A well-researched, potent, timely investigation of yet another element of systemic racism.
How the legacy of discrimination still affects opportunities for Black students in the realm of higher education.
Atlantic staff writer Harris, a former reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education, makes his book debut with an illuminating examination of Black students’ access to college, arguing forcefully that integrated colleges have failed Blacks. Even though Black colleges “educate 80 percent of Black judges, 50 percent of Black lawyers and doctors, and 25 percent of Black science, technology, math, and engineering graduates,” they remain severely underfunded. The author traces the history of educational opportunities for Blacks beginning in the 19th century, when two noted institutions were established: Oberlin, in Ohio, and Berea, in Kentucky. Both were determined to offer interracial education, often flouting local laws—and, in Berea’s case, the wrath of slaveholders—to do so. Berea’s original structure was “burned to the ground by slaveholders and their supporters.” After the Civil War, 45 Black colleges opened, but Blacks were barred from attending even public, land-grant colleges. The Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 upheld segregation, allowing states to pass laws making it illegal to educate Blacks and Whites together. Harris recounts lawsuits by students petitioning to attend all-White schools. In 1948, for example, when Ada Lois Sipuel sued to be admitted to the law school at the University of Oklahoma, the Supreme Court ruled that Oklahoma “was required to provide her a legal education.” In response, Oklahoma quickly established a law school at the all-Black Langston University. Later, when the University of Oklahoma grudgingly admitted Black students, it sat them at the back of the classroom or set up railings to separate them from Whites. Harris suggests ways that the government can offer reparations for its history of hampering Blacks’ education—perhaps as “targeted debt cancellation and tuition-free college,” cash transfers to students, or the redistribution of endowments—but discrimination is still widespread, “bending and twisting until it fits within the confines of the system it is given.”
A well-researched, potent, timely investigation of yet another element of systemic racism.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-297648-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
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
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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