A forward-thinking vision likely to appeal most to school decision-makers with progressive views.
A field manual that shows how to keep black girls in school and out of prison.
Morris (Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, 2016, etc.) begins with a promising idea: that blues songs are a musical underground railroad or conduit to freedom. The author, the co-founder of the National Black Women’s Justice Institute, suggests that artists like Billie Holiday—whose work expresses both pain and power—can “help educators, parents, students, and community members reimagine schools as places that counter the criminalization of Black and Brown girls” or interrupt the school-to-prison pipeline that sets up those girls for lives stunted by incarceration. After her introduction, however, Morris uses the blues mainly as a clothesline on which she hangs an assortment of school-based strategies that foster “educational justice.” Building on the ideas in Pushout, she argues that black female students are disproportionately harmed by exclusionary discipline measures like suspension and expulsion and need “safe learning spaces.” In her most provocative chapter, she recommends removing police from schools and praises a San Diego school that instead uses older women (fondly called “the grandmothers”) as proctors or hall monitors. Morris also favors restorative justice programs, transformative mentoring initiatives, and in-school suspensions in soothing rooms with “a Maker’s Corner” that lets girls calm down with tactile activities. Useful as such tactics might be in some schools, the author can be a harsh judge of teachers whose methods she faults. The text is heavy on left-leaning educational jargon about such things as the “patriarchal, heteronormative, Eurocentric nature of most pedagogical approaches and academic content,” which schools might buffer by offering weekly discussion groups “that engage girls in Black feminist theory.” Morris is certainly right that teachers should examine their biases, but the presentation of her material may limit the audience to readers who work in education.
A forward-thinking vision likely to appeal most to school decision-makers with progressive views.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-62097-399-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A clear and candid contribution to an essential conversation.
Straight talk to blacks and whites about the realities of racism.
In her feisty debut book, Oluo, essayist, blogger, and editor at large at the Establishment magazine, writes from the perspective of a black, queer, middle-class, college-educated woman living in a “white supremacist country.” The daughter of a white single mother, brought up in largely white Seattle, she sees race as “one of the most defining forces” in her life. Throughout the book, Oluo responds to questions that she has often been asked, and others that she wishes were asked, about racism “in our workplace, our government, our homes, and ourselves.” “Is it really about race?” she is asked by whites who insist that class is a greater source of oppression. “Is police brutality really about race?” “What is cultural appropriation?” and “What is the model minority myth?” Her sharp, no-nonsense answers include talking points for both blacks and whites. She explains, for example, “when somebody asks you to ‘check your privilege’ they are asking you to pause and consider how the advantages you’ve had in life are contributing to your opinions and actions, and how the lack of disadvantages in certain areas is keeping you from fully understanding the struggles others are facing.” She unpacks the complicated term “intersectionality”: the idea that social justice must consider “a myriad of identities—our gender, class, race, sexuality, and so much more—that inform our experiences in life.” She asks whites to realize that when people of color talk about systemic racism, “they are opening up all of that pain and fear and anger to you” and are asking that they be heard. After devoting most of the book to talking, Oluo finishes with a chapter on action and its urgency. Action includes pressing for reform in schools, unions, and local governments; boycotting businesses that exploit people of color; contributing money to social justice organizations; and, most of all, voting for candidates who make “diversity, inclusion and racial justice a priority.”
A clear and candid contribution to an essential conversation.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-58005-677-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.
Photographer and author Stanton returns with a companion volume to Humans of New York (2013), this one with similarly affecting photographs of New Yorkers but also with some tales from his subjects’ mouths.
Readers of the first volume—and followers of the related site on Facebook and elsewhere—will feel immediately at home. The author has continued to photograph the human zoo: folks out in the streets and in the parks, in moods ranging from parade-happy to deep despair. He includes one running feature—“Today in Microfashion,” which shows images of little children dressed up in various arresting ways. He also provides some juxtapositions, images and/or stories that are related somehow. These range from surprising to forced to barely tolerable. One shows a man with a cat on his head and a woman with a large flowered headpiece, another a construction worker proud of his body and, on the facing page, a man in a wheelchair. The emotions course along the entire continuum of human passion: love, broken love, elation, depression, playfulness, argumentativeness, madness, arrogance, humility, pride, frustration, and confusion. We see varieties of the human costume, as well, from formalwear to homeless-wear. A few celebrities appear, President Barack Obama among them. The “stories” range from single-sentence comments and quips and complaints to more lengthy tales (none longer than a couple of pages). People talk about abusive parents, exes, struggles to succeed, addiction and recovery, dramatic failures, and lifelong happiness. Some deliver minirants (a neuroscientist is especially curmudgeonly), and the children often provide the most (often unintended) humor. One little boy with a fishing pole talks about a monster fish. Toward the end, the images seem to lead us toward hope. But then…a final photograph turns the light out once again.
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05890-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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