Some remedies for a racial stalemate. Wachtel, a practicing psychotherapist and director of the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies at the City College of New York (The Poverty of Affluence: A Psychological Portrait of the American Way of Life, 1983, etc.), posits that blacks and whites have labored mightily for years over their racial differences—but instead of arriving at solutions, they—ve merely reached a stalemate. In that sense, he argues, the two are like a dog in hot pursuit of its own tail, spinning endlessly and getting nowhere fast. Wachtel doesn’t put it quite that way, of course, but does suggest that there’s a good deal wrong with the very language used by blacks and whites, not to mention their apparently shortsighted view of history. Does calling someone “racist,” for example, have the same impact as it once did? Wachtel thinks not. Moreover, what many blacks view as racist behavior in whites may in fact be indifference, a worse disease in Wachtel’s estimation. Along the way, the author takes an occasional jab at fellow social scientists. But in the case of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein (authors of The Bell Curve), it’s several swipes: He notes that time was when groups now riding at the top of their curve—Jews and Asians—once skulked at the bottom. Their IQ test scores changed, he notes, with a bettering of their social status. Wachtel claims that “racism” is too loaded a term and that “affirmative action” generates more heat than light. Perhaps the former term ought to be used in more clear-cut cases and the latter retired in word, if not in deed. Regardless, his recommendations are sure to anger those on either side of the racial equation. Thoughtful and sophisticated reading for anyone with more than a casual interest in race.
Pub Date: March 24, 1999
ISBN: 0-415-92000-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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
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