Book Review: "From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime" by Elizabeth Hinton

I've recently read the book From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime by Elizabeth Hinton. This book is a history of the progression through the titular subjects in the US, starting with the Kennedy presidency and ending with the Reagan presidency. It shows how while some problems associated with the war on poverty did come from good but conflicting intentions when implementing social welfare programs, many more problems came from halfhearted implementation of social welfare programs with the intent & through the lens of fighting crime leading ultimately to replacement of those programs with more explicit expansions of policing to fight crime especially in response to high-profile riots in large cities in the 1960s & 1970s.

The introduction makes clear that the war on crime started with the presidency of Lyndon Johnson and arguably even earlier with the Kennedy administration's efforts to combat juvenile delinquency, so the association of the war on crime primarily with the presidencies Nixon, Ford, and Reagan (as Carter is often left out of popular discussions about this despite being equally responsible in these ways) is because those presidents (and Carter) cut funding for social welfare programs that Johnson initially saw as integral to the success of programs combating crime but began to back away from by the end of his presidency, increased funding for policing, and shifted focus to arrests & imprisonments as ways to prevent future crimes. The author discusses how law enforcement agencies started to develop biased metrics for crime & collect data in biased ways to justify racist theories about the supposedly inherent pathologies of black Americans in cities, even as some politicians at that time wondered if law enforcement agencies should be collecting crime statistics given the conflict of interest. The author emphasizes the bipartisan white American political consensus about crime after 1960 to show that it wasn't just Reagan or other Republicans in the 1980s who focused on punishment through veiled racism. The author also discusses how black American community leaders in & after the 1960s wanted to partner with law enforcement agencies to develop effective strategies together to deal with local problems at the root of local crimes, but conservative politicians (from both parties) deliberately moved away from such partnerships toward the federal block grant funding model that would incentivize states to conduct law enforcement in the most heavy-handed & punitive way possible especially in urban black neighborhoods, which led many black Americans to stop trusting law enforcement. My only criticism specifically about the introduction (that doesn't have to do with the rest of the book) is that the author's language about conditional probabilities is quite sloppy, which is problematic in the context of discussions about biases in data collection & statistical analysis by law enforcement agencies about crime.

The rest of the book simply goes through the history in detail. In the introduction, I wasn't sure who the target audience of the book was supposed to be given frequent references to gaps in academic literature in the main text, but the narrative became more clear through the rest of the book.

There are a few points that I credit the book for. These are as follows.

First, the author repeats points effectively to reinforce the narrative. This makes the narrative easy to follow, and the narrative is clearly well-sourced.

Second, I didn't know that the war on crime dated back to the Kennedy administration. I can claim to have learned that from this book.

Third, I didn't know that close federal cooperation directly with local governments also dated back to the Kennedy administration at the latest. I can claim to have learned that from this book. This is an issue that has been on my mind for a while in the context of empowering cities whose political views oppose those of their state governments which want to disempower them (because while there is a clear federal relationship among the federal, state, and tribal governments in the US Constitution, the US Constitution doesn't govern states' internal affairs, and many states treat their constituent cities as fully subordinate to state governments in all matters).

Fourth, in my view, the author correctly recognizes that policies to combat crime should be evaluated for effectiveness several years afterwards, as there are no quick fixes. The author therefore evaluates whether different parts of the war on crime had effects on crime 10-20 years later instead of just a year later, as the latter would have been a political cheap shot.

Fifth, I appreciate the author's recognition that the US made the same mistakes in both military & social welfare strategies domestically as in invasions of other countries. The author makes clear that many politicians at that time recognized this in the context of wars in Southeast Asia. This adds another dimension to arguments from the book How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything by Rosa Brooks (which I have reviewed on this blog [LINK]) which, from what I remember, focused a little more on more recent invasions of Afghanistan & Iraq.

However, there are many more points in the book which I find problematic. These are as follows.

First, at several points, the author claims that news media & politicians often overstated the prevalence of violent crime, but the author's claims that federal law enforcement statistics about crime were less biased before the 1960s are undercut by the author's acknowledgment that such statistics were collected much more sparsely and in a more ad hoc way before the 1960s. Even leaving aside this point, the author doesn't (in the main text, leaving out the endnotes) name or cite enough specific sources to effectively argue against the dominant narrative of that time, which the book simply restates while feebly arguing against, or intuitively explain why certain crime statistics may initially look alarming but may actually imply rarity of such incidents in practice for an individual. For example, it could be argued that a certain homicide rate given in homicides per million people per year could look big at first but could be argued to imply that an individual has a very low chance of being killed by another person on a given day. (I don't know enough about crime statistics to know what specific number could plausibly fit this description.)

