by Theodore D. Segal ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 5, 2021
A candid view of institutional resistance to social justice and its dismantling by determined activism.
In-depth examination of the first years of integrated education at a prominent Southern university.
Trinity College, in Durham, North Carolina, became Duke University in 1924 following a huge endowment from a tobacco tycoon. For the next four decades, writes local attorney and Duke graduate Segal, the university was a reliable bastion of Jim Crow law. As late as 1957, a Black pastor asked to complete coursework begun in New York for a master’s degree in theology and was firmly declined by Duke’s president, who wrote, “No doubt you are familiar with the traditional admissions policy at Duke University. [Since] there has been no change in this policy…I am unable to give you a favorable reply.” In 1963, the school admitted Black students—not many, and not enthusiastically—meanwhile continuing a policy of hiring Black blue-collar workers at wages far below the federally established minimum. Thanks to a forward-looking president, Duke eventually “eliminated most of the school’s de jure discriminatory policies and practices” even if the school’s most formal social events were held at a Whites-only country club off campus. Following the death of Martin Luther King, writes Segal, Black students at Duke, as everywhere, were radicalized and became more militant; in 1969, they occupied a campus building only to be brutalized by campus police. Earlier, the majority of Duke’s Black enrollees had written, “We, as a group of Negro students, are fairly convinced…that our sole purpose here at the University is confined to being conspicuous.” Their point was well taken, and even if “on matters of racial progress, Duke was at best reactive and at worst highly resistant,” racial progress did eventually follow. Segal closes his doggedly researched narrative with a list of the accomplishments of some of the occupiers of 1969, including “Brenda Armstrong, the second Black woman in the United States to become a board-certified pediatric cardiologist.”
A candid view of institutional resistance to social justice and its dismantling by determined activism.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4780-1142-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
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by Emmanuel Acho ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 10, 2020
This guide to Black culture for White people is accessible but rarely easy.
A former NFL player casts his gimlet eye on American race relations.
In his first book, Acho, an analyst for Fox Sports who grew up in Dallas as the son of Nigerian immigrants, addresses White readers who have sent him questions about Black history and culture. “My childhood,” he writes, “was one big study abroad in white culture—followed by studying abroad in black culture during college and then during my years in the NFL, which I spent on teams with 80-90 percent black players, each of whom had his own experience of being a person of color in America. Now, I’m fluent in both cultures: black and white.” While the author avoids condescending to readers who already acknowledge their White privilege or understand why it’s unacceptable to use the N-word, he’s also attuned to the sensitive nature of the topic. As such, he has created “a place where questions you may have been afraid to ask get answered.” Acho has a deft touch and a historian’s knack for marshaling facts. He packs a lot into his concise narrative, from an incisive historical breakdown of American racial unrest and violence to the ways of cultural appropriation: Your friend respecting and appreciating Black arts and culture? OK. Kim Kardashian showing off her braids and attributing her sense of style to Bo Derek? Not so much. Within larger chapters, the text, which originated with the author’s online video series with the same title, is neatly organized under helpful headings: “Let’s rewind,” “Let’s get uncomfortable,” “Talk it, walk it.” Acho can be funny, but that’s not his goal—nor is he pedaling gotcha zingers or pleas for headlines. The author delivers exactly what he promises in the title, tackling difficult topics with the depth of an engaged cultural thinker and the style of an experienced wordsmith. Throughout, Acho is a friendly guide, seeking to sow understanding even if it means risking just a little discord.
This guide to Black culture for White people is accessible but rarely easy.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-80046-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
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by Thomas Sowell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 4, 1993
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
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