An uninspired handbook on hate from the leader of a prominent civil rights organization.
The CEO of the Anti-Defamation League suggests ways to respond to bigotry toward marginalized communities.
Greenblatt champions the ADL’s work and causes in a “handbook against hate” that often reads like a promotional vehicle for the civil rights organization. In addition to adapting previously published ADL materials, he writes, “I’ve also borrowed text freely from ADL without attribution.” This approach works well when he is describing unique tools or resources developed by the ADL, such as its “Pyramid of Hate,” which posits that bigotry occurs in five progressively worse stages that can overlap: “biased attitudes,” “acts of bias,” “systemic discrimination,” “bias-motivated violence,” and “genocide.” But Greenblatt’s free hand with warmed-over text and ideas can lead to mind-numbing clichés and corporate jargon in chapters intended to offer practical tips on promoting tolerance or overcoming hate in a range of everyday situations: at work, at home, on social media, in communities or religious groups, and elsewhere. For example, the author writes that companies seeking to respond responsibly to hate “would do well to implement initiatives consistent with their core competencies and operational design.” Such tedious passages clash with Greenblatt’s biting comments on topics such as the Palestinian cause or the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement’s “anti-normalization” stance, which “essentially criminalizes Zionism.” The author’s discussions of the discrimination faced by Jews and others such as Black or transgender people can also elide differences in their lived experiences. More persuasive and enlightening accounts of the spread of hate—and worthy responses to it—have recently appeared in Géraldine Schwarz’s Those Who Forget and Mark Oppenheimer’s Squirrel Hill. Either book would make a better introduction to the alarming resurgence of antisemitism and other forms of bigotry in the U.S. and elsewhere. Readers could also return to Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy.
An uninspired handbook on hate from the leader of a prominent civil rights organization.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-358-61728-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
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
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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