New Books in Politics and Polemics

In How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America (Harvard Education Press, 2025), Dr. Laura C. Chávez-Moreno uncovers the process through which schools implicitly and explicitly shape their students’ concept of race and the often unintentional consequences of this on educational equity. Dr.Chávez-Moreno sheds light on how the complex interactions among educational practices, policies, pedagogy, language, and societal ideas interplay to form, reinforce, and blur the boundaries of racialized groups, a dynamic which creates contradictions in classrooms and communities committed to antiracism.In this provocative book, Dr. Chávez-Moreno urges readers to rethink race, to reconceptualize Latinx as a racialized group, and to pay attention to how schools construct Latinidad (a concept about Latinx experience and identity) in relation to Blackness, Indigeneity, Asianness, and Whiteness. The work explores, as an example, how Spanish-English bilingual education programs engage in race-making work. It also illuminates how schools can offer ambitious teachings to raise their students’ critical consciousness about race and racialization.Ultimately, Dr. Chávez-Moreno’s groundbreaking work makes clear that understanding how our schools teach about racialized groups is crucial to understanding how our society thinks about race and offers solutions to racial inequities. The book invites educators and scholars to embrace ambitious teaching about the ambivalence of race so that teachers and students are prepared to interrogate racist ideas and act toward just outcomes.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

In this compelling and informative interview, Carrie N. Baker discusses her newest book, Abortion Pills: US History and Politics (Amherst College Press, 2024). This book is the first comprehensive history of abortion pills in the United States, and Baker examines the actions of scientists, policy-makers, pharmaceutical companies, pro-abortion rights activists and anti-abortion forces as the abortion pill was developed in France in 1980, and subsequently brought to market in the United States. She carefully investigates the fight for FDA approval of the abortion pill, and reproductive rights advocates’ work to expand access. She pays particular attention to the critical period of 2020-2024 when in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic telemedicine abortion became a possibility. Baker ends exploring attempts to restrict abortion pills and self-managed abortions in the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization Supreme Court decision. In this thoroughly researched history, Baker draws on interviews with over 80 activists, abortion providers, researchers, and people who have used abortion pills to demonstrate the range of actors involved in efforts to expand access to abortion pills. In addition, she analyzes medical research, government records, legal cases, and the archives of several reproductive health organizations.Abortion Pills: US History and Politics is available open-access starting December 3, 2024. Click the following link to see a PDF of the bookCarrie N. Baker holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Yale University, a J.D. from Emory University School of Law, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Emory’s Institute of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is the Sylvia Dlugasch Bauman Chair of American Studies and Professor of the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Smith College where, as a legal and social movement scholar, she teaches courses on gender, law and public policy; feminist social movements; and feminist public writing. In addition to publishing peer-reviewed academic scholarship, Baker also serves as a regular writer and contributing editor for Ms. Magazine, has a monthly column in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, and hosts Feminist Futures, a radio program on WHMP 101.5 FM in Northampton, Massachusetts.Jessie Cohen holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and is an editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

In 2024, people around the world focus on an American president who calls for the imprisonment of critics, spreads the culture of white supremacy, and upends the law to commit crimes with impunity. Is Trump the first authoritarian to threaten American constitution democracy? Corey Brettschneider’s new book, The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It (W.W. Norton, 2024) argues that the United States has had previous authoritarian presidents who similarly threatened core democratic and rule of law values – and each was challenged by non-elected leaders Brettschneider terms “democratic constitutional constituencies.” John Adams waged war on the national press of the early republic, overseeing numerous prosecutions of his critics. In the lead-up to the Civil War, James Buchanan colluded with the Supreme Court to deny constitutional personhood to African Americans. A decade later, Andrew Johnson urged violence against his political opponents as he sought to guarantee a white supremacist republic after the Civil War. In the 1910s, Woodrow Wilson modernized, popularized, and nationalized Jim Crow laws. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon committed criminal acts that flowed from his corrupt ideas about presidential power.Using an impressive combination of primary documents, secondary sources, and new interviews, Brettschneider highlights how freedom to dissent, equal citizenship, and rule of law are central to democratic norms and the role that citizens play in pressuring subsequent reform-minded presidents to realize the promise of "We the People." He documents how Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Sadie Alexander, Daniel Ellsberg, and others we cannot easily name fought back against presidential abuses of power.Dr. Corey Brettschneider is professor of Political Science at Brown University. His researches and teaches at the intersection of constitutional law and politics. His scholarly works include The Oath of Office (W.W. Norton, 2018) and he writes for outlets like the New York Times, Politico, and the Washington Post. I’m delighted to welcome him to New Books in Political Science.Mentioned:Online access to the Nixon tapes from Nixon LibraryPrinceton Library archive on Woodrow Wilson lecturesSusan’s NBN interview with Judge Richard Gergel on Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and JudgeCorey’s interview with Michael Kruse of Politico, “I’d Rather Have 10 Ken Starrs Than One Donald Trump”  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

