Favorite Books of 2021 – Progressive.org – Progressive.org

Ruth Conniff

Refugee High: Coming of Age in America (The New Press), by Elly Fishman, tells the story of four teenagers from four different countriesIraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, and Myanmarwho land at Roger C. Sullivan High School in Chicago, home to more refugee students than any other high school in Illinois. Principal Chad Adams and Sarah Quintenz, the big-hearted, foul-mouthed director of the schools English Language Learners program, share a vision of Sullivan as a welcoming place for new American teens, supporting and challenging them to succeed in their new country.

Elly Fishman spent the 20172018 school year at Sullivan, following the teenagers and their families, teachers, and friends. That year happened to coincide with one of the worst global refugee crises in history as well as a massive increase in pressure on immigrants in the United States from President Donald Trumps aggressive policies and escalating public hostility.

You cant help but root for the kids in this book, who struggle to overcome trauma and dislocation as well as the common heartaches of adolescenceand the terrible reality that the violence and poverty that caused them to flee their countries still stalk them like a recurring nightmare in Chicago.

As Alejandro, who witnessed his best friends murder by gangs in Guatemala and fled before he met the same fate, awaits his asylum hearing, his classmate is shot by gang members near Sullivan. Shahina resists her parents determined efforts to force her into an arranged marriage, and makes a harrowing escape after she is kidnapped in another state.

Despite such extreme circumstances, the kids at Sullivan are mostly engaged in regular kid stuff, and their teachers see them as whole people. Fishmans clear-eyed, empathetic portraits are a powerful rebuke to the nativism and bigotry that have gripped our country.

A Promised Land (Crown), by Barack Obama, is a hefty 701-page memoirand its only Volume I!that came out at the end of 2020, just after our last year-end review. The former President is a good writer, and this is a thoughtful book, not a ghost-written product meant to burnish his image.

Obama confesses to self-doubt, and while his accounts of the war in Afghanistan, Wall Street bailouts, and other disappointments wont assuage progressive critics, it is a humanizing read. Its also poignant to look back now, in this poisoned political era, at the optimism that propelled Obamas first presidential campaign, his search for common ground, and the idealism of his young supporters.

Obama, who saw the future of Republican politics in Sarah Palin, muses about whether John McCain would have chosen her as a running mate if he knew what he was starting. But while the ugly, know-nothing politics of the Palin/Trump variety continue to plague us, this book is a reminder of our nations better angels and the possibility that they could, again, ascend.

Ruth Conniff is editor-at-large for The Progressive and editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner.

Mike Ervin

Melanie Morrison was euphoric when she discovered that the Lillian E. Smith Center for the arts was offering a writing residency. As she recalls in Letters from Old Screamer Mountain (Resource Center for Women & Ministry in the South), To find a place of solitude and beauty in the mountains of North Georgia was appealing in and of itself; to be on the very mountain where Lillian Smith wrote Strange Fruit (1944) and Killers of the Dream (1949) was more than I could imagine.

Morrisons parents revered Smith. Her picture hung on a wall in Morrisons childhood home.

The two Smith books, the first a novel and the second a collection of essays, were about the tragic failure of white people to own up to the societal destruction wrought by racism in the United States. Smith and her life partner, Paula Snelling, operated the Laurel Falls Camp for girls on the same site from the 1920s to the 1940s. Morrisons mother, Eleanor, attended a weekend session at Laurel Falls as a college student in 1939, which Morrison describes as an unforgettable turning point in my mothers young life.

Morrison conducts anti-racism seminars for white people. She planned to use her residency to write essays about the horror of lynching. In 2000, Morrison opened the Leaven Center in rural Michigan, which, she says in the book, was devoted to equipping participants to become more effective and knowledgeable agents of social change. (I attended many Leaven retreats, and Morrison presided over my wedding in 2006.)

But when Morrisons residency began in July 2012, she was feeling ambivalent. Leaven had closed due to financial pressures less than a year earlier, and Morrison was still mourning that loss. At the same time, she was immersing herself in pictures and accounts of lynchings. So during her residency she wrote letters to her mother, who was descending into dementia, describing the avalanche of emotions and epiphanies I was experiencing.

Morrison never shared the letters with her mother because of her dementia, but theyre published in this book.

