Reviews of Books and Movies – The Multiracial Unity Blog

Movie Review: Pride and Billy Elliot and the UK Miners Strike 40th Anniversary

by Juliana Barnet, 3-26-2024 (from 2023)

Introduction (ed):

This year, British workers are commemorating the 40^th Anniversary of the strike. These two movies remind us of this enormous struggle.

Movies have a tremendous impact on the public’s understanding of politics and history. This year, Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon presented strong portrayals of the development of the atom bomb, the theft of Native American lands and oil, and the role of the FBI. In the past, Birth of a Nation promoted racist tropes of sexually aggressive black men that live today.

In this blog post, Barnet reviews two older films, Pride and Billy Eliot, that feature the UK Miners strike of 1984-85 when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher closed 20 mines, threw 20,000 miners out of work, and ripped apart social programs as President Reagan was doing in the US. The closures inspired a massive, militant strike of 140,000 miners across the UK that was supported by workers around the world.

Here, Barnet depicts activists, unions, and social movements in a political context. She contrasts the disparaging of the union in Billy Elliot with the positive portrayal of union people, organizing and building solidarity in Pride.

Anti-Racism as Communism, a Book Review

by Ellen Isaacs

March 16, 2024

Retired philosophy professor and communist Paul Gomberg has written a truly revolutionary book about racism. By this I do not mean just that he believes the revolutionary destruction of capitalism is necessary to destroy racism, but that the breadth and depth of his presentation is truly unique. Gomberg not only describes the historical development of racism, but shows how capitalism cannot survive without it. He focuses primarily on anti-black racism as the dominant paradigm in US history, but the analysis carries over to other marginalized groups and nations.

Learning from the ‘COVID War’

By Sam Friedman, 7-8-2023

This article first appeared at Learning from the ‘COVID War’ – Bill of Health (harvard.edu)

Amid an emergent international consensus that the COVID pandemic is “over,” writings about the pandemic and its meanings have burst forth like the flowers of June.

Group of people wearing medical masks to prevent disease, flu, air pollution, contaminated air, world pollution. Vector illustration in a flat style

This article will focus on one such book, Lessons from the COVID War: An Investigative Report. Produced by an eminently established collection of people, The COVID Crisis Group.

The book is intelligently critical of what was done during the pandemic, but at all points it remains within the confines of what is “politically respectable.” This respectability, I argue, means that their recommendations are too narrow to protect Americans, much less the populations of the Global South, from pandemics ahead (barring unexpectedly marvelous advances in vaccine breadth and rapidity of deployment).

THE FIRST BLACK PANTHER MOVIE: A Review

by a retired teacher, 11-14-2022

Yes, movies are entertaining and fun, but they also convey important viewpoints about life.

Undoubtedly, we won’t all agree about the ideas in a movie. I’m sharing this review to offer some thoughts that you may wish to consider while thinking about the implied themes in the brand new Wakanda Forever film. I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Here’s the original review:

For sure – as compared to many thousands of movies with no Black characters; or with just a few Black characters, all depicted as subservient; or with many Black characters but none given depth, complexity and leadership on the world scene – Black Panther is a breath of fresh air.

And it’s truly pleasing to hear about that day on the set, with hundreds of Black actors on the mountainside in a joyous mood between takes, celebrating the fact that so many actors of color have been employed in a major film, in a story about the most technologically advanced civilization on the planet. And it’s great to see women in leading roles: powerful, insightful, and on the cutting edge of scientific breakthroughs.

