More of a call to reason than a call to arms, the book offers hope in the face of great challenges.
A multicultural, interdisciplinary overview of activism as a means to an end.
As a social ethicist and Unitarian minister, Welch (Communities of Resistance and Solidarity: A Feminist Theology of Liberation, 2017, etc.) balances idealism and pragmatism, arguing that “we can be morally pure but strategically inept, and when that happens we lose.” Through surveys of literature, personal experience, and profiles of those on the front lines, she makes a case for “visionary pragmatism” as “an alternative to utopian thinking or cynicism and despair.” She finds kindred spirits where others see resistance or compromise: socially responsible corporations, socially engaged academics, a movement dubbed “Solutions Journalism” (which some would consider crossing the line from observer to participant), and Barack Obama, disparaged by some activists as too moderate but praised here for “one of the ongoing legacies of the Obama presidency—a catalytic form of civic engagement—not utopian but committed to the creation of microtopias that bear the seeds of ongoing critique and engagement.” The author’s approach stresses progress and process rather than pie-in-the-sky goals that see protests dissipate when they are unrealized. She allows that there are many different approaches that can be employed to achieve similar ends and that any sign of progress might well intensify resistance (Obama followed by Trump). Throughout, Welch draws from a tale told within the Potawatomi Nation of the “Windigo, a person driven by greediness with a heart as cold as ice, only focused on his or her own needs.” She urges white activists to recognize the Windigo within, to see how its spirit within the nation has exploited others, and to strive for an inclusive society that reflects and serves our better natures: “Helping people to create organizational structures and policies that identify and check such implicit biases or prejudices is essential in our work of creating a society and economic system that truly embodies our values.”
More of a call to reason than a call to arms, the book offers hope in the face of great challenges.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4798-5790-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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