In this English-language edition of her first book, an immigrant, LA–based reporter tells the intimate stories of the young people who, by no choice of their own, live without legal status in the United States.
With both political parties posturing on the issue of immigration reform and with the consequences of the president’s controversial executive action still unfolding, Truax’s subject could hardly be timelier. And it’s impossible not to sympathize with the subgroup of the estimated 11 million illegals living in America she profiles here: young people boldly declaring their undocumented status, bringing dangerous attention to their precarious lives, and organizing to encourage passage of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act. Truax showcases the personal histories of the Dreamers living under the constant threat of deportation and denied access to educational opportunities, housing, permits, licenses and career paths many take for granted. Here, they “speak for themselves,” relating tales of fear, frustration, courage, achievement and assertiveness: the Vietnamese honor student; the Mexican high schooler teaching English to her neighbors; the Texas student leader setting up a Dream Alliance chapter. Having covered this story for years and earned their trust, Truax introduces us to the places Dreamers go for support—the Food Closet at UCLA, El Hormiguero in the San Fernando Valley—to the political actions and to training sessions held in various states, to activists and politicians sympathetic to the cause—Gov. Jerry Brown, California state representative Gil Cedillo, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin—and even to some immigration opponents such as Maricopa County’s notorious Sheriff Joe Arpaio. There is, of course, a serious economic, legal, even moral argument against immigration on the Dreamers’ terms. But Truax focuses solely on the struggle and challenges they face today, and she does so in a way that leaves a mark on any reader with a conscience.
A forthright, moving piece of advocacy journalism.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8070-3033-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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Not an easy read but an essential one.
18
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Title notwithstanding, this latest from the National Book Award–winning author is no guidebook to getting woke.
In fact, the word “woke” appears nowhere within its pages. Rather, it is a combination memoir and extension of Atlantic columnist Kendi’s towering Stamped From the Beginning (2016) that leads readers through a taxonomy of racist thought to anti-racist action. Never wavering from the thesis introduced in his previous book, that “racism is a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity and are substantiated by racist ideas,” the author posits a seemingly simple binary: “Antiracism is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas.” The author, founding director of American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, chronicles how he grew from a childhood steeped in black liberation Christianity to his doctoral studies, identifying and dispelling the layers of racist thought under which he had operated. “Internalized racism,” he writes, “is the real Black on Black Crime.” Kendi methodically examines racism through numerous lenses: power, biology, ethnicity, body, culture, and so forth, all the way to the intersectional constructs of gender racism and queer racism (the only section of the book that feels rushed). Each chapter examines one facet of racism, the authorial camera alternately zooming in on an episode from Kendi’s life that exemplifies it—e.g., as a teen, he wore light-colored contact lenses, wanting “to be Black but…not…to look Black”—and then panning to the history that informs it (the antebellum hierarchy that valued light skin over dark). The author then reframes those received ideas with inexorable logic: “Either racist policy or Black inferiority explains why White people are wealthier, healthier, and more powerful than Black people today.” If Kendi is justifiably hard on America, he’s just as hard on himself. When he began college, “anti-Black racist ideas covered my freshman eyes like my orange contacts.” This unsparing honesty helps readers, both white and people of color, navigate this difficult intellectual territory.
Not an easy read but an essential one.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-50928-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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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
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