Never Throw Away the Key: The Compassionate Radicalism of Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. A Book Review

by Joseph G. Ramsey, 10-17-2022

The editors welcome this article from Joe Ramsey who analyzes Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. He argues that we must extend our compassion and beliefs that people can change to those whose situations lead to harmful actions. He states that: “the hierarchical sorting of people into the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ invariably draws upon and contributes to the toxic legacies of nationalism, race, class, as well as gender, homophobia, ableism, and more. But, as Stevenson makes clear, it is not simply abhorrent as an expression of such injustice. It is fundamentally dehumanizing and alienating for all involved, and corrosive to the potential for positive social change in general.” Ramsey’s review contributes to the discussion of abolition, restorative justice, and mitigation. Is it possible to treat people with compassion under capitalism? Do we want to forgive perpetrators of crimes against the working class, whether police or fascist rulers? Can we abolish or mitigate racism under capitalism? Read on. The Editors.

————————————————————–

“Our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.”

-Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me.”*

-Terence, African Roman playwright & former slave

(*favorite ‘maxim’ of Karl Marx)

Far too many people in the United States are officially condemned to have their futures cut short.[1] The most extreme of these cases are found on Death Row, where thousands now sit, sentenced to be executed by the state—some likely for crimes they did not even commit.[2] To these we must add another 55,000 people who languish permanently in US prisons, sentenced to “life” without even the possibility of parole.[3] They too are condemned to die, behind bars, if not today, then eventually—no matter what they do or say, no matter how unfair the events that landed them in prison in the first place.[4]

What does it mean for a society to condemn so many, so finally?

Looking Back at Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy

by Glenn Kissack

September 2, 2022

Not only do tens of millions of people around the world hate capitalism and want to see it replaced with a society run by and for workers, but they have felt that way for many generations. 125 years ago, Edward Bellamy wrote the novel Looking Backward, a powerful and intelligent critique of capitalism, a system that Bellamy considered cruel and wasteful. It was written at a time of great inequality and great workers’ struggles and also soon after Karl Marx had published his searing analysis of capitalism in the Communist Manifesto. Marx also raised ideas about how a post-capitalist communist society would work, most profoundly from each worker according to ability and to each according to need. Looking Backward is Bellamy’s vivid description of the egalitarian society that he saw replacing capitalism.

Review: Plague at the Golden Gate

by Karyn Pomerantz, 6-4-2022

PBS film on the bubonic plague of 1901 in SF

Imagine this scenario:

Disease outbreak blamed on Chinese
Physicians coverup cases in white areas
Business needs outweighed health protection
Denial of healthcare to Chinese workers creates distrust of physicians and public health officers
No cure existed
It took years to find the zoonotic cause and control transmission

Sound familiar??

No, it’s not Covid. It is the bubonic plague that appeared in San Francisco in 1901. The Plague at the Golden Gate, a documentary produced by PBS, portrays the desperate search for the cause of the rapid deaths among Chinese residents crammed into a crowded neighborhood known as Chinatown. Out of 120 plague stricken people, 119 died. The handling of the outbreak holds lessons for public health workers, government officials, and the public today.

Book review – Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War, by David Williams

by Fran Gilmore

January 15, 2022

I never studied the Civil War, except briefly in an eighth grade US History class. Thus my knowledge was confined to the myths in American textbooks and what I imbibed from the culture in general, such as movies and other media. My conception was that southerners before and during the Civil War were solidly united in favor or slavery and the war to preserve it, and were solidly racist. Williams’ book shows that the latter notion was true–even those opposed to slavery were for the most part racist. But there were a few cases of whites opposed to both slavery and the war uniting with slaves to fight the confederacy, examples of the multiracial unity that remains so critical for the success of workers’ struggles today.

Inflamed: Inspiring But Insufficient

A Book Review by Ellen Isaacs, October, 2021

The popular new book Inflamed, by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel, is both enlightening and enraging. It has several dominant themes. One is that inflammation is behind most disease processes in all parts of our bodies, an idea that is more and more accepted by conventional medicine. However the authors carry the idea farther, showing how the environment, both physical and social, is deeply entwined with inflammation and how even heredity is affected by these processes. The second main theme is that modern medicine has detached bodily systems from each other and the body from the world it inhabits just as modern humans have fallen out of harmony both with each other and the world around them. In contrast, there are many indigenous cultures that are better synchronized with their environment.