BOOK REVIEWS | spring 2007
Reviewed in this issue:
Blue Grit: True Democrats Take Back Politics from the Politicians
By Laura Flanders
Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War
in Imperial Democracy
By Zillah Eisenstein
Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women
By T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting
Nineteen Minutes
By Jodi Picoult
A Handbook to Luck
By Cristina García
LISTEN UP!
Blanche Wiesen Cook
Blue Grit: True Democrats Take Back Politics from the Politicians
By Laura Flanders
The Penguin Press
 Who are we now? What happened
to America’s celebrated values—
liberty, democracy, justice?
Why is our constitution under siege?
What do we stand for?
Whom do we praise?
Why are our leading
politicians silent and
supine as “aliens” are
rounded up, disappeared,
and denied
habeas corpus and
court trials?
After two stolen
elections, we find ourselves
in a disaster
zone, where issues of
party, race and gender
have become swamps
of confusion. It was, after all,
Louisiana’s white-woman governor
who bellowed, “Shoot to kill,” as she
confronted Katrina victims “looting”
diapers, infant formula, food and water.
(One wonders, did Democratic
Gov. Kathleen Blanco ever apologize?)
Then there was the black-man
mayor, who simply could not think of
a way to be helpful. Our spineless
Democratic leaders have been shaped
by the Democratic Leadership Council
(DLC), which instructs them to
sound like Republicans in order to
“win” elections. Beyond our borders,
we confront Guantanamo, Abu
Ghraib and other centers of criminal
detention. Who tortures? Who supports
torture? Whose America is this?
Perhaps FDR said it best in 1940:
“We will have a liberal democracy, or
we will return to the Dark Ages.”
In Blue Grit, radio journalist Laura
Flanders gives us a road map for our
journey out of the darkness. Brilliantly
researched with the help of media
activist Eileen Clancy, it is indeed “a
book of good news for grim times.”
Flanders has searched our country for
success stories in the people’s movement
against madness, brutality, war
—and they are everywhere! Oregon
Action got behind Portland’s winning
mayoral candidate, “pro-gay, pro-poor”
former police
chief Tom Potter. In
Arizona, gays and lesbians
worked in concert
to stop a referendum
that would
ban gay marriage.
In South Dakota,
a splendid coalition
of women’s rights advocates
and Native
American activists for
health defeated an
evangelical effort to
criminalize abortion.
In Utah and Montana, there have
been similar stirring victories.
While the Christian-Evangelical
crusade remains a statebystate challenge,
an entirely new movement is
under way, one that unites new and
grand alliances. America’s Heartland
has found its heart; it is bigger and
more expansive than ever before. Local
activism is everywhere on the rise
for labor rights, women’s rights, human
rights, marriage equality.
Flanders tells us about the politicians
elected because they opposed
DLC propaganda and those neocon
fundamentalists who would “starve
the beast,” meaning the public sector.
The future is not about more war,
more torture, more Scripture, fewer
rights, less social spending. Rather,
with the liberal upsurgence that Flanders documents, we can expect a
future that is about national health
care, affordable housing, job security,
public education, real opportunity, urgent
environmental action, a return to
the Enlightenment—including science
education and separation of
church and state.
Democrats!
Listen up! Fundamentalists
won’t vote for you, even if
you sound like them. Of course they
will if you act like them, but then you are them! In a world gone berserk,
Flanders writes, “a rumble of real
change is rising.” With this book as
our guide, we can restore the promise
of American life.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK is a distinguished
professor of history and professor
of women’s studies at John Jay College
and the Graduate Center, CUNY, and
author of Eleanor Roosevelt, Volumes
I and II (Viking Adult, 1992 and
1999); III, forthcoming.
Depravity Disguised
Purnima Mankekar
Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War
in Imperial Democracy
By Zillah Eisenstein
Zed Books
 As women gain more seats in
public office, why is the world not a
safer place for women (or, for that
matter, for children and men), Zillah
Eisenstein asks in Sexual Decoys. She
suggests this is because some of these
women, as well as some people of
color, are sexual and racial decoys:
They mask the damage caused by
sexism, racism and avaricious forms
of capitalism while also contributing
to it. Pointing to the (in)famous
examples of Condoleezza Rice and
Colin Powell, she describes how the appointment of women and people
of color to positions of power neither
reflects a just social order nor
results in one. Instead,
as decoys, these
individuals
participate in
the reinforcement or
aggravation of the
unequal and violent
treatment of women
and people of color.
Gender decoys, for
instance, were central
to the scandalous
abuse of prisoners in
Abu Ghraib. The different
roles performed
by women—ranging
from Lynndie England, an inmate-processing
clerk, to Janis Karpinski,
the brigadier general in charge of the
prison—raise complicated questions
about culpability and accountability.
Karpinski was one of the few senior
officers punished for the abuses. And,
as Eisenstein points out, England and
some of the other low-ranking
women who perpetrated the abuses
were pawns who supported “disgusting
practices that they should have
refused to perform.” As decoys, these
women covered up the “misogyny of
building empire, while also actually
building it.”