How Government Built America (Cambridge UP, 2024) challenges growing, anti-government rhetoric by highlighting the role government has played in partnering with markets to build the United States. Sidney A. Shapiro and Joseph P. Tomain explore how markets can harm and fail the country, and how the government has addressed these extremes by restoring essential values to benefit all citizens. Without denying that individualism and small government are part of the national DNA, the authors demonstrate how democracy and a people pursuing communal interests are equally important. In highly engaging prose, the authors describe how the government, despite the complexity of markets, remains engaged in promoting economic prosperity, protecting people, and providing an economic safety net. Each chapter focuses on a historical figure, from Lincoln to FDR to Trump, to illustrate how the government-market mix has evolved over time. By understanding this history, readers can turn the national conversation back to what combination of government and markets will best serve the country.Sidney A. Shapiro holds the Fletcher Chair in Administrative Law at the Wake Forest University School of Law. He is the author of Administrative Competence: Reimagining Administrative Law (2020) and Achieving Democracy: The Future of Progressive Regulation (2014).Joseph P. Tomain is Dean Emeritus and the Wilbert and Helen Ziegler Professor of Law at the University of Cincinnati. A highly respected professor and scholar, his teaching and research interests focus in the areas of energy law, land use, regulatory policy, and contracts.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Even though this is not a political show, today we will be talking about the ways in which mechanisms of defense effected both parties in the 2024 campaign and the presidential election. It is too big and too germane to our society to ignore. If we did, we might be guilty of denial.In this podcast the hist and co-host discuss the following question and how mechanism of defense were employed to ward off difficult thoughts and feelings; some too frightening to contemplate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Human beings have an overwhelming tendency to overemphasize the significance of the present without considering context or historical perspective. For many, here and now is as good as it gets - we have steadily progressed from a savage past, and all we have to look forward to is the great unknown. But if our literature and cinema are anything to go by, many are convinced that the future will indeed be dystopian. At the same time, arguments abound that living in the moment is a key to happiness and success.However, to privilege the present over the past or future, Brett Bowden argues in Now Is Not the Time: Inside Our Obsession with the Present (Iff Books, 2024), is to engage in tempocentrism. More than a mere preoccupation with the present, tempocentrism involves comparing and judging the past in relation to the present, with the tendency to assume that the present isn’t only materially and qualitatively different from the past but also superior to it, often morally so.Yet tempocentrism, a mistaken belief in the unprecedented nature of events going on around us, brings with it a skewed perspective loaded with bias and prejudice. Requiring just as much ignorance and arrogance as Eurocentrism - tempocentrism implies that the present is somehow superior to the past because we live in it now. The point, however, is not to suggest that there is not something special about the present - there might well be - but now is not the time to decide whether it is more significant than previous moments, or those still to come. Depending on the issue or event in question, the time for that is later … possibly hundreds or thousands of years later. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits (Routledge, 2024) examines the dilution and commodification of Black Rage--conceived as a constructive response to the conquest of resources, land, and human beings--in a spatial and historical critique of the capitalist State. Interweaving academic criticism with journalistic essays, it presents a thoughtful challenge to popular narratives surrounding recent US events such as the Black Lives Matter movement, the death of George Floyd and other police killings, and cases of White vigilantism, arguing that the maintenance of capitalism increasingly requires the manufactured consent of the conquered. Essayist/performer Too Black and geographer Rasul A. Mowatt assert Black Rage as a threat to the flow of capital, which must therefore be conquered by laundering, defined as a process of: - Incubation via the State, which places rage in circulation by setting both the oppressive conditions for its expression and seeding contradictions for it to be cleaned. - Labour, which sets mass uprisings in motion, layers the narcissistic rage of the Black elite over the illegal, militant rage of the masses to conceal class interests and collapse labour into capital. - Commodification, in which the now-laundered Black Rage is integrated within the State, ready to be withdrawn as a labour-crushed commodity to be bought, sold, or repressed by White capital. Entwining histories of Black resistance throughout the diaspora, State building under capitalism, cities as sites of laundering, and the world making of empire, Laundering Black Rage also lays the groundwork for upending the process through an anti-colonial struggle of reverse-laundering conquest. Relevant to studies of race and culture, history, politics, and the built environment, this pathbreaking work is essential reading for scholars and activists engaged at the intersection of critiquing capitalism and combating systemic racism"--Too Black is a low-wage worker, poet, organizer, and filmmaker. As a poet, Too Black has headlined the historic Nuyorican Poets Café, Princeton University, and Johannesburg Theater in South Africa. His words have appeared in publications such as Black Agenda Report, Left Voice, Indianapolis Recorder, and Hood Communist. He is also the co-director of the award-winning documentary The Pendleton 2: They Stood Up.Rasul A. Mowatt is a son of Chicago and a subject of empire, while dwelling within notions of statelessness, settler colonial mentality, and anti-capitalism. Rasul also functions in the State as a Department Head in the College of Natural Resources, as an Interim Department Head in the Division of Academic and Student Affairs, and as an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State University. He is the author of the book The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence: The City and State Between Us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

