Eleanor J. Bader
The idea that all people can live creative and inspired lives, even if they are in jail, is at the crux of American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion (Coffee House Press), an anthology edited by inmates connected to the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop (MPWW).
This wide-ranging collection gives voice to populations made vulnerable by social and financial precarity and zeroes in on the impact of diverse forms of instability: student debt, homelessness, transphobia, racial discrimination, incarceration, voter disenfranchisement, illness, and the insecurity of working in a gig economy that treats workers like expendable cogs in a money-making machine.
“In the wealthiest nation in the world, the wealthiest ever in human history, many people lead lives that are insecure,” author Eula Biss writes in the book’s introduction. “Security is not a right in this society; it is a commodity, something that must be bought.”
Each of the fifteen essays included in the book challenge this idea. And they’re followed by what MPWW founder and artistic director Jennifer Bowen calls “a conversation.” Thanks to Zoom, a dozen editors—whose prison sentences range from twelve years to life—were able to reflect on the selected works. As Bowen writes in an introductory note to the book, their words offer a thoughtful glimpse into the intellectual prowess of people made “invisible by design.” The result is both powerful and evocative.
American Precariat features work by award-winning writers Steve Almond and Kiese Laymon as well as lesser-known contributors. It’s a terrific read.
Before the early 1970s, women’s media focused exclusively on family, fashion, and food. That changed in 1973 when Ms. magazine—a publication devoted to building a feminist movement that linked women’s oppression to efforts to ameliorate poverty, support reproductive autonomy, and activate its readership in defense of progressive social change—printed its first issue.
Fifty-one often rocky years later, Ms. is now a quarterly print magazine augmented by daily and weekly updates on its website. While the issues it covers no longer seem like a departure from the expected, its dogged coverage of intersectional feminist issues is laudable.
50 Years of Ms.: The Best of the Pathfinding Magazine that Ignited a Revolution (Alfred A. Knopf), edited by Kathy Spillar and the editors at Ms., celebrates this persistence. More than 100 articles by well-known writers including bell hooks, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, and Dave Zirin touch on topics ranging from patriarchy to racism, and hip-hop to sports.
Feminist successes are celebrated and domestic failures—including the gutting of Roe v. Wade and the inability to get an Equal Rights Amendment added to the U.S. Constitution—are parsed. But what is most striking is how radical the content of the 1970s and 1980s was, with article after article linking racism, sexism, and homophobia.
There is great insight here. For example, Marie Shear’s 1985 article “Solving the Great Pronoun Debate” offers a surprising defense of “they” and “them” to reference “third-person singulars.” Equally instructive is Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s look at FBI surveillance of the women’s liberation, Black Panther, and labor movements.
All told, the anthology is a clear reminder that media can play a vital role in fomenting resistance. So hats off, Ms. Here’s to your longevity and future.
Eleanor J. Bader is an award-winning New York City-based freelance writer who covers domestic social issues including education, hunger and homelessness, anti-poverty organizing, and movements for gender and reproductive justice.
Michaela Brant
The original idea for Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism (University of California Press) came to Maryland Carey School of Law professor Leigh Goodmark when she and a support group of women serving life sentences brainstormed writing a book together—the women would write their own life stories, and Goodmark would fill in the academic context. When the idea was rejected by the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, Goodmark moved forward with telling the survivors’ often chilling stories anyway.
Through a combination of these stories and the research of many scholars, Goodmark explores gender-based violence and how the legal system has been set up to criminalize those it supposedly seeks to protect— from arrest and prosecution, to sentencing and incarceration, to clemency and resentencing.
After establishing the realities of these patterns and how they uniquely affect people of color, young, and trans and gender nonconforming people, Goodmark arrives in the last chapter at abolition feminism as the only way forward. Abolition feminism, she concludes, sees gender-based violence and carceral violence as inextricable and envisions justice not as punishment and incarceration, but imagining and creating systems that support us all.
Unlike like the food and cosmetic industries, fashion has no ingredient lists and startlingly few regulations.
In her thoroughly researched and frightening book To Dye For: How Toxic Fashion is Making Us Sick—and How We Can Fight Back (Putnam), Alden Wicker dives into the dangers of chemicals like PFAS and hexavalent chromium in clothing, as well as lesser-known ones—plus a host of chemical compounds that scientists have not even named or studied. (That means it is impossible to tell if these compounds are safe to be in our clothes.)
