Required reading for education reformers seeking to broaden community connections and benefit minority constituencies.
An urban university strikes a determined path to improve the academic performance and graduation rates of minority students—and does much more in the bargain.
Georgia State University is scattered across several campuses in Atlanta, long a choice of black and Latino students who lacked the means to go to schools farther from home. It barely ranked among institutions of higher learning until, during the last financial crisis, the university’s president made it a priority to improve conditions, thereby earning what journalist Gumbel calls “a national reputation for its pioneering work in retaining large numbers of students.” One example is a young man who, though “poor, black, and struggling to make it as the first in their family to attend college,” earned a degree in computer science. GSU initiated reforms along several lines, including enhanced financial aid even in a time when an increasingly conservative legislature was reducing educational funding. The administration also took an activist position in identifying parts of the culture of higher education that automatically assumed that minority students would not succeed. In the process, the GSU administration not only recruited more minority students than ever before; they also saw them graduate in higher numbers than the national average. Money was part of the equation; so was raising the number of student advisers substantially and changing certain pedagogical methods. “Committed leadership is of course essential,” writes Gumbel of such transformations as the one evidenced by GSU. But it’s not enough: The faculty must be invested in the change, and university representatives impressed upon Georgians, including legislators, the thought that adding college graduates to the urban mix by way of cost-effective educational programs would improve the economy, offering “a solid return on investment and moral justice, economic growth and social mobility.” Drawing on extensive on-the-ground reporting, Gumbel offers a richly detailed narrative of how such changes are effected.
Required reading for education reformers seeking to broaden community connections and benefit minority constituencies.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-62097-470-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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