Bouncing between personal narrative and critical analysis, the author weaves an entertaining and richly informative...
As the dialogue about racial relations in the United States escalates, there still remains much, if not more, uncertainty about the roles of whites wishing to help advance social equality and justice for blacks and other minorities. This book should help.
Through their actions, proponents of change sometimes sustain the very racism they seek to eradicate, while others simply play it safely and politically correctly, taking a sideline seat. In his latest book, hip-hop scholar Hess (English/Rider Univ.; The Nostalgia Echo, 2011, etc.) takes readers on a personal journey of his youth in the racially toxic backwoods of rural white Kentucky. He eventually escaped to the diversity of university life in Louisville, later joining the faculty at New Jersey’s Rider University. Along the way, the author inevitably became a “white ally” to the black struggle, using his deep love of hip-hop, which helped shape his worldview, as a tool to educate largely privileged white students about the realities of black life in the U.S. In his life mission as an ally, Hess continues to question his unique position as a white professor and the responsibilities, taboos, aspirations, and limitations of spreading awareness. “My former students are working as everything from TV cameramen to stand-up comics to cops,” he writes. “We need educated citizens in all those roles. Racism is so ingrained in American culture that it touches every aspect of our lives, so what should a white person do?” The author tackles a variety of significant issues: the potential dangers of watering down the struggle through the dominant culture’s slow appropriation of this once purely black musical form, the myth of “reverse racism,” corporate America’s role as perpetuator of racial problems, and misogynistic tendencies in hip-hop music. Ultimately, Hess emphasizes the importance of education as the principal approach to evoking real change.
Bouncing between personal narrative and critical analysis, the author weaves an entertaining and richly informative instruction manual for both seasoned and budding allies.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63246-077-6
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