Second, at several points, the author basically wags a finger against what the federal government did, but in some cases where solutions are longer-term and therefore more obvious like investments in unleaded plumbing, better street lighting, or better sidewalks, the author barely identifies these, and in other cases where issues like imminent or continuing riots are spiraling out of control, the author doesn't convincingly argue in favor of specific alternatives except in perhaps 1 or 2 isolated cases. Part of the problem, as becomes clear in the epilogue, may be that the federal government prematurely dismissed such alternatives before seriously trying them, but then the author should have spent more space arguing for such programs on their own potential specific merits instead of giving most of the space to the arguments of contemporary politicians that, by dominating the narrative, may unintentionally seem more convincing than the author may have wanted.

Third, the author argues at some points that poor black Americans should have been empowered from the bottom-up but at other points that they should have gotten similar top-down federal assistance as poor white Americans (which did happen in the war on poverty, albeit at much less monetary amounts per person). This seems incoherent, and the author makes no attempt to explain why these views are compatible with each other.

Fourth, the author ignores the issues of continued slum clearance, urban highway construction, and the dynamics of white flight from urban cores in much of the narrative. I've read in many other places how critical these concerns were in the context of urban crime, so it is surprising to see no mention of these concerns in the book.

Fifth, the author seems to unduly dismiss the challenges that the Carter administration faced in rebuilding damaged urban neighborhoods in the face of high interest rates & high inflation in the 1970s. Perhaps the argument would have been stronger if the author could have found examples of the Carter administration spending scarce resources on less dire issues.

Sixth, in the introduction, the author claims that the war on crime specifically wasn't a reincarnation of the Jim Crow era, but later in the book, the author at many points implies & comes close to explicitly saying exactly that. This seems inconsistent, though to be fair, it was obvious to me that the author would ultimately argue that the war on crime was related to the Jim Crow era, so this inconsistency only threw me off in the introduction.

Seventh, I found it interesting that the author used scare quotes around the term "evil empire" and called the Cold War "Reagan's Cold War". It could be argued that the latter was a more specific reference to how the Reagan administration waged the Cold War in the 1980s as a smaller part of the broader conflict over decades, but based on the author's other stated & implied views through the book, I see it more likely as evidence of the author having far left-wing sympathies, because the latter term in the broader context of the author's views through the book sounds like the author believes the Reagan administration was too bellicose toward the USSR and was too taken by American propaganda over decades to admit that some parts of Soviet propaganda especially about race relations could be true (which is debatable in the context of internal affairs in the USSR).

Eighth, the author seems to argue that the implementation of the ban of handguns but not shotguns was racist because it failed to separate bans on weapons (which should mostly be about destroying those weapons and removing sources of weapons production, though perhaps some further consequences could be appropriate for repeat offenders) from the harsh punishment of offenders. I agree with this in the context of having excessive punishments and in the sense that, even now, it is clear in the US that white Americans are much more often than black Americans given the benefit of the doubt with respect to usage of firearms in self-defense or the possession of firearms per the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. Moreover, it is worth remembering that while courts of law in the US didn't start to systematically recognize an individual right to bear arms until the 2000s (many decades after the 1960s), that doesn't mean that everyone was prosecuted equally for bearing firearms before the 2000s; it is much more plausible that there were racial disparities in enforcement of such laws. However, I think the author doesn't do a good job of acknowledging how the much greater difficulty in using a shotgun to commit violent crimes in urban settings compared to using a handgun for the same purpose makes a handgun ban more sensible without such a ban (separate from the consequences to humans who violate such bans) necessarily being racist per se.

