A notable contribution to debates about policing and prosecution bias.
Impassioned account of grassroots responses to mass incarceration.
In her debut book, Brooklyn Law School professor Simonson builds on her study of community bail fund networks, one facet of the evolving response to selectively punitive law enforcement in marginalized communities. “As a public defender in the Bronx,” she writes, “I fought for five years against a system that I believed was profoundly immoral.” The author tracks several responses to the segregationist excesses of policing and incarceration in multiple locales. She focuses on intervention strategies of bail funds, court-watching, participatory defense, and alternative budgeting (often simplified as “Defunding the police”), all set against a larger interrogation of what really constitutes community “safety” and whether the state speaks for “the people.” Throughout the text, Simonson provides valuable historical context. “For hundreds of years,” she writes, “people have gathered together to free people from the violence of the state,” but the movement “has grown exponentially since 2014, both in geographical reach and in public engagement.” She narrates how entities like the Philadelphia Bail Fund coalesced out of necessity to counter “the intractable hold of the criminal court system on their neighbors and communities” and tracks how they have grown into “permanent, sustainable organizations.” By 2018, the author notes, the umbrella National Bail Fund Network encompassed 33. The court-watching movement has also become increasingly visible, represented by outreach organizations from Baton Rouge to New York City. Both religious and secular activists view courtroom procedure as often plagued by racist policies, and state economies are “seemingly dependent on the carceral state.” Similar autonomy is promoted by “Participatory Defense,” a looser approach to community-based investigation in which “people are regaining control over their own narratives in court.” Simonson is attuned to the challenges faced by marginalized communities, and her writing is deft and well informed. The discussion elides some complexities related to victims’ rights and the realities of street violence, which may lead to conservative-leaning readers remaining unconvinced.
A notable contribution to debates about policing and prosecution bias.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781620977446
Page Count: 240
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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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