Required reading for all Americans.
A searing investigation of the violent oppression experienced by Black women and girls in America.
Lindsey, a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Ohio State, takes her title from Nina Simone’s scathing civil rights anthem, “Mississippi Goddam.” Explaining anti-Black racism as a matter of life or death, Lindsey takes an intersectional approach, showing how multiple forms of subjugation, including misogynoir, poverty, ableism, and transphobia, overlap and embolden one another. In each chapter, the author examines a specific form of contemporary violence causing irreparable harm. “You can’t support policing and affirm that Black lives matter,” writes Lindsey before delineating ways in which U.S. policing is rooted in the enslavement of captive Africans, slave patrols, and the protection of White wealth. The author references innumerable sociological studies in addition to the works of scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Angela Davis, and Saidiya Hartman. She points to the deaths of Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor, for instance, not as exceptional but rather illustrative of a larger underlying issue. “Criminalizing Black women and girls’ survival is a distinct form of devaluing Black life,” writes Lindsey, “as well as a unique form of racial and gender terror.” She recounts her own sexual assault by a police officer at 17 to underscore and personalize her argument that Black women and girls historically and contemporarily are relegated to systemic abuses—and then told to “silently endure.” As the author clearly shows, patriarchy, in conjunction with capitalism and White supremacy, has harmed Black women and girls for hundreds of years. “It is imperative to me as a Black feminist,” she writes, “to attempt to talk about all victims in life-affirming ways.” The epilogue is a letter to Ma’Khia Bryant, a 16-year-old fatally shot by a Columbus, Ohio, police officer in 2021: “I understand there’s no such thing as justice for you. I can, however, struggle for the abolition of these death-dealing systems with the hope that you know your beautiful life is a propelling force.”
Required reading for all Americans.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-520-38449-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
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: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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