Informative reading for activists and policymakers.
An immigration detention abolitionist explores the ties between America’s criminal justice and immigration systems.
For Shah, mass imprisonment and mass detention are two symptoms of the “American obsession with punishment and incarceration.” She traces the start of both to the explosive rise in prison building that began at the end of the 1980s and continued into the new millennium. Shah argues that the components underlying this trend—systemic racism, the failing war on drugs, and misguided national security concerns—carried over into sometimes brutal policies affecting immigrants and their status within American borders. Republican nativism was not entirely to blame for these developments, however. Bill Clinton "solidified the relationship between the criminal legal system and immigration enforcement system,” while Barack Obama focused on policies that criminalized and deported those immigrants deemed "unacceptable.” The connections thereby fostered between police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement culminated in Trump's inhumane family separation policy, as well as the increased moral panic about the threats represented by immigrants. Shah argues persuasively that this panic also led to increased prosecutions and detentions, especially for people coming from Central America. She further notes that some entities—most notably, private prisons—have profited handsomely from immigrant detention. As long as the demand for detention exists, so does the “need” to build more facilities, a situation Shah believes can only be ended by grassroots activism. At the same time, however, heightened awareness of police brutality brought about by the Black Lives Matter movement has helped spotlight how police and ICE collaborations have created dangerous situations for those immigrants made even more vulnerable by virtue of sex or gender identification. Shah’s intersectional approach to the immigrant justice struggle will interest those interested in immigration reform as well as individuals working on behalf of any marginalized community disproportionately affected by the current carceral system.
Informative reading for activists and policymakers.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9798888900840
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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