A timely and provocative read on power, politics and the racially charged landscape of the 2008 presidential election.
A scholarly yet accessible examination of racial loyalty and betrayal in the African-American community from a distinguished legal historian.
Kennedy (Harvard Law School; Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption, 2003, etc.) opens this energetic volume with a probing analysis of the ways in which Senator Barack Obama has been challenged to prove his blackness as he campaigns for the presidency. The son of a white mother and a Kenyan father, Obama, the author notes, has received a cool reception from black cultural gatekeepers who question his race credentials because he grew up in Hawaii and is not, in their view, a bona fide soul brother. Kennedy also cites Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Vernon Jordan as figures whose political and economic clout has rendered them suspect among the blacks and earned them the damning epithet “sellout.” The author traces concerns about race betrayal to slavery, when slaves helped thwart rebellions by alerting white plantation owners. He details the infamous case of South Carolina slave Denmark Vesey, whose planned 1822 insurrection was revealed to local whites by another slave, Peter Prioleau. In return for this information, white legislators freed Prioleau from bondage and rewarded him with a stipend that he used to purchase his own slaves. Vesey was hanged. Kennedy notes that African-Americans who’ve succeeded in the white world since the civil-rights era are increasingly compelled to pass a black litmus test. They are scrutinized by blacks, and some whites, on style of dress, speech patterns, choice of mate and allegiance (or not) to traditional black values as indicators of their racial authenticity. He devotes a riveting chapter to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In a discussion of Thomas’s jurisprudence in several controversial court decisions, Kennedy notes that the “most vilified black official in the history of the United States” has proven himself less the “quintessential sellout” than his critics have feared.
A timely and provocative read on power, politics and the racially charged landscape of the 2008 presidential election.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-375-42543-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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