Fashion history and science come together to warn all clothing wearers about the toxic chemicals and fossil fuels in our garments, further illuminated by interviews with experts and those suffering from chemical-related health problems. After sounding the alarm, Wicker offers solutions while emphasizing that it is a systemic problem that needs much more attention.
Michaela Brant is associate editor at The Progressive.
Helen Bezuneh
In a world that often trivializes pop culture as a frivolous source of mere entertainment, Wannabe: Reckonings with the Pop Culture That Shapes Me (HarperOne) by Aisha Harris stands as a compelling testament to pop culture’s profound impact on our identities and our role in shaping it.
In this series of thought-provoking, detailed essays that comment on topics ranging from the hyper-politicization of celebrities to the common commodification of nostalgia, Harris, co-host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, delivers a coherently entangled blend of personal narrative and cultural critique. Directly linking the development of her selfhood with her dynamic engagement with the likes of She’s All That, Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely,” the emergence in the early 2000s of LiveJournal, and the Black cultural renaissance that was 2016, Harris exhibits just how pivotal pop culture can be in forming our self-perception, desires, fears, and politics.
Wannabe candidly explores the coming of age of a late 1980s-born Black woman in a world saturated by pop culture’s influence. As such, it grapples with identity-related themes sensitive to the nuances of race and womanhood, such as the racial politics associated with one’s own name.
As a long-term pop culture fanatic, Harris brings a wealth of knowledge to the table, tracing contemporary phenomena like the sidelining of Black characters on screen to the era of slavery in the United States. Adorned with witty remarks, tongue-in-cheek humor, and an unmistakable grasp of Internet culture, the memoir reads like an intimate gossip session, inviting readers to share in Harris’s enlightening epiphanies.
Helen Bezuneh is a graduate of Smith College, in Massachusetts. She regularly writes about race, considering its intersections with pop culture, politics, education, and more.
Ruth Conniff
Naomi Klein deftly captures our current fractured and paranoid political moment in her timely book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Connecting a familiar personal story of pandemic disease and isolation to the global damage wrought by corporate capitalism, she puts her finger on the forces that are pulling us apart and making our current political predicaments appear so maddeningly intractable.
Klein turns her gaze inward as she recounts her obsession during the COVID-19 lockdown with “the Other Naomi”—Naomi Wolf, the famous feminist author with whom Klein is often confused.
Monitoring Wolf online as she morphed from mainstream writer into a COVID-19 conspiracy theorist, darling of the far right, and fixture on Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room, Klein contemplates the “Mirror World” of her doppelganger and what it reflects about the current state of society.
Klein has done more than any modern progressive journalist to focus popular attention on the tremendous damage wrought by predatory capitalism, in her previous books, No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, and This Changes Everything. In Doppleganger, she shows how the commodification of everything, which has turned each of us into caretakers of our “personal brand,” has accelerated our sense of alienation and unmoored us from society.
A gifted, honest writer, Klein describes how even she feels buffeted by demands to build her “brand” and sucked into an unreal, image-obsessed online world.
“The predatory corporate logics that earlier iterations of the left recognized as our enemies are deep inside us now,” she writes.
In their funhouse mirror way, Bannon and other rightwing strategists exploit widespread distrust of Big Tech and the surveillance state, while the left has failed to adequately respond to these threats. That, plus a frantic effort to repress the truth about an economic system in which we are all enmeshed and that is driven by exploitation and violence, explains the disjointed but durable rightwing populist narratives that propel rising authoritarianism. The solution, Klein writes, is not more entrenched tribalism and identity politics, but a push to connect with people outside our groups, to build solidarity. This is a smart and very readable book from a gifted and humane thinker.
Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean (University of California Press) is a coffee table book that documents beautiful, far-flung places on Earth that are slipping away.
Professor and environmental journalist Christina Gerhardt pulls together essays, maps, poetry, hard science, and expansive storytelling from island nations around the globe in this gem of a book.
Gerhardt lifts up the voices of islanders who haven’t been heard in the global conversation about climate change, but who are paying the highest price. “We are not drowning! We are fighting!” is the rallying cry of people who demand that we do something—now—to save the world.
Ruth Conniff is editor-at-large for The Progressive and editor-in-chief of the state news website, the Wisconsin Examiner. Her book, Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers, was published by The New Press in July 2022.
