A thoughtful prescription for social change.
How to fight for justice through storytelling.
Journalist and activist Kolhatkar, host and producer of the Pacifica Radio show “Rising Up,” argues persuasively for the necessity of “narrative-shifting” in order “to change public consciousness to the degree necessary for society to achieve justice.” While she applauds efforts to promote inclusivity and diversity in employment, communities, and schools, she sees justice at the heart of her distinction between equality and equity. “Equality for Black people means removing official barriers to home-ownership, education, health care, and more,” she asserts. “But equity for Black people means reparations to compensate for centuries of enslavement, oppression, Jim Crow segregation, and ongoing systemic racism so that home ownership, quality education, and health care are actually within reach. Equality ignores the past. Equity addresses historical injustice.” According to Kolhatkar, reforms that can lead to equity must be grounded in revised narratives from news media, film, TV, and social media, all of which—even those purporting to be liberal—are dominated by White voices. Newsrooms in major publications, she has found, are mostly White, as are individuals who critique journalism’s problems; therefore, these critics fail to notice “that white domination is a serious problem.” Likewise, the White-dominated film and TV industries perpetuate “ugly and reductive narratives” about people of color and present images of police that “are in line with white reality and at odds with what people of color experience.” Both independent media and young filmmakers of color—such as Ava DuVernay—offer crucial new perspectives. Kolhatkar praises the rise of Black Twitter, “an organic collection of the unfiltered opinions of Black Americans on any number of topics, big and small, that has the unique ability to create trends.” Powerful forces for narrative-shifting, she asserts, include courses such as ethnic studies and critical race theory as well as one-on-one discourse: conversations that encourage “actively taking the perspective of others.”
A thoughtful prescription for social change.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9780872868724
Page Count: 176
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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SEEN & HEARD
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