A timely, often illuminating examination of systemic bigotry.
Graham, an attorney, details his confrontations with deep but subtle racism in his debut memoir.
The African-American author, who has a law degree from Yale University, writes that he once thought that his accomplishments would be enough to overcome racial bias in his chosen field of corporate law. In this book, he explains how this turned out not to be the case. Specifically, Graham describes a system of institutional racism, supported by white workers who insisted racism did not exist and by African-American workers who wished to avoid being accused of “playing the race card.” He emphasizes that the so-called “polite” type of racism is subtle but constant and that it quickly takes its toll. For example, he notes that only a small fraction of law partners and Fortune 500 CEOs are African-American; that mentors will often overlook African-American candidates; that some firms officially embrace diversity but do little to prove it; and that African-American workers are often left out of informal support networks. The author includes personal anecdotes to accentuate his points, such as when his firm’s publicity material listed every partner’s name except his own and when visiting counsel automatically assumed that he was a file-room worker. Graham also suggests specific ways that organizations can address racism, such as by genuinely investing in diversity initiatives and encouraging white employees to confront racist attitudes. Overall, his book acts as an effective reminder that prejudice doesn’t have to be obvious to be harmful, and the current political climate makes Graham’s goal—to see an effective, national discussion on race—even more vital. Some of the book’s final moments, though, seem to emphasize laughter over complaint and counterintuitively assert that “racism can never be used as an excuse for not succeeding in America.” Despite this, Graham makes it clear that the stakes involved are high and that much work needs to be done to counteract ignorance and resistance.
A timely, often illuminating examination of systemic bigotry.Pub Date: April 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5411-7117-6
Page Count: 220
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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