Jules Gibbs
“Art,” wrote Emily Dickinson, “is a house that tries to be haunted.” In her ghostly new book, Unshuttered: Poems (TriQuarterly Books), Patricia Smith does what the best poets always do: She climbs through the centuries to commune with the dead and invites the haunting.
Each poem is accompanied on the facing page with a formal portrait of a Black woman, child, or man from the nineteenth century—some of them photographed with their white enslavers—curated from a collection of photographs she found in antique stores and garage sales over the decades. The subjects in these stunning portraits, once lost and forgotten, now speak in the form of persona poems.
Taken together, this collection is multi-vocal, engrossing in its strangeness, a choral reanimation of the dead who speak their most intimate desires and fears, who speak truths far too dangerous for a Black person to speak in their time. Smith—one of the most celebrated poets of our day—manages to say the unsayable in this collection, to cognate lost bloodlines.
In poem number nine (they are all untitled), one of the many “newly freed” who speaks in these pages, recalls her mother:
. . . The strap pretended to quiet her. No one
realized me, a notion already seething. They’re nothing. They’re mere
men, she hissed, and they heard. I heard. Even now, she raises much ruckus
for a woman so dead—thrashing through moonwash, bellowing blare near
my dreaming ear . . . .
In effect, she un-ghosts her subjects, who begin, in these poems, to feel tactile, proximate, comprehended, even loved.
The result is a book that feels redemptive, as if it were co-authored with the dead. The final poem is a kind of crown composed of the first lines of all of the preceding poems. Here, the personae of the book collapse into one voice—the poet’s voice—as she reminds us of the artifice at work. Her subjects will never be un-silenced or set free, nor will they escape the brutal legacy of slavery, but in imagining their voices, Smith calls back through those impossible chasms of time, history, and even death, to alternate possibilities. Ultimately, what's un-shuttered in Smith’s book is the crushing consequence of silencing; what rings forth is a lyrical intervention that connects us to this shared history, a most haunting revival.
Jules Gibbs is the poetry editor at The Progressive.
Emilio Leanza
When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, it was a shock to the mainstream media, which—up until the last battleground states turned red—believed that Hillary Clinton would become the first woman President. What many pundits had failed to imagine was the extent to which far-right ideologies had been, for decades, simmering under the surface. But for those who were paying attention—or, like myself, had grown up in a deeply conservative town in the South—Trump’s rise was mostly unsurprising. In fact, it reflected the results of a long campaign that was more widespread, more organized, and more familiar than it appeared.
My favorite book of this year—Tina Nguyen’s The MAGA Diaries: My Surreal Adventure Inside the Right-Wing (And How I Got Out) (Simon & Schuster)—won’t be published until January 16, 2024. I’m bending the rules here because, for one, Nguyen, a former journalist at Vanity Fair and now founding partner and national correspondent at Puck, has written an excellent memoir that exposes how the conservative movement operates on a granular level. Secondly, I was hired to help fact-check it, and have spent many nights and weekends over the last few months digging into things like the history of CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference) and the militias behind the January 6 insurrection. One highlight: a phone call with Tucker Carlson, who was surprisingly cordial and willing to go over details about what The Daily Caller was like when Nguyen worked there as one of her first jobs (Carlson co-founded the publication in 2010).
What’s unique about The MAGA Diaries, in comparison to the scores of other books about the Trump years, is that Nguyen was an insider. The memoir roughly breaks down into three sections: How Nguyen became a libertarian at Claremont McKenna College, and while there deepened her ties to the movement through a series of fellowships, internships, and other Koch-funded programs; her entry into journalism at conservative outlets as an overworked blogger; and the years of deep reporting on the far right that she’s done since. As Nguyen highlights all of the ways that she was mentored by the movement, there was a clear takeaway, which is that the same networks don’t exist for the progressive left—and, if we want to take and keep power, we need to be just as strategic.
Emilio Leanza is senior editor at The Progressive.
Bill Lueders
The word “favorite” doesn’t seem right for Timothy Egan’s A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them (Viking), an often disturbing look at how the KKK became a major force in U.S. politics in the mid-1920s. The resurgence was led by D.C. Stephenson, Grand Dragon of the Klan in Indiana, a state which claimed 400,000 members, a women’s brigade, and even the Ku Klux Kiddies.
