A well-reasoned case for not holding one’s tongue in the presence of injustice.
A philosophical manifesto defending anger as an effective instrument of protest against racism and oppression.
“I do not remember my first kiss. I do not remember the first book I ever read. I do remember the first time I was angry. And it was at racism.” So writes philosophy professor Cherry, recounting the day a classmate deployed the N-word against her for the first time. Her anger has not abated in the years since, even as manifestations of White supremacy proliferate. But what is one to do with that anger, even as well-meaning allies counsel people of color to respond with polite, calm counterargument? “Anger can be a force for good on the battlefield for justice,” writes the author. “We must remember this in the face of urges to abolish it altogether.” While one philosopher with whom she takes particular issue, Martha Nussbaum, calls anger “a bad strategy and a fatally flawed response,” Cherry unpacks Martin Luther King Jr.’s celebrated “Letter From Birmingham Jail” as a foundational document in what she calls “Lordean rage,” after the iconic poet and activist Audre Lorde. This Lordean rage ranks favorably in a typology of anger that she constructs, such as “wipe rage,” the wrath of the Charlottesville White supremacist marchers and their targeting of non-White and non-Christian others. Such rage, as well as the rage of narcissism, is the fevered, useless tool of the enemy, whereas “Lordean rage is a kind that is well suited to maintain itself just as it is, without needing to get out of the way so that ‘better’ emotions can get to work.” Although her argument is often repetitive, Cherry effectively shows that anger can be a positive force in organizing resistance and keeping the pressure on perpetrators of racism, sexism, and other societal ills.
A well-reasoned case for not holding one’s tongue in the presence of injustice.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-19-755734-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
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
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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