The historical amnesia about lynching is the silence that weighs heavily on my spirit, Mom, she writes in one letter. If this reign of terror remains unacknowledged by the descendants of its white perpetrators, we can be certain that the lies and fears that fomented lynching will continue to infect our white psyches and imaginations.

Letters from Old Screamer Mountain is an engaging tale of love, grief, healing, and family connection.

Mike Ervin is a columnist for The Progressive.

Brian Gilmore

The title of John Thompsons book, I Came As a Shadow: An Autobiography (Henry Holt and Company), comes from Nocturne Varial, a poem written by his uncle, the Harlem Renaissance poet Lewis Grandison Alexander: I came as a shadow / I stand now a light.

That the legendary Georgetown University basketball coach would pick such a literary reference is no surprise. He was a man who respected intellectual pursuits just as much as the game.

Thompson was the first African American coach to win the NCAA Division I Mens Championship in 1984. When asked at the time how it felt, he called the question insulting, because it implied that Black coaches before me had not been good enough to win a championship. That was Thompsonhe fought racism his way with every fiber of his being.

Growing up in Washington, D.C., Thompson was himself an accomplished basketball player. His working-class parents stressed education and hard work, which he embraced. He made it to the NBA, playing for the Boston Celtics for two years, but found his true calling as an educator, calling himself a teacher, not a basketball coach. He used basketball as an instrument to teach and the court as his classroom.

I Came As a Shadow (actually published in mid-December 2020, after The Progressives 2020 Favorite Books package) reminds me of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. A Black man of stature, intelligence, and notoriety tells of his life in the United States. Thompsons book, written with Jesse Washington, comments on slavery, racism, money in college sports, and education. And, as his mother, Anna, taught him as a boy, Thompson always speaks his mind.

Thompson talks about his most consequential Georgetown player, Patrick Ewing, and the evolution of the superstar Allen Iverson, as well as others who are not so well known. He recounts his famous walkout during a college basketball game over the NCAAs racist eligibility policies for student athletes and gives an insiders account of the NBAs own embarrassing racist history toward Black basketball players.

Thompson remembers being forced to ride on the back of the bus on family trips to Maryland and seeing how the Black people taking communion at the familys Catholic church could go only after all the white people went first.

The racism stuck with him. He was going to fight it. And not once would he bite his tongue.

Brian Gilmore is a poet and senior lecturer in the University of Marylands MLaw program. His latest book is come see about me, marvin (Wayne State University Press).

Sarah Jaffe

This year saw a banner crop of books about work from a variety of authors, from the mainstream to the radical left. We cant blame the pandemic for thatafter all, researching and writing a book takes years and most of these projects were launched well before we knew how much our relationship with wage labor would be transformed by global catastrophe. Yet many of these books land with new urgency in the world of COVID-19, and none more so than Amelia Horgans Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism (Pluto Press).

Horgan, an English philosopher, has written a concise yet thorough dissection of work in the 2020s, from deindustrialization to the gig economy, unpaid household work to academia. But it is more than just a look at the way work has gotten worse in recent years, particularly with the pandemic. It is a book, she writes, about how work under capitalism is bad for all of us.

The problem that we are so rarely allowed to admit to, that COVID-19 has made impossible to ignore, is that work is not something we do out of free choice. We must work in order to survive, to pay ever-inflating rents or mortgages, pay down student debt, feed our children and elderly family members, and be seen as productive members of society. That background unfreedom, Horgan notes, seeps into every work relationship, even as we tell ourselves that work is a place where we find meaning.

Horgan manages to clarify this somewhat depressing fact and have fun doing so. She uses Britney Spearss 2013 hit Work Bitch to explain our different understandings of the term, and brings in examples of present-day and past labor struggles to illuminate the ways that workers can, and do, change the conditions of theirand all of ourlives.

Its worth noting that Horgan finished her book while suffering the debilitating effects of long COVID, and she writes movingly about what the pandemic has wrought. COVID-19 did not fundamentally change our relationships with work, but it did pull back the veil that has allowed many people to pretend that the way we work now is the best of all possibilities. Horgans necessary argument is that it doesnt have to be this way, and that the change might be already beginning.