Stephenson, like a certain modern political figure, was inexplicably able to pull others into his orbit. He was also (again, the parallels are striking) a serial sexual assaulter. Egan writes that Stephenson’s entourage grew accustomed to seeing “battered and bloody women [fleeing] hotel rooms in tears and torn clothes, the Grand Dragon passed out and smelling of bourbon and tobacco.”
In 1925, Stephenson kidnapped, raped, and attacked with his teeth a young woman named Madge Oberholtzer, an ordeal so horrific she took poison to end it. She died a month later, after giving a dying declaration that provided the basis for Stephenson’s criminal conviction, which deflated the Klan nationally and led to his spending decades in prison. He filed more than forty appeals, all unsuccessful.
Another excellent historical book published in 2023 was American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress (Mariner Books) by Wesley Lowery. It explores a half-dozen instances of racist violence during the Obama and Trump eras, including the 2012 mass shooting at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and the deadly 2017 white supremacist marches in Charlottesville, Virginia.
In each of these cases, Lowery, like Egan a past winner of the Pulitzer Prize, tugs at the threads of racism that are interwoven into U.S. history. For instance, in telling how Ecuadorian immigrant Marcelo Lucero was stabbed to death by white teens on the prowl in Patchogue, New York, just four days after Barack Obama’s 2008 election, Lowery flashes back to March 1891, when a vigilante mob stormed a jailhouse in New Orleans and lynched eleven Italians accused of involvement in a killing, some of whom had been acquitted. (The Washington Post thought this was splendid, saying “the people’s justice, swift and sure, [was] visited upon those who the jury had neglected to punish.”)
American Whitelash is a jolting reminder of the primacy of racist violence in our nation’s past, and its hideous endurance.
Bill Lueders, the former editor and now editor-at-large of The Progressive, is a writer in Madison, Wisconsin.
John Nichols
"The past is never dead. It's not even past," observed William Faulkner. That great author's most insightful line serves as a powerful reminder that we should never presume that our history has been fully revealed—let alone understood.
The best way to understand history is not as a set of concrete certainties but rather as an evolving understanding of our past that helps us to explain, and potentially overcome, our present.
Key to that evolution is the expansion of our understanding of iconic figures. Many "heroes" lose their luster over time, as we realize that figures who Americans have for centuries celebrated as champions of liberty and conscience were in fact fundamentally flawed individuals who enslaved human beings, promoted the genocidal displacement of Indigenous peoples, and embraced racial and ethnic stereotypes that led to the brutal treatment of immigrants and political outsiders.
But there is a flip side to this historical truth-telling. While supposed heroes are diminished, real ones emerge in new tellings of our national story. Americans who were once narrowly understood as societal celebrities and cultural icons come to be understood—thanks to myth-busting historical research and agile biographical writing—as visionary political thinkers who got things right when others were wrong.
Such is the case with Helen Keller. Best known as a deaf and blind woman who overcame physical challenges and societal prejudices to become one of the most inspiring figures of the twentieth century, Keller's story has usually been told as that of the indomitable student of a "miracle-worker" teacher, Annie Sullivan, who learned against all odds to communicate with crystal clarity and poetic insight.
But there is so much more to Keller's story, as the remarkable 2023 book After the Miracle: The Political Crusades of Helen Keller (Grand Central Publishing) reveals. In it, author, historian, and disability activist Max Wallace draws our attention to the seldom told story of what Keller did with her hard-won ability to communicate.
Not satisfied with simply enjoying the accolades that went with her own celebrity, Keller used her prominence—as one of the most identifiable and beloved figures of the first half of the last century—to advocate for radical change in a society that was characterized by brutal discrimination, not just against Americans with disabilities but against people of color, women, immigrants, the poor, and dissidents. Wallace gives us a truer and fuller understanding of Keller, as a fighting campaigner for economic, social, and racial justice who was "a card-carrying socialist, fierce anti-racist, and progressive disability activist."
The Helen Keller we are introduced to in this thrilling and immensely readable biography is a figure of enormous strength, who gave voice to the struggles of those who had few champions with the access that Keller enjoyed to mainstream media and popular sympathy.
Keller, an often militant crusader, was prepared to risk her own comfort and reputation to address the inequities of her time and to make the United States what it promised to be: "one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all."
