A delightfully sardonic and sharp, if fragmented, commentary on race in the Trump era.
A Black scholar offers ruminations on race, language, and Donald Trump.
As indicated by its provocative title, this book refuses to pull any punches about race. In an eclectic mix of philosophy, social theory, history, and memoir, Abydos covers topics that range from Trump to the court petitions of enslaved Black men and women. With an expertise in the intersection of race and philosophy that leans heavily on the rhizoanalysis of the post-structural French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the author challenges readers through her “parodied” description of Trump as “our first nigger-president.” While explicitly acknowledging the epithet “must…be rejected and denounced,” she deploys it against a president whose ascension was built on White grievance politics. Abydos notes that while Whites are shielded from the racist term ever being used against them, which has provided them “a quixotic sense of hope and security…that they could never be as low as that,” Trump’s basest personal characteristics ironically match historical descriptions of the infamous term. As stated in the text, “Nigger is without principles.…Nigger is corrupt….Nigger is deplorable…,Nigger is unfit.” Throughout the book, the author also stylizes the word white with a strikethrough to show that “it is a social construct that functions as an identifier by a particular group.” Though at times the volume’s sometimes-incongruent themes make for a disjointed read, each chapter is remarkably consistent in its blend of scholarship and biting social commentary. Chapter topics include an analysis of how language itself upholds structural racism, a defense of former President Barack Obama, the history of a grotesque racist poem recycled for two decades by newspapers, and vignettes from the author’s life as a Black woman from Cleveland. The work’s references demonstrate a firm command of a diverse range of relevant, interdisciplinary scholarship and theory. While sometimes using jargon that may alienate a general audience, the author’s subversive and direct writing style will surely find readers far beyond academia. Admirably, Abydos is comfortable quoting a wide range of figures, including the rappers Cardi B and Rick Ross as well as the authors Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin.
A delightfully sardonic and sharp, if fragmented, commentary on race in the Trump era. (afterword, endnotes)Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-578-76888-5
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Everything about Sabathia is larger than life, yet he tells his story with honesty and humility.
One of the best pitchers of his generation—and often the only Black man on his team—shares an extraordinary life in baseball.
A high school star in several sports, Sabathia was being furiously recruited by both colleges and professional teams when the death of his grandmother, whose Social Security checks supported the family, meant that he couldn't go to college even with a full scholarship. He recounts how he learned he had been drafted by the Cleveland Indians in the first round over the PA system at his high school. In 2001, after three seasons in the minor leagues, Sabathia became the youngest player in MLB (age 20). His career took off from there, and in 2008, he signed with the New York Yankees for seven years and $161 million, at the time the largest contract ever for a pitcher. With the help of Vanity Fair contributor Smith, Sabathia tells the entertaining story of his 19 seasons on and off the field. The first 14 ran in tandem with a poorly hidden alcohol problem and a propensity for destructive bar brawls. His high school sweetheart, Amber, who became his wife and the mother of his children, did her best to help him manage his repressed fury and grief about the deaths of two beloved cousins and his father, but Sabathia pursued drinking with the same "till the end" mentality as everything else. Finally, a series of disasters led to a month of rehab in 2015. Leading a sober life was necessary, but it did not tame Sabathia's trademark feistiness. He continued to fiercely rile his opponents and foment the fighting spirit in his teammates until debilitating injuries to his knees and pitching arm led to his retirement in 2019. This book represents an excellent launching point for Jay-Z’s new imprint, Roc Lit 101.
Everything about Sabathia is larger than life, yet he tells his story with honesty and humility.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13375-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Roc Lit 101
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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