A thoughtful, probing look at a national character that is trending ever uglier.
Two Alabaman journalists, one White and one Black, examine the expansion of Southern prejudices into the larger nation.
The Southernization of which journalists Gaillard and Tucker write boils down to racism and White supremacy. This racism has been conservative gospel since at least the Reagan era, when, as one scholar observed, “the views and tools of Southern segregationists had become the official position of the national Republican party.” Chief among those tools are voter-suppression laws to disenfranchise ethnic minorities, and agents of this change include Karl Rove, the master of whispering campaigns that hinted that one Democratic candidate was “a homosexual pedophile”; and the blowhard politico Newt Gingrich, “Donald Trump, but with a higher IQ.” Trump, of course, was an adept follower of Gingrich’s methods: “bitter polarization [and] the combativeness and crude insults that characterize Republican political rhetoric and the tactics of obstruction, including stand-offs over paying the nation’s debts.” However, Gaillard and Tucker show that the true model for Trump was George Wallace, who eschewed Richard Nixon’s “veiled racism” for the real deal, carrying his message of ethnic division and hatred to audiences at rallies across the country, their attendees almost exclusively White blue-collar workers disaffected by the civil rights and anti-war movements. There is another South, of course, and while Trump’s “bigotry, mendacity and sheer incompetence upended a campaign he had expected to be a cakewalk to victory” in 2020, his defeat was caused in part by votes against him in Georgia, Virginia, and the region’s blue urban cores. The struggle will continue, the authors suggest, and likely to bad ends. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. This was Dr. King’s affirmation at the end of the Selma to Montgomery March,” they write. “We are not still sure if we should believe him.”
A thoughtful, probing look at a national character that is trending ever uglier.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-58838-456-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: NewSouth
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.
A deeply informed critique of the malicious initiatives currently using gender as a political tool to arouse fear and strengthen political and religious institutions.
In their latest book, following The Force of Nonviolence, Butler, the noted philosopher and gender studies scholar, documents and debunks the anti-gender ideology of the right, the core principle of which is that male and female are natural categories whose recognition is essential for the survival of the family, nations, and patriarchal order. Its proponents reject “sex” as a malleable category infused with prior political and cultural understandings. By turning gender into a “phantasmatic scene,” they enable those in positions of authority to deflect attention from such world-destroying forces as war, predatory capitalism, and climate change. Butler explores the ideology’s presence in the U.S., the U.K., Uganda, and Hungary, countries where legislation has limited the rights of trans and homosexual people and denied them their sexual identity. The author also delves into the ideology’s roots among Evangelicals and the Catholic Church and such political leaders as Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán. Butler is particularly bothered by trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who treat trans women as “male predators in disguise.” For the author, “the gap between the perceived or lived body and prevailing social norms can never be fully closed.” They imagine “a world where the many relations to being socially embodied that exist become more livable” and calls for alliances across differences and “a radical democracy informed by socialist values.” Butler compensates for the thinness of some of their recommendations with an astute dissection of the ideology’s core ideas and impressive grasp of its intellectual pretensions. This is a wonderfully thoughtful and impassioned book on a critically important centerpiece of contemporary authoritarianism and patriarchy.
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780374608224
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
The choir is sure to enjoy this impassioned preaching on familiar progressive themes.
Essays on current political topics by a high-profile actor and activist.
Milano explains in an introduction that she began writing this uneven collection while dealing with a severe case of Covid-19 and suffering from "persistent brain fog.” In the first essay, "On Being Unapologetically Fucked Up,” the author begins by fuming over a February 2019 incident in which she compared MAGA caps worn by high school kids to KKK hoods. She then runs through a grab bag of flash-point news items (police shootings, border crimes, sexual predators in government), deploying the F-bomb with abandon and concluding, "What I know is that fucked up is as fundamental a state of the world as night and day. But I know there is better. I know that ‘less fucked up’ is a state we can live in.” The second essay, "Believe Women," discusses Milano’s seminal role in the MeToo movement; unfortunately, it is similarly conversational in tone and predictable in content. One of the few truly personal essays, "David," about the author's marriage, refutes the old saw about love meaning never having to say you're sorry, replacing it with "Love means you can suggest a national sex strike and your husband doesn't run away screaming." Milano assumes, perhaps rightly, that her audience is composed of followers and fans; perhaps these readers will know what she is talking about in the seemingly allegorical "By Any Other Name," about her bad experience with a certain rosebush. "Holy shit, giving birth sucked," begins one essay. "Words are weird, right?" begins the next. "Welp, this is going to piss some of you off. Hang in there," opens a screed about cancel culture—though she’s entirely correct that “it’s childish, divisive, conceited, and Trumpian to its core.” By the end, however, Milano's intelligence, compassion, integrity, and endurance somewhat compensate for her lack of literary polish.
The choir is sure to enjoy this impassioned preaching on familiar progressive themes.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18329-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
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