Discrimination & Racism Books - Page 12

Why Black Men Love White Women: Going Beyond Sexual Politics to the Heart of the Matter

Rajen Persaud

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Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

THE IRREVERENT, EYE-OPENING, AND HILARIOUS BOOK THAT DARES TO ASK...

Why do so many high-profile black men date and marry the most ordinary white women?

Why do so many other black men desire and covet the company of white women?

And why does this subject deeply touch so many people of both races?

Are these provocative questions matters of love, sex, revenge, power, or politics? All of the above, asserts Rajen Persaud in this illuminating, no-holds-barred book that will have you laughing with recognition while fundamentally changing the way you see just about everything -- from sex and marriage to your own gender and race in all its foibles, pretensions, and ultimate possibilities.

Challenging every one of our preconceptions about mixed-race relationships, Rajen Persaud's commentary lights up a topic that has only deepened in intensity and relevance in the decades since Sidney Poitier asked the world "Guess who's coming to dinner?" The answers, so deeply ingrained in our fabric as a nation and even grounded in our past, force us to look at ourselves and our culture with new eyes while pondering matters of

CELEBRITY: From Michael Jordan to Bryant Gumbel to Tiger Woods, high-profile affairs and marriages with no shortage of controversy.

SEX: Are black men choosing white women -- or rejecting black women?

RACE: How white male insecurity is the key to understanding racism.

RELATIONSHIPS: Is it more than love that brings the races together?

POLITICS: How fear is used to gain power, from sexual politics to global war.

MEDIA: How movies and television keep black men running to white women.

...and much more. Get ready for Why Black Men Love White Women -- and finally understand the relationship phenomenon of our times.

The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed The Jewish People

John Loftus, Mark Aarons

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Total reviews: 40 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A hugely controversial work that exposes a series of scandals from Oliver North to the British royal family, The Secret War Against the Jews reveals as much about political corruption inside Western intelligence as it does about Israel. Using thousands of previously top-secret documents and interviews with hundreds of current and former spies, Loftus and Aarons, both veteran investigators, Nazi-hunters, and authors, present a compelling narrative.

The authors demonstrate that numerous Western countries, especially the United States and Great Britain, have conducted repeated and willful spying missions on Palestine and later Israel over many decades. While on the surface these two countries and others profess to be ardent allies of Israel, they work, in fact, through their intelligence services to betray Israel's secrets to the Arabs. Their motive: oil and multinational profits, which must be attained at any price through international covert policies.

The pageant of characters appearing in this narrative is vast and shocking. This is not only a compelling work of history, but also a volume whose grave allegations will be debated for years to come.

The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity

Eric L. Goldstein

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

What has it meant to be Jewish in a nation preoccupied with the categories of black and white? The Price of Whiteness documents the uneasy place Jews have held in America's racial culture since the late nineteenth century. The book traces Jews' often tumultuous encounter with race from the 1870s through World War II, when they became vested as part of America's white mainstream and abandoned the practice of describing themselves in racial terms.

American Jewish history is often told as a story of quick and successful adaptation, but Goldstein demonstrates how the process of identifying as white Americans was an ambivalent one, filled with hard choices and conflicting emotions for Jewish immigrants and their children. Jews enjoyed a much greater level of social inclusion than African Americans, but their membership in white America was frequently made contingent on their conformity to prevailing racial mores and on the eradication of their perceived racial distinctiveness. While Jews consistently sought acceptance as whites, their tendency to express their own group bonds through the language of "race" led to deep misgivings about what was required of them.

Today, despite the great success Jews enjoy in the United States, they still struggle with the constraints of America's black-white dichotomy. The Price of Whiteness concludes that while Jews' status as white has opened many doors for them, it has also placed limits on their ability to assert themselves as a group apart.

The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege

Robert Jensen

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Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In The Souls of Black Folks, W.E.B. DuBois wrote that the question whites wanted to ask him was: "How does it feel to be a problem?" In The Heart of Whiteness, Robert Jensen writes that it is time for white people in America to self-consciously reverse the direction of that question and to fully acknowledge that in the racial arena, they are the problem.

