A pointed reminder that good intentions aren’t enough to break the cycle of racism.
The author of White Fragility suggests that with friends like White progressives, people of color need no other enemies.
In opening, DiAngelo recalls a Black friend who, for various reasons, was finding it uncomfortable to address White audiences. Observing her and the group before her, “I saw a metaphor for colonialism.” A Black person was doing the hard work of interpreting racism, and a White audience was receiving her insights without breaking a sweat themselves. DiAngelo makes very good points simply in noting how difficult White people—especially those who consider themselves progressive and who bill themselves as colorblind and open to friendships across the racial divide—find it to actually hear about the issue of racism. That issue is central, because “our identities are not separate from the white supremacist society in which we are raised.” In that regard, merely maintaining that he or she is “nice,” well-intended, and open-minded does little good. DiAngelo writes that her aim is not to explain Black people to White audiences but instead to “teach white people about ourselves in relation to Black and other people of color.” One way to engage is to become an active learner with an eye not simply to nonracism but to anti-racism, to recognize that there really is such a thing as White privilege, and to build “authentic cross-racial relationships.” The author provides enough proscriptions that a reader might feel as if a minefield of potential faux pas lies between good intention and meaningful action. But that’s just the point, and she’s certainly willing to own the assumptions and mores of her progressive kin. “As white people,” she writes, “we tend to focus on the personal impact of receiving feedback on our racism without acknowledging the cost to BIPOC people for giving us this feedback.” Altogether, it’s a valuable primer to be read alongside the work of other anti-racist activists such as Ibram X. Kendi and Johnnetta Cole.
A pointed reminder that good intentions aren’t enough to break the cycle of racism.Pub Date: June 29, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8070-7412-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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BOOK REVIEW
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