Ninth, at several points, the author seems to go beyond merely describing large-scale riots led by black Americans as a predictable consequence of oppression to being an apologist for such riots. I do at least acknowledge the merit in describing such predictable consequences from a sociological perspective. Also, I admit that it took me a while to understand the author's point that the problem with claiming in the 1960s & later that black Americans are culturally pathological is that such claims were coming from white American politicians who wanted to claim that such cultural pathology was the root of poverty & crime (and not the other way around). Finally, while I still believe that any human culture can have pathological elements in which some elements come from a history of being oppressed & therefore traumatized while other elements may be evidence of being a privileged or oppressive group (so there is no such thing as being a purely "good" or "oppressed" group or a purely "bad" or "oppressive" group), I can understand the author's desire to call white American racism as the dominant group in the US something closer to "cultural pathology" and the cultural pathologies that may result directly from centuries of oppression "trauma" as qualitatively distinct things within the context of US history. Having said those things, I don't think the author did a good enough job of acknowledging that even if some ideal form of reparations for these harms could be formulated & implemented overnight, the lasting effects of these traumas could continue to have negative consequences for different localities & the US as a whole for many decades, and especially now with the US having so many residents & citizens who come from other places & don't identify as white or black, I'm not sure how many Americans would have the patience to wait decades for those things to resolve even if they are much more understanding & supportive of the need for reparations than most white Americans would have been in the 1960s (as the author shows how white Americans in the 1960s wanted quick fixes to the eruptions of violence in response to oppression, which led to further oppression through brutal crackdowns by law enforcement).

Overall, I still recommend this book because the basic historical narrative is well-written & well-sourced; I do feel like I learned a little bit and I had a lot to think about. I just think that readers should be aware of the author's biases as I've discussed above.

Book Review: "The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee" by David Treuer

I've recently read the book The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by David Treuer. This book was a gift to me from a family friend who heard that I like reading about American history and other nonfiction topics, and when that person gave me this book, we further discussed the historical injustices inflicted by white Americans upon Native Americans, the deep connections that Native American religions & spirituality have with land & nature, and the way that Native Americans see themselves as truly indigenous as opposed to being traveling groups of humans like any other group passing through a given land. In that conversation, I also noted that reading this book would be professionally useful to me given that my professional interest in transportation equity would intersect with how Native Americans have been at the forefront of many recent social & environmental justice movements and how Native cultures & issues are much more visible in the Southwest than in the Northeast (due to the history of forced removal). It was with these conversations in mind that I read this book.

This book is a combination of historical accounts, contemporary interviews, and observations by the author. The author is a Native American (from the Ojibwe tribe) who grew up on a reservation, and his stated goal in writing this book was to create a more complete picture of how Native Americans have continued to live (especially but not exclusively under adverse conditions) in every part of the US since the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890, as he felt that too many people (both people sympathetic to Native Americans and those wishing to exterminate them) wrongly framed that massacre as the final death of Native American culture, life, and identity.

Coming into reading this book, I already knew a bit about how some Native people and tribes owned black slaves, the complex loyalties that Native tribes had for or against the US government at different points (especially in the Revolutionary War as well as the Civil War), Indian boarding schools, Native land management practices, the complex results of trade between Native tribes & European settlers, how Native tribal raids were often ceremonial instead of being true acts of war, and how some tribes have gotten guaranteed income from their casinos. However, I learned more about seminal battles & massacres, notable successes in Native governance in the 19th & 20th centuries, land allotments, termination of tribal governments, the way that some Native tribes became much more mobile & spread much more after the introduction of horses, the way that agriculture (especially of corn) spread throughout the Americas, the Native conception of the geography of the Americas (especially centering the Great Lakes, with river networks to the north and south leading away), how varying numbers of Native Americans remained in every part of the US even after forced removal, the Indian Rights movements of the 19th & 20th centuries, and how Native American cultures & identities were mixed & reformed many times in the crucible of shared suffering. It was also interesting to see the author directly compare the situation in Palestine to European settlement of the Americas, implicitly compare white American settlement of Native lands in the 19th & 20th centuries to rich white gentrification of urban neighborhoods which previously mostly had poor people of color, and explain that the fact that some but not all companies that helped white Americans move west in the 19th century had smallpox vaccine mandates for their [white American] employees so those companies that didn't have such mandates could be directly linked to the spread of smallpox in Native tribes (which bears striking parallels to current debates in the US regarding mandates for vaccines against this coronavirus).

Initially, I was a little put off by the meandering nature of the narrative, but I came to appreciate it more as the book progressed. Also, based on my expectations of this book, I wanted to see more of the promised discussion of Native American religions that arose from the crucible of oppression as well as from the broader 1960s American counterculture, as I figured there would be parallels with how Hinduism in North India had to reinvent itself in the crucibles of Mughal conquest and then British colonialism and later found common cause with American & British hippies. I was thus initially disappointed to not see so much discussion of those issues, but as I read further, I thought it was nice to read about what contemporary Native American individuals are actually doing in & for their communities instead of feeling beaten over the head with arcane mysticism. Similarly, I was initially disappointed by the lack of further discussion after the initial mention of how Native Americans see themselves as part of a people truly indigenous to North America, but as I read further, I thought it was nice to read about Native American individuals' & communities' actual modern subsistence practices & knowledge of the land instead of feeling beaten over the head by mysticism of a connection to the land that cannot be explained to people who aren't Native Americans.