While some whites would like to think that we have reached "the end of racism" in the United States, and others would like to celebrate diversity but are oblivious to the political, economic, and social consequences of a nation-and their sense of self-founded on a system of white supremacy, Jensen proposes a different approach. He sets his sights not only on the racism that can't be hidden, but also on the liberal platitudes that sometimes conceal the depths of that racism in "polite society."

The Heart of Whiteness offers an honest and rigorous exploration of what Jensen refers to as the depraved nature of whiteness in the United States. Mixing personal experience with data and theory, he faces down the difficult realities of -racism and white privilege. He argues that any system that denies non-whites their full humanity also keeps whites from fully accessing their own.

This book is both a cautionary tale for those who believe that they have transcended racism, and also an expression of the hope for genuine transcendence. When white people fully understand and accept the painful reality that they are indeed "the problem," it should lead toward serious attempts to change one's own life and join with others to change society.

Robert Jensen is the author of Citizens of the Empire. He is a professor of media ethics and journalism at The University of Texas at Austin.

The Culture of Make Believe

Derrick Jensen

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Total reviews: 37 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Are you ready for the red pill? 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

*The Culture of Make Believe* picks up where its predecessor, the powerful *Language Older than Words*, left off. After examining in that latter volume the objectification and systematic denial of that objectification that permeate Western culture, Jensen turns his attention to the related "relationships between hate and fear, hate and power, power and fear... What are the relationships between any of these and the desire or need to control? And what are the relationships between all of these and a desire or need to perceive others as objects? It seems obvious to me that enslaving another requires that the other be, at least to some degree, objectified: Does objectification imply hatred? I used to think so, but I'm beginning to think the relationship is more complex." (67) The relationship is indeed more complex, and because of the complexly interpenetrating nature of the subject matter, the book itself is also complex while somehow remaining an engaging read. In order to adequately describe and analyze these complex relationships, Jensen's sprawling tome draws on vivid storytelling, graphic and painful historical accounts, potent metaphors drawn from our cultural heritage, powerful intuitions, postmodern reflexivity and critical insight into the author's own biases, lengthy interviews with relevant thinkers, and an underlying logic that deftly interweaves the seemingly disparate strands of racism, sexism, monotheism, hatred, power, exploitation, colonialism, ecocide, war, abstraction, objectification, production, and of civilization (particularly the civilization with roots in the Mediterranean and the Levant, aka "Western" civilization) itself. In the Biblical metaphor that he develops throughout the book, Jensen is Noah's son Ham, sharing his vision of the naked patriarch of civilization, especially industrial civilization, and calling the reader to see that the patriarch has no clothes, and having seen, to make a choice.



Jensen's book is filled with detailed accounts of atrocities that have been perpetrated against racial and ethnic minorities, women, and against the natural world itself, but he doesn't stop with relating the gory details. Instead he digs deeper into the accounts to show how the perpetrators were most often not barbaric and marginal, as we tend to assume, but were instead policemen, politicians, businessmen, economists, investors, CEOs, Rotarians, and other decent, respectable folks, the people that Ward Churchill has called "little Eichmanns." (In other words, the perpetrators were and are all of us who benefit from the system.) He describes how South African cultures were systematically destroyed, not through lawlessness but through the passing of laws, in order to get black laborers to mine diamonds for DeBeers; in effect, racist apartheid grew out of good old-fashioned market economics. He relates accounts of how everyday black Americans were lynched and burned for looking at white women, or for looking like black men who looked at white women, or for just being black. (He even tells the story of a woman whose fetus was cut out of her belly by a bunch of upstanding white citizens as punishment for her crime of hating them for burning her husband.) Again and again, we see that the perpetrators of these evils weren't inbred reprobates, but were upstanding members of their communities, and that these evil occasions weren't attended in shame, but in celebration. For example, at its height the KKK, contrary to popular belief, did not comprise backwater yokels but police chiefs, sheriffs, attorneys general, and state governors.

