A well-researched, pragmatic guide to anti-racist policies in an organizational context.
Two experts on racial equity provide practical materials and advice for organizations at all stages of DEI work.
Curry-Stevens and Baksh, who teach social work at Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University, offer a guidebook on how to “hardwire equity into organizational policies, procedures, and practices.” It’s intended for municipal governments, nonprofits, and private-sector businesses that are “committed to making progress to building anti-racism.” The authors emphasize promoting a culture of inclusion that goes beyond the superficial appearance of diversity work; they note, for instance, that more “palatable” terms for “anti-racism” can be useful in advancing such goals: “Naming racism is an important part of the work, but it can be sidestepped in favor of the term ‘racial equity’ if naming racism is particularly provocative for staff.” Their data-driven solutions effectively point to the intrinsic and financial value of racial equity—from organizational composition to contracting and allocation practices—and they back their assertions with more than 400 scholarly endnotes. However, although this anti-racist guidebook may work well in a Canadian context, its applicability to American audiences may be limited by the current presidential administration’s active hostility to DEI work; the book lacks, for example, practical advice on how a vested organization might navigate interference by a hostile federal government. Still, the authors provide an ample assortment of surveys, worksheets, and other practical tools that can be used in organizational workshops and small groups. Most importantly, both the book’s narrative advice and its functional tools and worksheets will be useful for organizations at all levels of diversity work, from early to late stages. Curry-Stevens and Baksh emphasize that “planning often does not work in such a straightforward, linear way,” and the materials need not be employed in a preset chronological order; this adaptability makes it an ideal reference tool. The authors’ accessible writing style defines any jargon and is accompanied by helpful charts, diagrams, and other visual elements.
A well-researched, pragmatic guide to anti-racist policies in an organizational context.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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