A delightfully sardonic and sharp, if fragmented, commentary on race in the Trump era.
A Black scholar offers ruminations on race, language, and Donald Trump.
As indicated by its provocative title, this book refuses to pull any punches about race. In an eclectic mix of philosophy, social theory, history, and memoir, Abydos covers topics that range from Trump to the court petitions of enslaved Black men and women. With an expertise in the intersection of race and philosophy that leans heavily on the rhizoanalysis of the post-structural French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the author challenges readers through her “parodied” description of Trump as “our first nigger-president.” While explicitly acknowledging the epithet “must…be rejected and denounced,” she deploys it against a president whose ascension was built on White grievance politics. Abydos notes that while Whites are shielded from the racist term ever being used against them, which has provided them “a quixotic sense of hope and security…that they could never be as low as that,” Trump’s basest personal characteristics ironically match historical descriptions of the infamous term. As stated in the text, “Nigger is without principles.…Nigger is corrupt….Nigger is deplorable…,Nigger is unfit.” Throughout the book, the author also stylizes the word white with a strikethrough to show that “it is a social construct that functions as an identifier by a particular group.” Though at times the volume’s sometimes-incongruent themes make for a disjointed read, each chapter is remarkably consistent in its blend of scholarship and biting social commentary. Chapter topics include an analysis of how language itself upholds structural racism, a defense of former President Barack Obama, the history of a grotesque racist poem recycled for two decades by newspapers, and vignettes from the author’s life as a Black woman from Cleveland. The work’s references demonstrate a firm command of a diverse range of relevant, interdisciplinary scholarship and theory. While sometimes using jargon that may alienate a general audience, the author’s subversive and direct writing style will surely find readers far beyond academia. Admirably, Abydos is comfortable quoting a wide range of figures, including the rappers Cardi B and Rick Ross as well as the authors Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin.
A delightfully sardonic and sharp, if fragmented, commentary on race in the Trump era. (afterword, endnotes)Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-578-76888-5
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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