Sarah Jaffe, a reporting fellow at Type Media Center whose most recent book is Work Wont Love You Back, is a frequent contributor to The Progressive.

Sarah Lahm

Heres a radical thought: Everyone deserves to be comfortable, relaxed, and happy. This idea forms the basis of social psychologist Devon Prices new book, Laziness Does Not Exist (Simon & Schuster), which reflects an emerging zeitgeist for our post-COVID-19 world by showcasing our growing resistance to work and the grind culture that often defines it.

Grind culture has seeped into every facet of our modern lives. It is most commonly associated with Millennials, who are at greater risk of being pressured to work all day, every day. But it even affects young children, whose brains and future purchasing habits are desperately coveted by companies such as Facebook.

In recent years, activists and thought leaders like Tricia Hersey have pushed back on our demanding 24/7 work and social media culture. Hersey is a theologian, artist, and self-care proponent who started the Nap Ministry in 2016 to popularize the idea that rest is resistance. She has linked the work-till-you-drop pressure of today to a long legacy of compulsory work culture in the United States, going all the way back to the experiences of Black Americans under slavery.

Price does not mention Hersey in Laziness Does Not Exist, but the book clearly reflects the ideas she has helped popularize. Price, who is transgender, insists a laziness lie has permeated American culture ever since the Puritans first arrived on Native soil centuries ago.

Puritans were purveyors of a productivity-obsessed version of Christianity, Price notes, and this helped lay the groundwork for capitalism in this country. Then, as now, work was deemed virtuous and anyone who did not succeed was dismissed as lazy. They say this has led to a dark implication that our failures are always our own fault.

Price does not just decry this problem. They also provide strategies for resistance, including a chapter on how to establish boundaries with ones own family members to preserve ones right to rest, dream, be creative, and simply be temporarily unavailable.

The intent is to impart a message of empowerment. Step one on the path to ending grind culture might indeed be rooted in awakening individuals, as Price seeks to do, to the idea that laziness is a most damaging lie.

Sarah Lahm is a columnist for The Progressive.

Emilio Leanza

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Macmillan), by David Graeber and David Wengrow, is a book with a very particular axe to grind.

A familiar story told in other expansive history bookssuch as Jared Diamonds Guns, Germs, and Steel or Yuval Noah Hararis Sapiensgoes something like this: For most of prehistory, an era that roughly spans from 3.3 million to 10,000 years ago, humans lived in bands or chiefdoms which, due to their small size, were inherently democratic and egalitarian; it was only with the invention of agriculture that, to paraphrase philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, we rushed headlong into our chains.

At its core, The Dawn of Everything is about how we live; or, to be more exact, how we choose to live in relation to each other.

Agriculture, these authors claim, was the original sin that set the stage for everything else, from kings and private property to bureaucracy, colonialism, genocide, and the contemporary nation state.

Graeber and Wengrow reject this narrative. Relying on new archaeological research, they rigorously debunk the idea that early human societies can be as neatly categorized as Diamond and Harari suggest. Early hunter-gatherer groups, for example, were not necessarily tiny, isolated democratic communes, but instead engaged in bold social experiments. This included seasonally shifting into temporary settlements, with something like a Neolithic aristocracy.

Likewise, the authors argue, the first cities were not all defined by social stratification and inequality. Among them were many large-scale ancient cities, like Harappa of the Indus Valley Civilization, that seem to have functioned without any sort of rigid, top-down government.

In fact, according to Graeber and Wengrow, the way a society worked was never solely determined by technologies (for example, the plow) or environmental factors (the availability of large, tameable livestock to pull them). Rather, the humans of the past actively debated and experimented with social formsmuch more so, it turns out, than we do today.

At its core, The Dawn of Everything is about how we live; or, to be more exact, how we choose to live in relation to each other.

As Graeber, whose untimely death in September 2020 cut short the career of one of the most brilliant thinkers of recent decades, once wrote, The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.

Our distant ancestors grasped this truth. Its up to usas we churn about in states where money is converted into political power and the environment is in perilto remember it.

Emilio Leanza is associate editor of The Progressive.

Bill Lueders

Among the panoply of issues clamoring for our attention, none are more urgent than finding less destructive ways to interact with our planet. Some of my favorite books this year are about that challenge.