According to Jensen's analysis, hatred--whether aimed at blacks, at women, at religious minorities, at Iraqi civilians, or at the natural world itself--is a manifestation of our cultural vision of the world. In this vision, the Other is objectified, dealt with abstractly in terms of a class (so an innocent black man is burned just because he looks like the actual criminal or a 2,000 year old tree is rendered into two-by-fours just to make a quick buck), held in contempt, and viewed as a resource to be exploited instead of as another living being with which one may enter into relationship. Moreover, as Jensen teases out, the phenomenon of red-faced, spittle-flinging hatred is an aberration that typically appears only when the normal direction of power is subverted or challenged. At other times, hatred merely manifests as the status quo, innocent only to those who benefit from its privileges.

This book, while engaging, is not an easy read, precisely because it challenges the reader on EVERY level. It reveals the "embeddedness of all of us in a culture that perceives war in monstrously utilitarian terms" and our "immersion in a river of deceit, a river where we take as accepted that one hand may hold forth an olive branch while another makes final arrangements to thrust with a sword, a river where treaties are abrogated at convenience, a culture in which lying to achieve one's goals in not only acceptable and expected, but routine" (175). Making the choice to see one's embeddedness in the culture of make believe and to conceive of alternatives is irrevocable and has real consequences: "The difficulty comes--and here is the real beauty of the story of Noah and his sons---when, like Ham (or at least my vision of Ham), you find your way through these shifts in perception and see the patriarch naked and vulnerable. What do you do then? Do you, like Ham, talk about what you have seen? As the story makes clear, there are grave strictures against doing so, with severe consequences. Or do you follow the lead of Ham's brothers, and reap the privilege that comes from averting your eyes?" (62-3) Jensen's book challenges our need for happy, simple solutions and implies that this need for "feel-good" vibes is itself a loss created by the culture of make believe: "I need not fight despair...despair is a normal and reasonable response to a desperate situation.... my response--breaking into sobs over the killing of so much beauty--is normal, and expected, and that to not feel these losses manifests another type of loss, that of one's own humanity, one's own heart." (249)

I could write and quote more, but I won't. My guess is that you are here, reading these reviews, because you already have an idea of what Derrick Jensen has to say and agree with it to a greater or lesser extent. Readers seem to either hate Jensen's writing style-- with its tangential approach, long narrative arcs that connect loose ends over a span of 200 pages, and self-referential quality--or to love it, hearing it in a voice as refreshing as the truth it reveals in page after page. Give this book a read. Your view of the world and of your role in it won't be the same when you finish it.

Editorial Review:

Derrick Jensen takes no prisoners in The Culture of Make Believe, his brilliant and eagerly awaited follow-up to his powerful and lyrical A Language Older Than Words. What begins as an exploration of the lines of thought and experience that run between the massive lynchings in early twentieth-century America to today’s death squads in South America soon explodes into an examination of the very heart of our civilization. The Culture of Make Believe is a book that is as impeccably researched as it is moving, with conclusions as far-reaching as they are shocking.

Silent Racism: How Well-Meaning White People Perpetuate the Racial Divide

Barbara Trepagnier

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Vivid and engaging, Silent Racism persuasively demonstrates that silent racism - racism by people who classify themselves as not racist - is instrumental in the production of institutional racism. Trepagnier argues that heightened race awareness is more important in changing racial inequality than judging whether individuals are racist. The collective voices and confessions of non-racist; white women heard in this book help reveal that all individuals harbor some racist thoughts and feelings. Trepagnier uses vivid focus group interviews to argue that the oppositional categories of racist/not racist are outdated. The oppositional categories should be replaced in contemporary thought with a continuum model that more accurately portrays today's racial reality in the United States. A shift to a continuum model can raise the race awareness of well-meaning white people and improve race relations. Offering a fresh approach, Silent Racism is an essential resource for teaching and thinking about racism in the twenty-first century.

The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn't, and Why

Jabari Asim

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Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

disappointed 2 out of 5 stars.
3 of 5 people found this review helpful.

I guess my expectations were too high. When I saw the author interviewed on The Colbert Report, I was left with the impression that I would love to read this book. This topic is fascinating and important to me, maybe b/c of the time period that I have grown up.