I really appreciated that the author, in his desire to make Native Americans feel empowered to tell their own people's story in a way that doesn't necessarily end in 1890 as a tragedy, doesn't shy away from hard truths, like Native Americans owning black slaves, Native Americans helping European and later white American settles massacre other Native Americans, and more recently Native tribal officials not doing their duties by not meeting with executives of the Dakota Access Pipeline soon enough. The author of course doesn't deny the history of oppression and genocide, but he strikes a good balance between acknowledging genocide and acknowledging Native Americans' own agency in their own history as a way of showing that with empowerment comes responsibility. I also appreciated that the author didn't frame Native religions, land practices, or their lack of written records in mystical ways that ultimately fail to connect with people who aren't Native Americans. This is really an anti-cynical, forward-looking, optimistic book that I believe can be a light for all Americans in these bitterly divided & troubled times, so I recommend this book to anyone, especially in the US; I don't claim that this is the best book ever, but I do believe that reading it carefully can slowly plant seeds of cautious optimism about the US in a reader's mind. Furthermore, from my own perspective, while I don't claim that this book is a comprehensive overview of Native American history & culture, I can use it as a starting point to better frame my view of Native Americans, and I can feel a little less intimidated to read more deeply about Native American history, culture, and activism.

Book Review: "The Half Has Never Been Told" by Edward Baptist

I've recently been able to read the book The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist. It is a thorough account of the history of chattel slavery in the present-day US from the 17th century through the Civil War. The main point of the book is to challenge three common assumptions in prevailing historical narratives of slavery, namely that its incompatibilities with liberal democracy in the 1850s were points of universal agreement in the North at that time and drove the Civil War, that its worst aspects were its denial of civil liberties & rights to black people, and that it was bound to fail eventually for being an inefficient economic system. The author counters this, marshaling numerous statistics from that time and corroborating analyses too, to show that slavery was in fact an efficient and dynamic economic system that went hand-in-hand with capitalism and national expansion, and further uses the stories of individual slaves (often left out of conventional historical narratives) on top of the available statistics to show the violence and brutality inherent in slavery as extending far beyond the mere denial of rights (as that denial of rights remained even in the Jim Crow era succeeding slavery).

The facts are presented in a very straightforward manner, and the narrative structure is remarkably coherent and engaging; this makes the emotionally weight of the book all the more apparent. I was particularly surprised to see not just how much of financial speculation familiar to modern readers was present with respect to the products of slavery in the 19th century, but particularly to see that even the slicing and dicing of securities that was practiced on subprime mortgages leading up to the 2008 financial crisis & recession were practiced almost identically with securities representing fractions of average slave labor products in the 1830s (even leading to financial panics then too). Moreover, while I was abstractly aware of the lack of happy endings for most slaves and the conditions of enslavement that would prevent successful revolts or emancipation, the reality of this didn't truly hit me until reading this book, seeing so many stories of slaves whose histories were obscured after a final sale or flogging. It was also quite interesting (and depressing) to see just how much slavery and the desire to maintain unity across the country drove the national political & economic conversations right up until the Civil War, and how much the North economically depended on the products of slavery until they started getting many more immigrants and gaining political power in turn; that discussion really puts into perspective just how simple lies the narratives of the Civil War being "for states' rights" or "of Northern aggression" were. The content is of course depressing to read, but that only enhances its importance; I really believe that this should be taught in schools & colleges to remove a lot of the myths and misinformation about slavery that are promulgated in schools throughout the country, and for that reason, I certainly recommend this book to anyone (though one must be mentally prepared to read about the horrors described).

Book Review: "Hidden Figures" by Margot Lee Shetterly

I've recently read the book Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly. It weaves together the true stories of a few particular mathematicians, who happened to be black women (among a larger group of such female black mathematicians), who made extremely important contributions to the development of American warplanes in WWII and then spacecrafts during the 1950s and 1960s, including the crafts that took John Glenn to space and then the Apollo 11 astronauts to the moon. It highlights the skills of these women and their own personal lives, in conjunction with the broader social issues of that time.