For a case study in how a nations citizens can deliver stunning rebukes to the destroyers of Earth, theres The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed (Beacon Press). It is written by the wife-and-husband team of Robin Broad, a professor at American University, and John Cavanagh, the former director of and now senior adviser to the Institute for Policy Studies; both played minor roles in helping spare El Salvador from the environmental ravages of a proposed gold mine.

In 2016, after a seven-year legal battle, the Central American nation won a lawsuit filed against it by a global mining company ticked off about a denied permit. The next year, El Salvador became the first nation in the world to ban metals mining.

The Water Defenders of El Salvador, similar to Indigenous-led groups throughout the world, succeeded by building alliances around a simple message of water over gold. They rallied the public, enlisted experts, and secured political support. The mining ban passed the Salvadoran legislative assembly 70 to 0.

But these gains came with sizeable costs, including the still-unsolved 2009 murder and mutilation of anti-mining activist Marcelo Rivera. The Water Defenders, a deeply informed and highly readable book, does justice to his cause.

Another important take on achieving a cleaner and safer world is Prosperity in the Fossil-Free Economy: Cooperatives and the Design of Sustainable Businesses (Yale University Press), by Melissa K. Scanlan, a longtime Wisconsin environmentalist. She envisions a future where green policies go hand-in-hand with worker empowerment, and provides a detailed blueprint for how to get there.

Already, Scanlan notes, more people in the United States are members of cooperatives than participants in the stock market. Her book offers essential hope that we can yet save ourselves . . . from ourselves.

Finally, let me acknowledge the fiftieth anniversary edition of Frances Moore Lapps seminal Diet for a Small Planet (Ballantine Books), which includes a lengthy new introduction, the updates made in earlier editions, and even some new recipes. Lapp (see her essay, Acts of Rebel Sanity, on page 51) argues that the advice shes been giving about our wasteful and unhealthy food systems has become even more imperative.

The challenge now, she writes, is learning how to focus both on our everyday choices and on our courage as empowered citizens to revolt against concentrated power and achieve democratically set rules putting our health and Earth first.

To the barricades! And the dinner plate.

Bill Lueders is editor of The Progressive.

John Nichols

Critical race theory, the bane of conservative pundits and Republican political strategists, found an unexpected defender last summer when General Mark Milley, the sixty-three-year-old chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appeared in June before the House Armed Services Committee.

As part of their cynical effort to discredit teaching that recognizes the influence that 400 years of slavery, segregation, and racism has had on contemporary laws, Republicans on the committee demanded to know why instructors at West Point were teaching students materials from a lecture by Dr. Carol Anderson of Emory University with the title Understanding Whiteness and White Rage.

This sincere desire to understand how this countrys tortured past influences its tortured present has turned a great many Americans to the writing of Carol Anderson, a historian and professor of African American studies at Emory.

General Milley did not blink: I want to understand white rage, he responded. Im white, and I want to understand it. So what is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building [on January 6, 2021] and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out.

This sincere desire to understand how this countrys tortured past influences its tortured present has turned a great many Americans to the writing of Carol Anderson, a historian and professor of African American studies at Emory. Anderson has written a series of transformative booksincluding White Rage and One Person, No Votethat critique how our laws and public policies developed. She does this by shedding light on patterns of racism and anti-Blackness that have always been present but that have not always been explored.

In her latest book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury Publishing), Anderson presents a Constitutional history that exposes how the Second Amendment was designed and has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable.

Rejecting the simplistic notion that the amendment outlines a right to bear arms in order to preserve the freedom of Americans, she describes the explicitly racist story of its drafting and interpretation over the past 230 years. The Second Amendment is so inherently, structurally flawed, so based on Black exclusion and debasement, she concludes, that, unlike the other amendments, it can never be a pathway to civil and human rights for 47.5 million African Americans.

Andersons argument is more than compelling. It takes the debate about guns and gun violence to a deeper and more vital level, as does her brilliant observation that the Second is lethal; steeped in anti-Blackness, it is the loaded weapon laying around just waiting for the hand of some authority to put it to use.

John Nichols, a frequent contributor to The Progressive, writes about politics for The Nation and is associate editor of The Capital Times newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin.

