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Ahron Bregman, Cursed Victory: Israel and the Occupied Territories:It’s very interesting to read a book by an Israeli about all the bad decisions Israel made with the occupied territories. Perhaps the most telling is the use of the Gaza Strip to provide a low-paid labor force for Israel, allowing Israelis to thrive in high-tech jobs but leaving many Palestinians impoverished and humiliated, even when they managed to get an education. Israeli farmers prevented produce from the territories from entering Israel, further worsening the economic situation. And that’s only the economic violence—apparently the defense minister himself said at one point that if his homeland had to be occupied, he wouldn’t want it done by the Israelis. That said, the book spends relatively little time on Palestinian violence. Especially now that Israel seems to have chosen poorly from the two out of three it can pick from the set (large, Jewish, democratic), I was left with a sense that most of the imaginable opportunities have been missed.
Jeff Chang, We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Representation: Asian-American take on current issues around white supremacy in the US. Not much different from what I find on my Twitter feed regularly, but Chang has a nice reading of Beyonce’s Lemonade at the end.
Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America: Terrifying book, well researched but sometimes repetitive and badly written, about white power activism and organizing from post-Vietnam until now. The “leaderless” strategy that spurred acts like the Oklahoma City bombing has paid off in significant part by convincing journalists and most law enforcement officers that people like Dylann Roof and Timothy McVeigh were “lone wolves” rather than embedded in a larger network that trained and encouraged them. Belew’s thesis that the Vietnam War fundamentally reshaped the white power movement would have been strengthened by more contrast with the pre-Vietnam configurations, and it’s not clear that “Vietnam” structures the current movement’s understanding of its relationship with America and America’s government as it did twenty years ago. Her argument that post-Vietnam white power movements understood themselves as fundamentally in opposition to the federal government, as opposed to enforcing a racial hierarchy with which the government agreed, also needs some revisiting post-Trump. (I also wonder how much this is really a change—the KKK members and other racists who terrorized people in the first half of the twentieth century, in North and South, probably also thought that their local governments were really on their side, and they were almost certainly right. Hmm, this makes me think about Arendt’s argument about anti-Semitism’s inherent link to opposition to the modern state, and whether it could be extended to African-Americans’ relationship to the federal versus local governments.)
Naomi Klein, The Battle for Paradise: Two forces are contesting for control of the reconstruction of Puerto Rico—one with a vision of the island as a low-tax playground for the rich (a utopia apparently pronounced poor-topia, appropriately enough) and one with a vision of community gardens, energy generation, education, and other aspects of thriving civic life. Which one will win? The one we feed.
Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things To Me: Short book of essays, including the titular one, about mansplaining and Virginia Woolf and hope, as well as about violence against women. I want to believe Solnit that we won’t go backwards, but when Russia is decriminalizing domestic violence I find it hard to sustain hope except as a matter of faith.
Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities: Another short book of essays centering on the theme of being hopeful, not because victory is guaranteed but because the future is dark and thus much is possible.
Margaret A. Hagerman, White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. Hagerman studies wealthy white kids from three Midwest neighborhoods, one of which was basically my neighborhood even though it’s halfway across the country. There’s the conservative suburb where many white parents use private schools even though they ostensibly moved there for the quality of the public schools; there’s the liberal suburb where many white parents move heaven & earth to get their kids into the “good” public school whose racial diversity is (wrongly) perceived to come from the children of immigrant PhD students from the local university; and there’s the progressive city neighborhood where many white parents are ideologically committed to public schools, agonize over whether it’s fair to give their children outside experiences like trips and tutors, but do it anyway. I felt very seen: that last neighborhood was populated by two types of cars: hybrid cars and cars over 10 years old, often with political bumper stickers (i.e., our last two cars). Part of this story, then, is increasing residential segregation among groups of white people, based on political/cultural differences.
Hagerman argues that kids don’t receive racial ideologies unchanged and unchallenged from their parents, but rather do a lot of the work of race-thinking themselves and with peers (and also influenced by media). Especially for the first two groups of white kids, their parents rarely mention race and may even teach that speaking about race—noticing race—is itself racist, even though they also often use racially coded or even explicit language (“ghetto” kids, Hispanic “gang members”). Those kids usually advocated color-blindness but also asked Hagerman lots of questions about race when their parents weren’t around, like whether blacks had different muscles that made them better at sports. “Racism” is the worst accusation many white kids can imagine, and it’s therefore also a joke (you asked for a marker of a particular color and that makes you racist!). The conservative parents teach color-blind ideology that ends up blaming minorities for their own subordination; the liberal parents teach that discrimination was a problem historically and remains in existence today, but as a matter of individual prejudice rather than structure; and the progressive parents teach that race is one of a number of linked axes along which power and subordination may operate, even as they also teach their kids that they are powerful and entitled to a good life in ways that can reproduce white dominance. There are no good answers, though I have to admit I was impressed by the progressive white kid who talked about protests of Trayvon Martin’s death by basically saying that whites’ role as allies was to listen and support, not to stand in front trying to lead the protest. I hope there’s a lot more of that kid out there.
Jeff Chang, We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Representation: Asian-American take on current issues around white supremacy in the US. Not much different from what I find on my Twitter feed regularly, but Chang has a nice reading of Beyonce’s Lemonade at the end.
Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America: Terrifying book, well researched but sometimes repetitive and badly written, about white power activism and organizing from post-Vietnam until now. The “leaderless” strategy that spurred acts like the Oklahoma City bombing has paid off in significant part by convincing journalists and most law enforcement officers that people like Dylann Roof and Timothy McVeigh were “lone wolves” rather than embedded in a larger network that trained and encouraged them. Belew’s thesis that the Vietnam War fundamentally reshaped the white power movement would have been strengthened by more contrast with the pre-Vietnam configurations, and it’s not clear that “Vietnam” structures the current movement’s understanding of its relationship with America and America’s government as it did twenty years ago. Her argument that post-Vietnam white power movements understood themselves as fundamentally in opposition to the federal government, as opposed to enforcing a racial hierarchy with which the government agreed, also needs some revisiting post-Trump. (I also wonder how much this is really a change—the KKK members and other racists who terrorized people in the first half of the twentieth century, in North and South, probably also thought that their local governments were really on their side, and they were almost certainly right. Hmm, this makes me think about Arendt’s argument about anti-Semitism’s inherent link to opposition to the modern state, and whether it could be extended to African-Americans’ relationship to the federal versus local governments.)
Naomi Klein, The Battle for Paradise: Two forces are contesting for control of the reconstruction of Puerto Rico—one with a vision of the island as a low-tax playground for the rich (a utopia apparently pronounced poor-topia, appropriately enough) and one with a vision of community gardens, energy generation, education, and other aspects of thriving civic life. Which one will win? The one we feed.
Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things To Me: Short book of essays, including the titular one, about mansplaining and Virginia Woolf and hope, as well as about violence against women. I want to believe Solnit that we won’t go backwards, but when Russia is decriminalizing domestic violence I find it hard to sustain hope except as a matter of faith.
Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities: Another short book of essays centering on the theme of being hopeful, not because victory is guaranteed but because the future is dark and thus much is possible.
Margaret A. Hagerman, White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. Hagerman studies wealthy white kids from three Midwest neighborhoods, one of which was basically my neighborhood even though it’s halfway across the country. There’s the conservative suburb where many white parents use private schools even though they ostensibly moved there for the quality of the public schools; there’s the liberal suburb where many white parents move heaven & earth to get their kids into the “good” public school whose racial diversity is (wrongly) perceived to come from the children of immigrant PhD students from the local university; and there’s the progressive city neighborhood where many white parents are ideologically committed to public schools, agonize over whether it’s fair to give their children outside experiences like trips and tutors, but do it anyway. I felt very seen: that last neighborhood was populated by two types of cars: hybrid cars and cars over 10 years old, often with political bumper stickers (i.e., our last two cars). Part of this story, then, is increasing residential segregation among groups of white people, based on political/cultural differences.
Hagerman argues that kids don’t receive racial ideologies unchanged and unchallenged from their parents, but rather do a lot of the work of race-thinking themselves and with peers (and also influenced by media). Especially for the first two groups of white kids, their parents rarely mention race and may even teach that speaking about race—noticing race—is itself racist, even though they also often use racially coded or even explicit language (“ghetto” kids, Hispanic “gang members”). Those kids usually advocated color-blindness but also asked Hagerman lots of questions about race when their parents weren’t around, like whether blacks had different muscles that made them better at sports. “Racism” is the worst accusation many white kids can imagine, and it’s therefore also a joke (you asked for a marker of a particular color and that makes you racist!). The conservative parents teach color-blind ideology that ends up blaming minorities for their own subordination; the liberal parents teach that discrimination was a problem historically and remains in existence today, but as a matter of individual prejudice rather than structure; and the progressive parents teach that race is one of a number of linked axes along which power and subordination may operate, even as they also teach their kids that they are powerful and entitled to a good life in ways that can reproduce white dominance. There are no good answers, though I have to admit I was impressed by the progressive white kid who talked about protests of Trayvon Martin’s death by basically saying that whites’ role as allies was to listen and support, not to stand in front trying to lead the protest. I hope there’s a lot more of that kid out there.
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Thanks as always for reading for all of us :)