With After the Miracle, Max Wallace reveals an American hero—and a history that speaks to our highest ideals.
John Nichols, a contributing writer for The Progressive, covers politics for The Nation and is associate editor of The Capital Times newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin.
Ed Rampell
How did Charlie Chaplin, moviedom’s beloved “Little Tramp,” go from Earth’s most famous man to being kicked out of the United States? In Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided (Simon & Schuster), Scott Eyman exhaustively answers this baffling, if overlooked, question.
In an interview, the prolific Hollywood biographer explained what caused the canceling of “the number one victim of the Blacklist.” He highlighted three factors: “First, his premature antifascism in the 1930s and making The Great Dictator. Then his proselytizing for opening a second front to aid Russia during World War II. Then came his sexual travails, when he was charged with the Mann Act and a paternity case.”
Eyman’s splendid biography also documents Chaplin’s poverty-stricken childhood in London, which gave him an enduring empathy for the downtrodden, plus his decision not to seek U.S. citizenship.
Conservative cancel culture limited distribution of Chaplin’s 1947 satirical, anti-capitalist Monsieur Verdoux, then banned his 1957 critique of blacklisting, A King in New York, made when the exiled star lived in Switzerland. By focusing on Chaplin’s politics, Eyman makes an indispensable contribution to film history.
Donald Bogle, the foremost film historian of the African American screen image who wrote 1973’s groundbreaking Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks, is back with Lena Horne: Goddess Reclaimed (Running Press Books, publisher of Turner Classic Movies’ film histories).
This lavishly illustrated, 272-page biography about the iconic singer and actress chronicles Horne’s career, from Harlem’s Cotton Club to Hollywood, where she struggled against racism and colorism. Despite extraordinary talent and beauty, Tinseltown generally denied Horne leading roles, mainly relegating the sizzling songbird to numbers in musicals such as MGM’s Till the Clouds Roll By in 1946.
Bogle also covers Horne’s private life—her interracial marriage was hushed-up when miscegenation was taboo—and offscreen activism. During World War II, Horne deployed star power to support Black soldiers. She became active in the civil rights movement, including trips in 1963 to Jackson, Mississippi, and the March on Washington.
Bogle’s biography also notes the notables Horne interacted with: Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X. An entire chapter, titled “Red-Baiting, Red Channels: The Blacklist,” is devoted to Horne’s entanglement in the Hollywood Blacklist due to her friendship with Paul Robeson and her membership in leftist organizations.
Ed Rampell is a Los Angeles-based film historian and reviewer, and co-author of the third edition of The Hawaii Movie and Television Book.
Betsy Robinson
Freeman House Publishing was besieged with problems on its first launch, BlackWorld by Bertice Berry. A sociologist, Berry had written bestselling books for Big Five publishers and had been advised by an editor to “publish yourself. You’re already doing the selling.”
Yet it wasn’t until experiencing Amazon’s stranglehold that Berry decided to found Freeman House, own her work, and eventually publish other “stories that need to be told,” cutting out middlepeople and sharing profits equitably.
But on the cold February day in 2023 that BlackWorld was delivered, crisis erupted: The printer’s eighteen-wheeler wouldn’t fit on the narrow country road leading to Berry’s house in Savannah, Georgia. So Berry called friends and— alakazam!—a human conveyor belt of Black women went into action, from the semitrailer to Berry’s house, where they formed a distribution-packing chain.
Similarly, BlackWorld is a fantastic tale of teamwork and conveyance: A young, Black, doctoral student finds herself “conducted” into a metaphysical adventure where she discovers that all known and unknown eminent figures in Black history, art, culture, and science are not only thriving, but also infusing our world with inspiration to know true history and heal.
A fantastic teaching story, BlackWorld functions as an “over-ground railroad,” conducting readers into an omnipresent ocean of Black brilliance—mirrored by the book’s dissemination through Berry’s speaking engagements, her 100,000 Facebook followers, and her Facebook group, “Stories to Tell with Dr. Bertice Berry.” There, more than 6,000 members tell their own stories and self-recruited to get indie bookshops to carry BlackWorld.
Betsy Robinson is a novelist, journalist, and editor. Her most recent novel is The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg. Read more at: www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com
Norman Stockwell
Ken Grossinger has spent his career as a strategist for labor unions, community organizations, and social justice campaigns. In Art Works: How Organizers and Artists are Creating a Better World Together (The New Press), he turns a lens to a particular aspect of that work: culture.
