A bracing and thoughtful work on a complex topic.
Watson, a therapist, and co-author Markowitz, a journalist,offer a guide to confronting and overcoming lingering biases, aimed at white allies of people of color.
This bracing book focuses less on structural racism in favor of addressing what the authors call the “White shadow” of ingrained bias, ranging from “white rage” (the “hot” rage of white supremacists and the “cold” rage of politicians defending racist laws) to “white voyeurism” and cultural appropriation. Throughout, Watson, who’s Black, and Markowitz, who’s white, unsparingly describe the many unconscious assumptions that affect white people’s interactions with people of color. In each chapter, they emphasize the many harmful effects of unconscious racism, and they conclude each with practical questions and self-examination exercises. The book pulls no punches and is open about the discomfort that this might cause its intended readership; the authors temper their rebukes with compassion, but they’re powerfully unsparing in their descriptions of casual racism, especially in the workplace. That said, the work is weakened somewhat by a lack of nuance in some sections. For example, one interviewee tells of dealing with internalized antisemitism in addition to bias against people of color, which could have been explored more deeply; she notes that in college, she “wanted to shed my Jewishness and fit in better,” and that she later came to a painful realization that she felt comfortable with her Black and biracial friends “because in the racial hierarchy, being a White Jew was culturally, socially, and institutionally far superior to being a Black man or biracial woman.” The book also seems to engage in stereotypical assumptions at times, as in generalizations about white people’s reactions to a well-known photo of an Afghani girl on the cover of a 1985 issue of National Geographic. Still, this is a compelling and necessary book that grapples with important and timely issues.
A bracing and thoughtful work on a complex topic.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9798991395304
Page Count: 178
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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