Unfortunately, I feel that the author is a poor writer and that it just seems like he is throwing out a lot of "catch" topics, rather than really telling the story that you think he is going to tell. The content seems to be all over the place and just doesn't flow. I kept reading, thinking that I would finally get sucked in - but it never happened.

Editorial Review:

The debate over the N word touches almost every aspect of American popular culture. Does it ever have an appropriate place in the media? Are rappers justified in using it? Should Huckleberry Finn, which repeats it 215 times, be taught in high school? As the cultural critic Jabari Asim explains, none of these questions can be addressed effectively without a clear knowledge of the word's bitter legacy. Here he draws on a wide range of examples from science, politics, the arts, and more to reveal how the slur has both reflected and spread the scourge of bigotry in America over the last four hundred years. He examines the contributions of such well-known figures as Thomas Jefferson and Mark Twain, W.E.B. Du Bois and Margaret Mitchell, Dave Chappelle and NWA. Through this history, Asim shows how completely our national psyche is affected by the use of the word, and why it's such a flashpoint today.

Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement

Dennis Banks, Richard Erdoes

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Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Great Personal History and Social Commentary 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 6 people found this review helpful.

Ojibwa Warrior is an autobiography and first hand account of the formation and rise of the American Indian Movement told by one of its founders, Dennis Banks. Banks' book, Ojibwa Warrior, is a multi-dimensional account of the history of racism and empire in the United States which should be of great interest not only to historians but also to anthropologists, philosophers, ecologists and especially social and environmental activists.

Banks begins the book with one of the most important events of the 20th century - the armed takeover and occupation of Wounded Knee by the American Indian Movement in 1973. Throughout the course of interaction between the Federal government of the United States and the remaining Tribal Reservations, the takeover of Wounded Knee was arguably the most important event of the 20th century. The takeover placed the American Indian Movement and the struggle for Native sovereignty into the national and international spotlight. The takeover of Wounded Knee is a fitting beginning for Banks' book, which is filled with various stories and events that combine into a overarching narrative of uncompromising struggle against oppression and determination to better the lives of Native Americans by any and all means necessary.

From Wounded Knee, which is dealt with in detail towards the end of the book, Banks fades back to his childhood years on the Leech Lake Ojibwa Reservation in Northern Minnesota where he was born in 1937. Banks was born into an economically poor yet culturally rich environment where he and his family lived close to the land and relied on natural foods to supplement their scarce and unhealthful government rations. Dennis tells of the close relationship that he had with his Grandparents, who still spoke the Ojibwa language and continued to practice the spiritual and cultural traditions of their ancestors. Throughout the book, Dennis would reflect back on those happy days often. However, the good times did not last. At the age of six, Dennis and his siblings were forcibly removed from the care of their relations to be placed into State run boarding schools. Banks' experience in this "school" was one that can be described as nothing other than a Government sponsored attempt at cultural genocide.

When Dennis returned to the reservation, he found the situation there to be much worse than when he had left as a child. Although the reservation had always been poor and marginalized, the situation was now much worse - increasing numbers of white folks had encroached into the reservation and the state had forced the Ojibwa nation to take out licenses to hunt traditional foods on their own land. The ability to sustain oneself on the reservation had become nearly impossible and Banks did what many youths from poor and marginalized areas often do in a tragic attempt to better their economic situations - he joined the armed forces. Ironically, rather than making Banks into a mindless soldier for America, his time in the Air Force ended up engendering within him a consciousness of the racist and imperialistic nature of the United States:
"I had been guarding the ramparts of the American Empire, but now I felt like those Crow and Arikara Indians who, after scouting for Custer and fighting on behalf of the whites, were pitted against their own brothers, the Cheyenne and Lakota. My Japanese family members were called gooks, slopes, and slant-eyes by whites, and those who suffered from these names were people just like me. Was I not a slant-eye, as all American Indians are? The American Air Force, which I had thought of as a friend, turned out to be an enemy" (p.55).

Although his antipathy toward the Air Force had already been established, Banks extended his tour of duty two years to remain in Japan with his new Japanese wife and child. When Banks was reassigned to the States shortly after, he went AWOL in order to remain with his family. However, his freedom did not last for long and he was quickly captured, court-marshaled, jailed and shipped back to the States where he received a dishonorable discharge.

By the mid 1960s, Banks was remarried with children and living in the "Indian Ghetto" section of Minneapolis where he had sunken into despair and alcoholism. In 1966, he was arrested, convicted and sent to prison for two years for stealing groceries to feed his family. During his time in prison he wrote that he had become invigorated by the growing resistance to U.S. empire both inside and outside the country and was especially inspired by groups such as the Weather Underground and the Black Panther Party. When he was released from prison in 1968, he returned to Minneapolis, determined to organize the Indian community to join in the struggle against racism and empire. On July 28, 1968, Banks organized a meeting in the "Indian Ghetto," where over 200 people showed up to discuss how to best empower their local community - during this meeting the American Indian Movement (A.I.M.) was formed.

A.I.M. began with the formation of a local cop-watch program to monitor and intervene in police abuses of the Indian community. As A.I.M. began to grow and achieve successes in its various struggles, native communities around the country began to call upon the group to intervene in their local struggles. A.I.M.'s tactics were confrontational and although they did not seek violence, they were not afraid to use it if they deemed it necessary to achieve their goals. Coupled with their militant organization and tactics, Banks also describes a spiritual foundation based on a synthesis of traditional native ceremony/spiritualism that was very important to the cohesion and morale of the organization. Although A.I.M.'s tactics were modeled after groups such as the Panthers and Weathermen, those groups suffered from a reactionary anti-spiritualism and disconnected consciousness. It is very likely that A.I.M's spiritual foundation was the key element that allowed A.I.M. to achieve many great successes in their struggles as well as to remain as an organized movement while other resistance movements dismantled and faded into oblivion when faced with the violent repression of the U.S. government under the cointelpro program.

A.I.M. achieved many great victories in their struggles, but they also suffered many devastating defeats. Banks describes some of the more notable actions that A.I.M. undertook during the 1970s and early 1980s, including the six day long occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in Washington D.C., the riot in Custer, South Dakota, which ended in the arson of the County Court House, the three month long armed takeover and occupation of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, and the shoot-out between A.I.M. members and F.B.I. agents at the Jumping Bull ranch on the Pine Ridge reservation. Banks also describes he and Leonard Peltier's time together on the run from a massive national manhunt after the Jumping Bull ranch incident and also writes about the time he spent in California during the 1980s while he lived under an asylum granted him by then Governor Jerry Brown.

The importance of Banks' book cannot be understated. As a primary source document, it will remain as an important reference for present and future historians studying the American Indian Movement and the various groups with which it interacted. The book will also be of great importance for present and future resistance groups who find themselves engaged in struggle against the forces of empire and the repressive apparatus of the United State Government - for these people and groups Ojibwa Warrior will provide much needed insight into the strengths and weaknesses of resistance movements in the United States and the strengths and weaknesses of the various repressive agencies of the U.S. government.

To End a War (Modern Library Paperbacks)

Richard Holbrooke

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Total reviews: 38 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

When President Clinton sent Richard Holbrooke to Bosnia as America's chief negotiator in late 1995, he took a gamble that would eventually redefine his presidency. But there was no saying then, at the height of the war, that Holbrooke's mission would succeed. The odds were strongly against it.
        As passionate as he was controversial, Holbrooke believed that the only way to bring peace to the Balkans was through a complex blend of American leadership, aggressive and creative diplomacy, and a willingness to use force, if necessary, in the cause for peace. This was not a universally popular view. Resistance was fierce within the United Nations and the chronically divided Contact Group, and in Washington, where many argued that the United States should not get more deeply involved. This book is Holbrooke's gripping inside account of his mission, of the decisive months when, belatedly and reluctantly but ultimately decisively, the United States reasserted its moral authority and leadership and ended Europe's worst war in over half a century. To End a War reveals many important new details of how America made this historic decision.
        What George F. Kennan has called Holbrooke's "heroic efforts" were shaped by the enormous tragedy with which the mission began, when three of his four team members were killed during their first attempt to reach Sarajevo. In Belgrade, Sarajevo, Zagreb, Paris, Athens, and Ankara, and throughout the dramatic roller-coaster ride at Dayton, he tirelessly imposed, cajoled, and threatened in the quest to stop the killing and forge a peace agreement. Holbrooke's portraits of the key actors, from officials in the White House and the Élysée Palace to the leaders in the Balkans, are sharp and unforgiving. His explanation of how the United States was finally forced to intervene breaks important new ground, as does his discussion of the near disaster in the early period of the implementation of the Dayton agreement.
        To End a War is a brilliant portrayal of high-wire, high-stakes diplomacy in one of the toughest negotiations of modern times. A classic account of the uses and misuses of American power, its lessons go far beyond the boundaries of the Balkans and provide a powerful argument for continued American leadership in the modern world.

Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America

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Total reviews: 156 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Enlightening Content, Problematic Writing Style 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Like other readers, I found John's writing style to be a bit challenging at times. I can appreciate the necessity of long sentences with embedded clauses, parentheticals, and asides when it comes to complex, logical arguments. But I felt at times that John was writing for an academic reader or letting the linguist in him get carried away with love of syntacital possibilities for their own sake!

As a college teacher with over twenty years of experience, I have witnessed some of the same trends that Mr. McWhorter describes, and I have had black students attest to being bullied for liking "books" and otherwise trying to be "white." Like McWhorter, I have also seen amazing dedication, commitment, and interest from immigrant and second-language students.

Many posters here argue that McWhorter minimizes racism as an ongoing, potent force causing low-performance amongst contemporary Black students, even those who are from stable, middle class families. This includes those who know as little about the struggles of their ancestors as some young Chinese-American students know about the Cultural Revolution (i.e. "Oh, yeah, I think my aunt said something about that"). I should add that plenty of white students from families that have been here for generations are apathetic and low on basic skills, and that is part of a wide, general trend.

It's hard not to be persuaded by McWhorter's accounts -- corroborated by my own teaching experience -- of highly achieving immigrant students who have fled, in some cases, very dire political and economic situations, not to mention having to read and write in a new language. They have also faced discrimination.

One of the most accomplished groups of students I've taught recently is middle-age African-American women. It's interesting to see how little they have in common with their younger African-American classmates (who, like their own age peers, can't seem to leave their IPods and cell phones alone long enough to write notes or ask a question). Of course, this is no scientific sampling, but it does tell me that students who are "ready" often do well. At the risk of being merely anecdotal here, let me say that one of these women wrote an essay in which she said that "black males are committing genocide against each other." She went on to write that, as a young woman, she'd endured a broken family, child abuse, teen pregnancy, and drug addiction. She was outspoken about racism, but, again, what moved me was her readiness to be a student and behave responsibly.

Contrary to what others have written in criticism, I think that McWhorter did include adequate research about how conditions have improved for Blacks in this country. He doesn't deny that racism is still a problem, and he doesn't deny that it can be internalized. Yes, he does include quite a bit of anecdotal experience, but that is what he knows best, no? He doesn't survey students or teachers, and maybe that would have been to his advantage.

My limited understanding tells me that ANY student is more likely to excel if her or his parents stress "books" at an early age. That is supposed to be one of the strongest predictors of later academic success and sheer interest. And, yes, within ANY family you are going to have kids who are naturally drawn to books more than their siblings are. It sounds to me like McWhorter benefitted from both.

Editorial Review:

Berkeley linguistics professor John McWhorter, born at the dawn of the post-Civil Rights era, spent years trying to make sense of this question. Now he dares to say the unsayable: racism's ugliest legacy is the disease of defeatism that has infected black America. Losing the Race explores the three main components of this cultural virus: the cults of victimology, separatism, and antiintellectualism that are making blacks their own worst enemies in the struggle for success.

More angry than Stephen Carter, more pragmatic and compassionate than Shelby Steele, more forward-looking than Stanley Crouch, McWhorter represents an original and provocative point of view. With Losing the Race, a bold new voice rises among black intellectuals.