The author of The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (1996) now examines the cultural significance of welfare reform.
Hays (Sociology and Women’s Studies/Univ. of Virginia) spent five years following the implementation of the 1996 welfare reform law in two locations, the first in a medium-sized southeast town, the second in a large Sunbelt city. Assuming that a nation’s laws reflect a nation’s values, she attempts to analyze what welfare reform says about work and family life in American society today. The author posits that there are two contradictory lines of rhetoric within the new policy: one goal of reform is to provide assistance to needy families so that children may be cared for in their own homes rather than in foster care; another is to end needy parents’ dependence on government benefits by promoting work. For single-parent families, these goals cannot be reconciled. Hays is careful to point out the new reforms’ benefits: income supplements for women with children, childcare subsidies, bus vouchers, and job training. But she wonders what will happen to the least skilled workers, the disabled, and their children when their benefits run out. Hays portrays the varied faces of welfare today. Elena, a 40-year-old mother of three, left an abusive husband and was doing well until a severe car accident rendered her temporarily disabled; she went through her savings and insurance and has been on welfare for six months. Christine, 24, has been unable to work since she had a massive stroke just six weeks after giving birth to her daughter, now 8. By contrast, 23-year-old Nadia has four children by multiple fathers and seems to lack any sort of work ethic; her past employment is limited to four months at a fast-food restaurant (“they don’t pay you nothing”) and two days as a hotel housekeeper (“too much bending over”). In showing both “deserving” and “undeserving” recipients, Hays presents a balanced portrait of the most controversial of all public programs.
Thoughtful and well researched.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-19-513288-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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Not an easy read but an essential one.
11
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Title notwithstanding, this latest from the National Book Award–winning author is no guidebook to getting woke.
In fact, the word “woke” appears nowhere within its pages. Rather, it is a combination memoir and extension of Atlantic columnist Kendi’s towering Stamped From the Beginning (2016) that leads readers through a taxonomy of racist thought to anti-racist action. Never wavering from the thesis introduced in his previous book, that “racism is a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity and are substantiated by racist ideas,” the author posits a seemingly simple binary: “Antiracism is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas.” The author, founding director of American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, chronicles how he grew from a childhood steeped in black liberation Christianity to his doctoral studies, identifying and dispelling the layers of racist thought under which he had operated. “Internalized racism,” he writes, “is the real Black on Black Crime.” Kendi methodically examines racism through numerous lenses: power, biology, ethnicity, body, culture, and so forth, all the way to the intersectional constructs of gender racism and queer racism (the only section of the book that feels rushed). Each chapter examines one facet of racism, the authorial camera alternately zooming in on an episode from Kendi’s life that exemplifies it—e.g., as a teen, he wore light-colored contact lenses, wanting “to be Black but…not…to look Black”—and then panning to the history that informs it (the antebellum hierarchy that valued light skin over dark). The author then reframes those received ideas with inexorable logic: “Either racist policy or Black inferiority explains why White people are wealthier, healthier, and more powerful than Black people today.” If Kendi is justifiably hard on America, he’s just as hard on himself. When he began college, “anti-Black racist ideas covered my freshman eyes like my orange contacts.” This unsparing honesty helps readers, both white and people of color, navigate this difficult intellectual territory.
Not an easy read but an essential one.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-50928-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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