.

A timely and provocative read on power, politics and the racially charged landscape of the 2008 presidential election.

Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-375-42543-1

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE

The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...

A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.

Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.

The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017

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