The book is moderately long, but it is very well-written and engaging. I liked seeing the descriptions of these towns that flourished during the wartime years and the space race as bustling with life and energy, because with the trends of deindustrialization starting from a few decades ago, I haven't really been able to see descriptions such towns as much beyond shells of their former selves. This also ties in with the discussions of the military-industrial complex and how the formation of these towns during the wartime was a symptom of that phenomenon, which in turn meant that as wartime research facilities and organizations were often temporary, even if they hired black people, allowing them to economically advance to the middle class, those economic advancements became tenuous due to the temporary nature of such jobs, such that when the goal was met (whether it was winning the war or landing on the moon), those facilities would be closed and the employees there would be displaced with few, if any, alternatives available to them. Of course, pervading the book were descriptions of the explicit and implicit forms of institutionalized racism and sexism, whether at work in the form of barriers to career advancement or collegiality/free exchange of ideas, or in the context of daily life with respect to the civil rights movement, sit-ins, et cetera. Not only were those issues discussed in a broader context, but their impact on the specific protagonists of the book was detailed, showing how these women had to deal with so many struggles just to stay afloat while still trying to achieve the same goals to which any other family of any ethnicity would strive, namely, caring for spouses and children, putting food on the table, balancing work and family, and being able to raise children in a safe environment and educate them well; it really helped that the author so masterfully portrayed the mundanity of daily daily life for these women to show how stupid obstacles, like legalized segregation and institutionalized barriers to career advancement, could get in the way of the passion that these women had for STEM. It was also interesting to see that black communities like those in this book were acutely aware of how much more advanced the USSR and other communist countries were in terms of race and gender relations, and actively called out the US on its own failings in that regard (in the context of the US trying to ally with African and Asian countries that used to be European colonies), while these black women, despite being in the middle of such institutional bigotry, kept their heads held high and persevered in pursuit of their goals to contribute to STEM R&D. Related to that, it was also chilling to see how de facto segregation has persisted in education in many places through the US resulting in school facilities that in many poor places are no better than they were several decades ago, and also to see how many of the arguments for white parents sending their kids to private schools at that time were more explicitly about preserving racial segregation in education. Overall, I enjoyed this book thoroughly and would strongly recommend it to people for a clear and engaging account of how NASA and the social issues of the middle of the 20th century became intertwined.

Book Review: "More Than Just Race" by William Julius Wilson

The book that I've been able to read most recently has been More Than Just Race by William Julius Wilson. It is essentially a collection of 3 essays (each as a chapter) concerning various issues of the black experience (especially in cities) in the US, separately considering the conditions of black ghettos, the socioeconomic problems of poor black males, and the breakdown of poor black familial structures. These chapters are bookended by introductory and concluding chapters summarizing and further expounding on these issues. The main purpose of the book is to analyze, through various studies from the social sciences, the complementary roles of structure and culture in explaining why blacks in the US, especially in inner cities, are worse of by many metrics than their suburban counterparts and than people of other races/ethnicities in the US.

It is a relatively recent book (2009), but it isn't recent enough to have touched upon issues of police brutality and exploitation in urban black communities or issues of socioeconomic decay in poor white communities in cities as well as in rural areas (characterized by structural joblessness, opioid addiction, et cetera). The book itself is short, but the main three essays themselves are a bit dry. In particular, the essays are essentially separate from each other and can be read as such, but there aren't many attempts to form an overarching narrative (beyond the idea that structure and culture combine to explain the issues that many black Americans face), and the few attempts that do exist feel somewhat forced; perhaps the issue is that these issues are simply too nuanced to be described in a single broad brushstroke, but while that is clear from the details of the book, it would have been nice to see such a thesis made a little more explicit. Additionally, there are a few arguments that get rather muddled, and some ideas that aren't touched upon much after their introduction, perhaps because they don't fit the local narrative quite as well; I'll discuss these and other issues after the jump. Overall, while the discussion of structural issues seemed to be in line with a lot of what I've read in articles in newspapers and magazines in the last few years (probably because the author is an academic heavyweight in these areas anyway), the discussion of which cultural factors seem more (or less) plausible is relatively new to me, and their combination is much more nuanced than any of the broad stereotypes of individuals or institutions that I have seen previously; I rather appreciate this book for providing that perspective.