A well-researched case promoting the value of antiracist education.
Hagopian, a veteran educator, outlines the assault on antiracist curricula in this nonfiction work.
Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, James Whitfield—the first Black principal to serve at Texas’ Colleyville Heritage High School—penned a thoughtful email criticizing systemic racism and calling for his community to unite against ignorance and hate. While the message was embraced by many, it drew the ire of a local, unsuccessful candidate for the school board, who then launched a campaign that painted Whitfield as a left-wing radical hellbent on indoctrinating students. The campaign worked, and Whitfield would shortly thereafter be suspended, and later let go, from his position. This book highlights the stories of educators like Whitfield, who bravely defy pressure to remain quiet on issues of racism, while surveying state and national efforts to censor educators attempting to teach Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ histories endorsed by a consensus within the scholarly community. These “truthcrime” laws, a term coined by the author, ban “divisive concepts” and other vague categories that target marginalized histories. Promotors of “uncritical race theory,” per Hagopian, emphasize historical and contemporary narratives that deemphasize racism “as only sporadic and merely the product of individual bias” as they reject institutional analyses that point to systemic power imbalances. The author provides a compelling account of how a politically and economically powerful minority have been able to enact book bans and curriculum censorship. He also celebrates individual educators like Whitfield who have stood up for antiracist educational practices despite public bullying campaigns against them. In so doing, the author highlights strategies other educators can use in “truth teaching,” such as encouraging critical thinking skills that prompt students to view sources from a myriad of perspectives. An educator with more than two decades of experience in public schools, Hagopian is the editor or co-editor of multiple books on education and social justice. The text’s inspirational anecdotes spotlighting teachers who have defied public pressure to teach antiracist lessons are undergirded by the author’s solid foundation in pedagogical best practices and supported by more than 500 research endnotes.
A well-researched case promoting the value of antiracist education.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9798888902950
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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