Ed Rampell

The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth (Common Notions), released in April, boldly proclaims a sweeping First Peoples ecological and political caretaking vision for the humble people of the Earth and their other-than-human relatives. The Red Deal, it explains, goes beyond the proposed Green New Deal because it prioritizes Indigenous liberation and a revolutionary left position.

The book, an anti-capitalist, anticolonial manifesto, was written collectively by the Red Nation, a coalition of Native and non-Native activists, educators, students, and community organizers advocating Native liberation, and resisting targeted destruction and violence towards Native life and land.

Indigenous people have lived sustainably since time immemorial and can continue to live in reciprocity with all those we share the Earth with.

The Red Nation, from The Red Deal

The Red Deal opposes the edict of Genesis 1:28, giving humankind dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the Earth, an ideology that justified Western colonialism, the conquest of Native peoples, and the theft of their lands. The book posits that capitalists view the Earth as a resource to be exploited instead of a relative to be protected.

In contrast, the Indigenous ethos sees humans as having sacred bonds with nature, not something separate from or superior to it. Indigenous people have lived sustainably since time immemorial and can continue to live in reciprocity with all those we share the Earth with, asserts The Red Deal, which calls for decolonization, demilitarization, and repatriation of stolen ancestral lands.

In recent years, pipeline protests have magnified the impact of Indigenous peoples on U.S. policy. President Joe Biden, elected over Donald Trump with help from tribal votes in battleground states like Wisconsin, tapped Deb Haaland as his Secretary of the Interior, the nations first Native American Cabinet member. The push continues to restore national monument status to Utahs sacred sites. Octobers People vs. Fossil Fuels protests included civil disobedience at the White House and the occupying of the offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The Red Deal is thought-provoking and visionary. It synthesizes socialist and Indigenous worldviews, suggesting that theres some truth in Friedrich Engelss 1884 prophecy in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that the next higher plane of society . . . will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality, and fraternity of the ancient gentes.

The humble shall then inherit the Earth. Its about time.

Ed Rampell, a Los Angelesbased film historian and critic who lived and reported in the Pacific Islands for twenty-three years, is a frequent contributor to The Progressive.

Norman Stockwell

Polity Books has achieved another tour de force in its Black Lives series. I reviewed the first volume W.E.B. Du Bois: The Lost and the Found a year ago; now the third volume, Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition, provides insight into this important Black Radical thinker.

Robinson, who passed away five-and-a-half years ago, was a friend, so I may be a bit biased. But Joshua Myers, an associate professor of Africana Studies at Howard University, does an excellent job in contextualizing Robinson in this very readable biography. The new book is a worthy companion to Cedric J. Robinson: On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance, a collection of Robinsons essays and articles, some never before published, which came out from Pluto Press in 2019.

It is a hopeful sign that Robinsons work is being rediscovered by younger scholars of the Black Radical tradition. As Robinson wrote in his 1997 book, Black Movements in America, It is always possible that the next Black social movement will obtain that distant land, perhaps even transporting America with it.

Bill Gentile, another friend and a colleague whom I first met in Nicaragua in the 1980s, has a new autobiography, Wait for Me: True Stories of War, Love and Rock & Roll (self-published but readily available in bookstores and online). As a journalist and photographer, Gentile has told intimate stories of people whose lives have been deeply affected by wars and conflict. This book gives us the tales behind the imagesillustrations of a life well lived.

From the steel mills of Pennsylvania, to the jungles of Central America, to the deserts of Iraq, to a classroom in Washington, D.C., Gentile has faithfully told the stories of his subjects. And in recent years, he has helped inspire a new generation of equally responsible backpack journalists.

This falls chaotic U.S. exit from its twenty-year war in Afghanistan came as no surprise to British journalist, activist, and filmmaker Tariq Ali, who has been writing about the region for decades. His new book, The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan: A Chronicle Foretold (Verso), a collection of previously published articles and columns, revisits his years of coverage. As he told me when we spoke via Skype on August 31, the day after the last U.S. troops pulled out, Its been a disaster on every level, as have most of the wars that have been fought by the United States in the name of the war against terror.

Norman Stockwell is publisher of The Progressive.

Kassidy Tarala

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Favorite Books of 2021 - Progressive.org - Progressive.org