Race and reckoning From founding fathers to today's disruptors

This blistering survey of racial inequality in America begins by deploring the "assault on the machinery of our democracy" launched by President Trump and his supporters in the wake of the 2020 election. However, contends journalist Cose (The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America), Trump "is only a man," and his path to the presidency was paved by centuries of racism, exploitation, and discrimination. Spotlighting efforts by white Americans to preserve their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by denying those same rights to people of African, Asian, Latinx, and Indigenous descent, Cose briskly recounts the Trail of Tears, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the ransacking of East St. Louis by white mobs in 1917, the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, and the anti-Mexican "Zoot Suit Riots" in 1943 Los Angeles. He argues that these and other episodes of racial violence and intolerance reveal the existence of a "belligerent minority that believes its self-selected rights are the only rights that matter," and lucidly explains how the Electoral College, the filibuster, and voter suppression work to undermine the popular will and thwart racial equality. Much of this will be familiar to readers of American history and politics, but Cose draws incisive parallels between past and present. This is a pointed rebuke of American exceptionalism. (July)

A survey of ethnic relations in America that links past and present injustices. "To understand the current efforts to disenfranchise likely Democratic voters," writes Cose, "you have to understand what happened at the end of Reconstruction." The end of Reconstruction returned White conservative Southerners to power and introduced an era of Jim Crow laws that seem all too current today. At stake, notes the author, is the vision of an American nation made up of equals as opposed to one in which only some Americans are entitled to the benefits of citizenship, including voting rights. Cose begins at Jamestown and the introduction of African slavery to the American Colonies, showing how the enslavement of Blacks and the removal of Native Americans from their homelands were conjoined efforts to secure White supremacy. Every state was once complicit, given the requirements of such laws as the Fugitive Slave Act, which Cose examines through the lens of the real-life case that inspired Toni Morrison's novel Beloved--a book, he reminds us, that figured in a campaign ad for Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin as one to be banned in public schools. In many cases, Blacks enslaved before the Civil War became enslaved in practice, if not in name, afterward even as immigration officials tried to sort out other racial classifications. One such official, reported the Washington Post, held that "Syrians and their racial kindred…were yellow, not white, and that they were barred therefore from naturalization." In the face of civil rights advances after World War II, racism is growing today through social media and dog whistlers such as Donald Trump, whom Cose links to a eugenicist from the previous century who complained that Latin American countries "furnish very undesirable immigrants." The author ends with a well-reasoned defense for teaching this history against those who "doggedly refuse to acknowledge how our past affects our present." A book that merits a place on ethnic studies--and American history--curricula. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.