A concise, powerful reflection on the 50th anniversary of the landmark case.
A sobering look at the centrality of whiteness to the nation’s founding and growth, both before and after Loving v. Virginia, the significant 1967 Supreme Court case.
Cashin (Law/Georgetown Univ.; Place, Not Race: A New Vision of Opportunity in America, 2014, etc.) walks readers through the history of interracial marriage in the United States—i.e., the long legal restrictions to it until the court case of Richard and Mildred Loving challenged enduring strictures of white supremacy in the wake of civil rights legislature in the 1960s. In striking down Virginia’s long ban on interracial marriage, Chief Justice Earl Warren specifically cited the ban as “designed to maintain White Supremacy,” enforced by strict racial separation. In the first part of the book, “Before Loving, 1607-1939,” Cashin looks at early examples of “amalgamation,” such as John Rolfe’s marriage to Pocahontas, rationalized as a “patriotic, even sacrificial act for the good of the [Jamestown] colony.” In addition, bonding between indentured servants and African slaves began to threaten the planter class, and new restrictions on interracial sex passed in Virginia—e.g., a mandate that children fathered by Englishmen with a black woman take the mother’s status—became the model code in other states. Slavery henceforth “helped propagate supremacist thinking,” and slave-owning Founding Fathers were fraught by mind-bending contradictions about “black inferiority” while engaging in sexual relationships with black slaves—e.g., Thomas Jefferson. After Cashin chronicles the Loving case, she delineates the vast cultural changes that have occurred over the last decades in rendering people—young people, mixed-race couples, progressives—more “dexterous” in their navigation of interracial trust and resisting arguments of white supremacy. Moreover, she notes how the Loving case inspired the fight to legalize same-sex marriage. Finally, Cashin looks beyond the current “state of toxic polarity” and speculates on what propels and nourishes interracial intimacy and inclusion.
A concise, powerful reflection on the 50th anniversary of the landmark case.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8070-5827-5
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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