Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I wanted to love Belinda Love's book. I wanted to read something akin to Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow," a book that lays out evidence for systemic oppression and racism in ways that people can begin to understand the problem. I wanted something more like bell hooks's Teaching to Transgress, a book that would unpack critical pedagogy and critical race theory and offer teachers actionable recommendations. I wanted a book like Chris Emdin's "For White Folks who Teach in the Hood." This is not that book. Love uses her position as a professor at UGA as grounds for expertise to speak to race and the effects of discrimination on the American school system. But she offers almost no evidence to back up her statements (odd choice for an academic scholar); no follow-up readings; very few statistics. If you already agree with her points (and I do), you might find the personal stories valuable. But this book will never convince anyone to adopt her viewpoint if they aren't already in agreement. For a book by an academic claiming to address education inequality in America, this flaw renders the book nearly useless to anyone who's trying to expand the horizons of white folks. I don't mind the wandering, discursive path that the author uses to make her point, weaving in personal story and quotes from other authors amidst her "main points." I even agree with her main points. But at best, this book is simply "preaching to the choir." Unlike the white-hot rage of Ta-Nehisi Coats's "Between the World and Me" which wrecked me and really opened my heart to the need for white people to ally with Blacks in a fight against incipient and open racism, Dr. Love's anger burns with little of Coats's eloquence and none of the value of his subsequent essays exploring pathways toward healing, correction, and reparations. I did appreciate her emphasis on joy as part of resistance. This theme emerged late in the book. I stuck it out only because I was reading for a book club. I wished she'd developed this as the entire point of the book. There is a place in print for rage and for personal memoirs and opinions. I'm not saying Love doesn't have a right to say her mind -- she does -- and if the book were billed more as personal reflections of a Black educator rather than a treatise on how to teach toward educational freedom and abolition, I wouldn't have minded. As it stands, this is one of the worst book purchases I've made in the past few years, and I will be donating it immediately.