A well-researched analysis of what white identity means from an academic’s point of view.
A data-based examination focuses on what defines white identity and how it shapes political beliefs.
In this debut sociology book, Jardina takes a scholarly look at the evolution of white identity and white consciousness in the United States, drawing on several national surveys as well as an existing body of research. After a review of current literature on racial identity theory, the author takes readers through a statistical analysis that measures the correlation between people’s identification with whiteness and how they understand its role in their lives. She also offers a number of potentially related views and beliefs, like opinions about Social Security, welfare, and Medicare; real and perceived economic status; and the changing status of whites. Jardina finds little evidence of a connection between economic status and white identity but a “powerful and robust” link between white identity and negative attitudes toward immigration. The book concludes that while previous studies have looked at whiteness as a response to other ethnic groups, it is more effective to assess whites’ attitudes toward their own community—in-group rather than out-group relations, in sociology terms. While the volume’s many figures and paragraphs of statistical analysis can make for dry reading—though excerpts from responses to the surveys’ open-ended questions do provide some anecdotal leavening—Jardina’s prose is strong when she begins to draw conclusions from her data: “Put bluntly, the politics of white identity is marked by an insidious illusion, one in which whites claim their group experiences discrimination in an effort to reinforce and maintain a system of racial inequality where whites are the dominant group with the lion’s share of power and privileges.” The work’s narrative structure will be more appealing to the specialist or researcher than to casual readers. But for its intended audience, the volume is an admirable success, with coherent arguments (many continued in the detailed endnotes), a clearly explained research process, and a new outlook that may encourage readers to approach questions of white identity from a more useful perspective.
A well-researched analysis of what white identity means from an academic’s point of view.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-108-47552-5
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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