Portside

Looking back after 50 years at the few pros (the real lack of jobs) and the many cons (an over-reliance throughout on allegedly debilitating cultural factors) of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's explanation for high African American poverty rates in his Report on the Black Family and Poverty.

In this look at three new and “valuable contributions to our cultural thinking and political thinking on today’s feminist movement,” Rinku Sen finds much to praise; however, she criticizes these authors because they “treat these two realms as largely disconnected from each other.” That’s too bad, Sen adds, because the movement is strongest “when cultural and political interventions reinforce each other.”

The book under review examines the rise of American capitalism, the visionary attempts by workers to resist and the housebreaking of a long-running anti-capitalist ethos from imaginative, frenzied opposition to diffuse, angry, but ultimate accommodation. While a residual 19th century fight-back culture built the CIO and defended the New Deal into the 1960s, it lacked the same emancipatory charge it had earlier, and unions shifted to cautious monitors of the working class

Ta Nehisi Coates is best known for his June, 2014 article in the Atlantic, "The Case for Reparations." Since then, he has emerged as one of today's most important commentators on racism and anti-racism. His new book has garnered both praise and push-back, placing it right at the center of our contemporary debates on the subject. Here, Josie Duffy calls it "an important book—perhaps the most important in a generation—on how race in this country functions."