Authoritative, illuminating and accessible.
This provocative study of minority-vote suppression successfully links blatant Reconstruction-era tactics and regulations with modern-day voting in America.
Activist Piven (Political Science and Sociology/CUNY; Challenging Authority, 2006, etc.), along with co-authors Minnite (Political Science/Barnard Coll.) and Groarke (Government/Manhattan Coll.), argues that decentralized electoral rules and regulations were originally designed to limit the African-American vote in the South, in response to the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which enfranchised all freed black men. Tactics employed in the 19th century included literacy tests, poll taxes, violence and intimidation; the ultimate discretion to disqualify voters was ceded to registrars. The authors note that the American personal-registration system puts the burden of registration on the voter rather than on the government, unlike many European democracies. The U.S. electoral system further allows certification to be periodic, permitting local election officials to sporadically purge voters. The book kicks into high gear when the authors describe, in riveting detail, the fevered techniques employed to suppress the black vote in important 1960s mayoral elections in Gary, Chicago and Cleveland, where the African-American electorate had surged due to migration. Qualified black voters were purged from registration rolls, ghost voters were added in white precincts and a campaign of disinformation prevailed, impeding new registrations of poor minorities. All three African-American candidates won anyway, but another goal was to mobilize the white vote by playing to racist fears using ugly stereotypes. The authors posit that these fears stem from demographic realities as America’s composition becomes more diverse, and that the Republican Party has become the champion for delaying the inevitable devolution of white power by focusing on close elections. The most compelling section is the informed analysis of how aggressive tactics, such as targeted misinformation campaigns and the challenging of black voters at polling places, were used to secure a Republican victory “by 537 votes” in the Florida 2000 election, where “nearly 180,000 ballots were cast but not counted…more than half of these by blacks, who make up only 12 percent of the state’s population.”
Authoritative, illuminating and accessible.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59558-354-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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