If Abu Ghraib brought to public
awareness the sexualized racism
abroad, other political and ethical
disasters uncovered the convergence
of racism and sexism at home. As
much as it was a natural disaster,
Hurricane Katrina was a “political
disaster defined by racism, sexism and
class privilege.” The war on Iraq
and the war on the poor in New Orleans
were connected in many concrete
ways. For example, over $71
million was cut from the Army Corp
of Engineers for flood protection
while billions were spent on the war.
And, as in the war in Iraq, private
firms like Halliburton have profited
from receiving an early contract for
the “rebuilding” of
New Orleans.
Eisenstein describes
the role of sexual and
racial decoys across a
range of troubling
social
developments:
the
rollback of civil rights,
the feminization of
poverty, the spike in
the incarceration of
people of color. She
raises provocative
questions about how
we might measure the
gains of feminism(s): Rather than
congratulate ourselves on how many
women now occupy positions of power,
we might ask whether they have
contributed to improving the world
in which we live. When women decoys
participate in the perpetuation
of conditions of violence and inequality,
she remarks, “this is not a win for
feminism.” Smart and witty, sobering
yet uplifting, this book is essential
reading for all of us committed to social
justice.
PURNIMA MANKEKAR is an associate
professor in women’s and Asian American
studies at UCLA.
The Lust Generation
Patricia Hill Collins
Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip Hop's Hold on Young Black Women
By T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting
New York University Press
 Readers unfamiliar with the graphic sexuality that permeates commercial
hip-hop should get ready for a
shocking read. Through provocatively titled chapters such as “Sex, Power,
and Punanny” and “Strip Tails: Booty
Clappin’, P-poppin’, Shake Dancing,”
Sharpley-Whiting provides a sobering
analysis of women’s participation in
the hypersexualized black-American,
urban-youth culture
known as hip-hop.
Commercial hip-hop,
argues the author,
relies on a “pimp-playa-
bitch-ho” nexus
that depicts young
black men and women
as selfish, sexualized,
materialistic hustlers.
These images encourage
youth who listen
to rap music, watch
hip-hop music videos
and chase the latest
hip-hop fashions to
think of themselves in these terms.
The most pernicious effect may be
on black girls. In hip-hop’s “masculine”
version of black femininity, selling
sex is central to a perverse sort of
self-definition, and male-female relations
pivot not on gender warfare but
on sex as sport. Black women are expected
to hustle men, give command
performances as hos, “play” men for
money, favors and pimp power, and
live by the adage “it’s my body and I’ll
do what I want with it.” In the fantasy
world of hip-hop’s quasi-
pornographic music
videos, sex is simultaneously
a way for black
women to garner power
and a way for men to
devalue them.
Black American feminists
have consistently
pointed out how these
sexual stereotypes foster
troublesome gender
relations among blacks
and mask inequalities
of race, class and gender.
Sharpley-Whiting
makes scant mention of black feminism,
describing hip-hop’s misogyny
without explaining it. Her book illustrates
the tendency of some young
black feminists to claim hip-hop culture
as the authentically black creation
of their generation while
rejecting a Western feminism that
they see as irrelevant because it is too
white. Surprisingly, they ignore the
history of black American feminism,
which has long challenged the social
inequalities that underpin hip-hop’s
success.
This book delivers a riveting portrayal
of hip-hop, from the thumping
rap music that serves as a soundtrack
for America’s strip clubs to the predatory
groupies who relentlessly pursue
rap stars. But it misses a good opportunity
to show young black women
that criticizing hip-hop stereotypes
can be an important part of black feminist
analysis as well as a contribution
to the broader struggle for social justice.
Those who read this book with
this challenge in mind should be well
positioned to dispute hip-hop’s troubling
gender politics.
PATRICIA HILL COLLINS is a
professor of sociology at the University
of Maryland and author of From
Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism,
Nationalism, and Feminism (Temple University Press, 2006).
Empathy Denied
Jessica Stites
Nineteen Minutes
By Jodi Picoult
Atria Books
 In the opening sequence of Nineteen Minutes, a detective rushes
into a high school in the midst of a
Columbine-style shooting, directing
terrified students toward the exits.
The last scared, shaking 17-year-old
he rescues turns out to be the killer—
a killer indistinguishable from his
victims. This is the moment when
any chance for a simple good guy/bad
guy crime narrative evaporates.
Instead, the way opens for Jodi
Picoult, a writer of psychological and
ethical dramas, to probe how the
explosions of violence we call “asocial”
and “abnormal” can stem from
the “normal” socialization of boys.
We meet the shooter, Peter, as a
child. He is a sweet, wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly
kind of boy, a lightning rod for
bullying. Teachers and parents tell
him that he needs to stick up for himself,
underscoring the problematic
lessons he is already learning from his
tormentors: Proper masculinity entails
violence; kindness is a weakness
to be punished. Meanwhile, his father
introduces Peter to
guns. With the shooting,
Peter feels he has
finally, appropriately,
managed to defend
himself. His first question
for his lawyer is,
“How many did I get?”