But it’s not just about how culture portrays movements or how it can be used by movements. Rather, Grossinger digs into the interaction between cultural workers and movements and how they feed off each other, influence each other, and benefit and change each other’s work. The book truly illustrates how art can be a weapon, an organizing tool, and a mirror for activists and organizers to view their own work.
The book is based on more than 100 interviews and archival research into the cultural production of various movements, from civil rights to Black Lives Matter, and from the United Farm Workers to migrant and refugee justice efforts today.
Looking at visual art, music, theater, film, and digital productions, Grossinger shows how movements develop artists and how artists can influence the direction of movements. “While social movements can result in important policy changes,” he notes, “organizing alone is unlikely to produce long-term change if we are unable to touch the heart and soul of our communities and shift the narratives that maintain the status quo. Cultural organizing does that.”
The voice I always remember at the other end of the phone whenever I used to call to speak with Noam Chomsky was that of Bev Stohl. From 1992 until Chomsky’s 2017 departure from
Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the University of Arizona—and Stohl’s retirement the same year—she was the organizer, scheduler, and gatekeeper of one of the most interviewed progressive thinkers of the twentieth century.
Stohl’s new memoir, Chomsky and Me (OR Books), recounts many details about that professional relationship in touching and revealing ways. Much of the book is equally revealing of Stohl—and her hopes, dreams, and fears—as it is of Chomsky.
An avid blogger, Stohl also performed stand-up and improvisational comedy, clearly using these skills during her two-and-a-half decades of working alongside the man The New York Times once called “the most important intellectual alive today.” This book is crafted with love, respect, self-reflection, and humility and gives readers some new insights into the personality of a great man.
Yohuru Williams and Michael G. Long have both written for The Progressive, but their new book, More Than a Dream: The Radical March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), is truly a tour de force. If you read no other book about this important historic event—which happened exactly sixty years before the book’s release—read this one.
Williams and Long delve into the motivations, history, and organizing of the march—as well as the lesser-known organizers like Bayard Rustin (whose involvement was erased by many due to his homosexuality) and the many women whose names we never hear in the official histories, but whose participation was critical in making the day a reality. Honoring both the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the anniversary of the brutal lynching of young Emmett Till exactly eight years earlier, on August 28, 1955, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was truly a watershed in the modern civil rights movement.
This book is written in a style for young adult audiences, but the analysis is deep and appropriate for all ages. And the collection of archival photographs, press clippings, posters, and organizing leaflets is so inspiring and informative as to be “worth the price of admission” on their own. I cannot speak too highly of this important volume as a testament to an event that was truly “more than a dream.”
Norman Stockwell is publisher of The Progressive.
Dave Zirin
I will always remember 2023 as the year that book banning—and book burning—became an acceptable cause of the right wing. No longer on the fringes, placing libraries—and even bookstores—in a state of siege over the content of what they offer, has become a political norm.
The perfect book for this appalling time in history is Our History Has Always Been Contraband (Haymarket Books), a searing compilation of the past and present of Black studies. The book, with authors ranging from Frederick Douglass to June Jordan, to today’s cutting-edge theorists on race and racism, is a testament to the ideas that the forces of reaction have tried to outlaw for 200 years and how these ideas were stronger than their bans.
If that is all Our History Has Always Been Contraband was, it would be an extremely worthy text for everyone to read in these troubled times. It provides a shattering perspective of political ideas that could not be harnessed or muzzled. But that’s not all that makes this book so powerful. It is also edited by three people, two of whom are among our most important scholars: Keeanga Yahmahtta-Taylor and Robin D.G. Kelley. The third is exiled NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who also writes a razor-sharp essay for the book.
Many have asked what Kaepernick has been up to since the NFL sent him packing because he dared challenge racism and police violence by taking a knee during the National Anthem. One project has been starting a publishing house, and this book is the product of a joint venture between Kaepernick Publishing and leftist mainstay Haymarket Books.
It is a remarkable text, and in an era when Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, Moms for Liberty, and other frightening entities are out to ban Toni Morrison, it’s also like fascist kryptonite.
Dave Zirin writes about sports for The Nation and The Progressive and hosts the Edge of Sports podcast. His most recent book is The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World.