A provocative examination of social constructs and those who would alternately undo or improve them.
An excursus in the realm of the normal and normative and how we define them.
Covid-19, Donald Trump, cyberwarfare: All these are signs that things are not “normal.” But what does normality constitute? Norms, writes Harvard Law School professor Sunstein, are generally if sometimes loosely agreed upon guidelines that govern our behavior. We agree, by consensus and often by law, that one should not smoke in church or call 911 to report a leaking spigot. But what happens when a norm iconoclast comes into the picture? Among other things, the elevation of Trump to national power “weakened the social norm against supporting anti-immigrant groups,” and it freed many Americans to spout the vilest of sentiments. “When norms begin to loosen, people start to say what they actually think,” Sunstein adds, and what they think can be quite awful. Norms can be positively constructed, though. The author notes that the arrival of the pandemic has put new practices in place that forgo handshaking and promote hand-washing instead. Authoritarians can be what Sunstein calls “norm entrepreneurs,” but then again, so can the democratically minded, leading to the common situation where one person’s norm is another person’s form of oppression. Sunstein takes a long look at institutions that are meant to uphold democratic norms. In an especially inspired moment, he rejects Winston Churchill’s notion that democracy is the worst form of government save for all the others and instead upholds it at least in part because the citizenry establishes normative behavior. By virtue of that fact, norms can come and go for better (civil rights for all) or worse (cancel culture), leading Sunstein to conclude, “An appreciation of the paradox—the simultaneous power and fragility of the normal—attests to one fact above all: human beings are astonishingly resilient.”
A provocative examination of social constructs and those who would alternately undo or improve them.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-300-25350-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
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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