The ingredients
here—a cutthroat social
hierarchy, unjust
authority figures, the
torturing of effeminate
boys—should be
familiar to anyone
who attended middle school. As too
should be the casual cruelties inflicted
by the swaggering male athletes at
the top of the social heap—woe be-tide
the boy (or girl) who shows
weakness in their presence. With the
accumulation of so many banal, every-day
violences, blame becomes diffuse.
Which of many perpetrators can be
held responsible? And what about the
adults who failed to intervene?
“Maybe it was our own damn fault
that men turned out the way they
did,” muses one character, a mother.
“Maybe empathy, like
any unused muscle,
simply atrophied.”
If empathy is an inoculation
against violence,
then Picoult’s
own compassion for
her characters goes beyond
good storytelling
to political statement;
she models the deep
sympathy that might
have averted the
tragedy. She takes us
inside prickly adolescents
whose every action screams
“Keep out!” and inside the adults
afraid to brave their children’s barriers.
She even takes us inside the bullies,
revealing that they too are
constantly nervous about their own
place in the hierarchy. After all, when
masculinity is a zero-sum game—when asserting it means undermining
someone else’s—everyone’s status is
uncertain.
There is only one place where
Picoult’s own empathy fails. We never
see the killing spree from Peter’s
perspective. We never learn why he
shot a teacher who had been kind to
him or why he stopped midspree to
eat a bowl of Rice Krispies. Perhaps
the radical failure of empathy at these
moments is two-way. Once we lose
boys, Picoult seems to imply, they go
somewhere that we cannot follow.
JESSICA STITES is Assistant Editor
at Ms. Magazine
Romp and Circumstance
Rosie Molinary
A Handbook to Luck
By Cristina García
Alfred A. Knopf
 We call the world small as we
navigate our technology-rich, travel-dense
lives. A ping in the email inbox
signals an old friend who has found
you on the Internet; a stranger in the
airplane seat next to you lived next
door to your sister at college. Our
lives don’t just touch each other’s, the
sensation of a brushed shoulder in a
train station staying with us later.
Our lives influence each other’s,
pressing us toward situations that
some might see as good luck or bad
luck, but what Leila in García’s novel
would insist is simply the fate written
indelibly on our foreheads at birth.
Styled in juxtaposed narratives of
three children initially living thousands
of miles apart, A Handbook to
Luck follows them through 20 years as
they mine the circumstances presented to them, attempt to cross the emotional
and physical borders before
them, and ultimately choose paths that
bring them to intersect and detach in
heartrending and soaring ways.
The book opens in 1968, when
Enrique is 9. His greatest fear is forgetting
the mother who died in front
of his eyes as she assisted his magician
father Fernando with a stage
trick. Grief-stricken, father and son
flee Cuba for the United States where
his father’s flamboyant magic act
might earn him fame and fortune. If
Fernando is razzle-dazzle, Enrique is
studied. He masters poker at 13,
scores an 800 on the math portion of
the SAT, and lands admission to MIT
and the chance to start over without his
father’s shadow casting
a long and heavy darkness
over him. But despite
Enrique’s talents,
his desires, his plans,
he can’t escape the allure
of the casinos and
the duty he feels to
ease his father’s misfortunes.
Two years later,
across the globe in
Tehran, Leila Rezvani,
a preteen, watches her
brother take his last
breaths, sharing with him a secret
that will not fade away. Her mother
forces Leila into a life she never
wanted: rhinoplasty, boarding school
and, ultimately, a marriage bound by
appearances rather than love. The
condolence prize is a college education
in California. And so, as she ages
and fulfills her mother’s expectations,
there is something else that won’t
fade away—the nights she spent with
Enrique and the fragile love she
shaped with him before reading the
writing on her forehead.
Meanwhile, Marta Claros roams
the streets of San Salvador in the late
’60s as a 9-year-old vendor and provides
for her brother, who lives in a
tree and bears the scars of what he
witnesses in the darkness of night as
San Salvador falls victim to guardias without conscience. A daring escape
from an abusive husband takes her to
the United States where a new life, a
new Marta, awaits her. In a country
where the American Dream is the
teaser, she starts over, embracing
parts of herself that could only be born
absent of familial expectation and obligation.
Slowly, almost surprising
herself, she becomes self-sufficient, a
workplace advocate and a woman invested
in saving herself. When she
meets Enrique and is
given the opportunity
to fill a void in her life,
luck, fate or maybe the
angels grant her the ultimate
gift before almost
taking it away
again.
A Handbook to Luck shines with vulnerable
characters, poetic language
and poignant
epiphanies that allow
each character to transcend
the oppression
and exile that have been placed around
their necks like a tight noose, if only
for a moment. The question that
lingers after the journeys of our three
protagonists is how we find solace and
freedom in our own lives when luck—
good or bad—spins what we imagined
into what we cannot fathom or what
we did not dare to dream.
ROSIE MOLINARY is the author of Hijas Americanas: Beauty, Body
Image and Growing Up Latina (Seal Press, 2007). |