More men than ever are refusing loving partnerships and commitment, and instead seeking out “situationships.” When these men deign to articulate what they are looking for in a steady partner, they’ll often rely on superficial norms of attractiveness rooted in whiteness and anti-Blackness.Connecting the past to the present, in The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance (Beacon Press, 2024) sociologist Dr. Sabrina Strings argues that following the Civil Rights movement and the integration of women during the Second Wave Feminist movement, men aimed to hold on to their power by withholding love and commitment, a basic tenet of white supremacy and male domination, that served to manipulate all women. From pornography to hip hop, women—especially Black and “insufficiently white” women—were presented as gold diggers, props for masturbation, and side-pieces.Using historical research, personal stories, and critical analysis, Dr. Strings argues that the result is fuccboism, the latest incarnation of toxic masculinity. This work shows that men are not innately “toxic.” Nor do they hate love, commitment, or sex. Instead, men across race have been working a new code to effectively deny loving partnerships to women who are not pliant, slim, and white as a new mode of male domination.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

In this episode, Dr. Ismail Patel sits down with Prof. Nazia Kazi to discuss her book “Islamophobia, Race and Global Politics” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Football is the national game in the United States – and many families and friends bond over their love of the sport. While few people play professional football, many participate in tackle football as children and adolescents. In the last decades, more attention has been paid to the dangers of playing tackle football, including traumatic brain injury and the degenerative brain disease, CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy). As more former players donated their brains, the rate of CTE surprised even those already concerned with traumatic brain injury. If the risks are so great, why do more than two million American children under the age of 18 continue to play tackle football? Is it the opportunity to contribute to a team? Overcome adversity? Test personal limits?In Tackle Football and Traumatic Brain Injuries: Law, Ethics, and Public Health (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024), Dr. Daniel S. Goldberg asks readers to think about American tackle football as an industry – like the American tobacco industry – that sells a product that is dangerous to those who use it. Despite the clearly documented costs to society and individuals who play, the tackle football industry has successfully manufactured doubt about the health hazards. Goldstein argues that a basic familiarity with the history of regulated industries and their intersection with public health is needed both to understand the contemporary debates and to move forward with fair and equitable policy solutions. If the risks to people who play were better known to the public, the profitability and perhaps even the viability of American football would be at risk.Goldberg draws on public health ethics, public health law, and the histories of occupational and public health to assess the limits of parental choice to expose their children to risks of injury. Goldberg recommends using public health laws to counter the manufacture of doubt – offering specific policy proposals to address the population health and ethical problems presented by tackle football.Daniel S. Goldstein, JD, PhD is an associate professor at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. He is the director of Education at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities and director of the Public Health Ethics and Law Program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics