Tikkun Recommends

From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Haymarket Books, 2015

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor challenges the notion that the United States is fundamentally “color-blind” or a “postracial society.” Taylor, who teaches at the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University, shows that this fantasy has become a major justification for dismantling the state’s capacity to challenge the real and pervasive discrimination that persists not only in the criminal justice system and in the economy, but also in the ways that the courts are now engaged in allowing racist states to restore old barriers to voting. Her central point is that these attacks on African Americans are a “Trojan horse” shielding a much broader attack against all working-class people, including whites and Latino/as. The political and economic elite have a vested interest in color-blindness and in perpetuating the myth that America is a meritocracy, precisely to hide the fundamental injustice of the entire system from the victims of austerity cutbacks in social welfare. While Black elites cannot transcend race altogether, in general they experience racial inequality differently compared to poor and working-class African Americans (think of Justice Thomas or Dr. Ben Carson). For the Black elite, their success validates the dominant meritocratic fantasies of class society and leads them to believe that it is the personal failings of the less fortunate that cause their problems. To fight this system, Taylor argues, requires building solidarity among the oppressed and exploited. Taylor tells us that despite the ubiquitous “common sense” of “white privilege,” most ordinary whites live in fear about the future. The liberation needed by African Americans requires relentless struggle to win white workers to anti-racism—and then to a struggle against global capitalism.

Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle
Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux
City Lights Books, 2015

For Our Common Home: Process-Relational Responses to Laudato Si’
Edited by John B. Cobb, Jr. and Ignacio Castuera
Process Century Press, 2015

Those who have read Henry A. Giroux’s brilliant and provocative columns on our website, tikkun.org, will be excited to see how Evans and Giroux present a systematic exposé of American politics and culture in their book. Subtitled The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle, it unveils pervasive violence and sadism in contemporary America. Incorporating insights from Adorno, Arendt, Bauman, Deleuze, Foucault, Zizek, Marcuse, and Reich, the book confronts the violence and ethos of disposability represented by the prevalent neoliberalism of the Obama/Clinton age, the subservience of education to the requisites of the corporate economy, and the way that violence is now sold to us as entertainment. This is a must-read book for anyone ready to transcend fear and imagine a new reality.

Nowhere is this vision demonstrated more powerfully than in Pope Francis’s encyclical letter Laudato Si’. The responses to the Pope’s encyclical collected by John G. Cobb, Jr. and Ignacio Castuera—including an introduction from Bill McKibben and essays by Vandana Shiva, Rosemary Ruether, Herman Daly, David Ray Griffin, Roger S. Gottlieb, Mary Evelyn Tucker, Bonnie Tarwater, Philip Clayton, and many more—present a serious grappling with the Pope’s urgent message: the suffering of the earth and the fast-approaching environmental catastrophe, along with the suffering of the poor, who are most likely the first (but not the only) victims of this tragedy, is rooted in values that are intrinsic to the worldview of global capitalism.

My Father’s Guitar and Other Imaginary Things
Joseph Skibell
Algonquin Books, 2015

Native: Dispatches from an Israeli-Palestinian Life
Sayed Kashua
Grove Press, 2015

The Hilltop
Assaf Gavron
Scribner, 2013

The Yid
Paul Goldberg
Picador, 2016

A Street Divided: Stones From Jerusalem’s Alley of God
Dion Nissenbaum
Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Sometimes you get a better grip on reality by reading fiction than you get from nonfiction—or at least, at times, a relief from the craziness of the contemporary world. Here we’ve selected some authors whose works you might enjoy or learn from. Joseph Skibell’s A Curable Romantic is an enduring gem, and his true stories in My Father’s Guitar have been described...