A welcome case that all of us should just get along—and work hard to do so.
A searching history of interracial friendship and cooperation throughout American history.
George Washington’s farewell address is “tinged with the presumption of racial homogeneity as a prerequisite of national unity,” writes political science professor Ambar. The U.S. was racially diverse then and is even more so now, and we diverge today along a number of axes—food, religion, customs, ethnicity—that hold us apart. Ambar examines key instances that speak to the ability of people to reach across those lines of separation to form friendships. Although Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, to name one of Ambar’s examples, seem to have genuinely liked each other, there was also a quid pro quo in their relationship. Perhaps the least successful of these case studies involved the efforts of Benjamin Banneker, a freed Black man, to forge a relationship with Thomas Jefferson, which would allow him to argue intellectual equality between races. Banneker, a surveyor who help lay out the plat of Washington, D.C., was unable to sway Jefferson, who replied in letters that he was in principle in favor of “raising the condition both of their body and mind to what it ought to be”—ought to be if Blacks were free, that is—but was otherwise reluctant to abandon the White supremacist stance into which he was born. Other friendships were more successful, if still reflective of their time: Ralph Ellison and Shirley Jackson enjoyed a great literary friendship, but it had to be mediated by Jackson’s husband since “You didn’t write to another man’s wife.” Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune, Gloria Steinem and Angela Davis, Marilyn Monroe and Ella Fitzgerald, all round out the possibilities of racial amity, at least among the cultural and political elite. Closing his illuminating study, Ambar writes, “we cannot disavow friendship’s role in making over our democratic republic.”
A welcome case that all of us should just get along—and work hard to do so.Pub Date: June 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-197-62199-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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