Synopses & Reviews
Toxic Diversity offers an invigorating view of race, gender, and law in America. Analyzing the work of preeminent legal scholars such as Patricia Williams, Derrick Bell, Lani Guinier, and Richard Delgado, Dan Subotnik argues that race and gender theorists poison our social and intellectual environment by almost deliberately misinterpreting racial interaction and data and turning white males into victimizers. Far from energizing women and minorities, Subotnik concludes, theorists divert their energies from implementing America's social justice agenda.
Insisting, in the words of James Baldwin, that “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced,” and that thoughtful Americans regardless of race and gender can handle frank conversations about difficult topics, Subotniks critique of race and gender theory pulls no punches as it confronts such inflammatory issues as single parenthood, the merit system in academic and business settings, gender privilege in the classroom, and crime.
Review
“A thoughtful critique of identity politics in the nation's law schools. . . . It is the great merit of Mr. Subotnik’s work that he moves us toward a single standard for judging scholarship and thus helps create the conditions for the common enterprise of explaining our social world—and even, if we are lucky, improving it.”
“Many outside the universities think that political correctness faded from the campus in the mid-nineties. Dan Subotnik shows that it never went away: it got tenure. This book is beautifully written, consistently enjoyable, and replete with wonderful anecdotes and memorable humor. It is also thoroughly researched and reliable.”
“This is the kind of fearless work that will read as common sense a hundred years from now, to readers who will be as perplexed by much of our current race writing as we are today by medieval tracts about alchemy.”
“The left knows how to dish out criticism. Can it take it? With the publication of Toxic Diversity, we'll find out. More subtle and searching than other critiques of critical race theory, critical legal studies, and feminist legal theory, Dan Subotnik’s book poses challenges that all progressives, myself included, will need to consider.”
“An entertaining and enlightening excursion into the world of critical race and gender theory. Even those who disagree with Subotnik’s critique will appreciate the value of his analysis. Toxic Diversity is a worthwhile contribution to the dialogue over diversity in its many forms.”
Synopsis
Friends as lovers; lovers as friends; ex-lovers as friends; ex-lovers as family; friends as family; communities of friends; lesbian community. These are just a few of the phrases heard often in the daily discourse of lesbian life. What significance do they have for lesbians? Do lesbians view friends as family and what does this analogy mean? What sorts of friendships exist between lesbians? What sorts of friendships do lesbians form with non-lesbian women, or with men?
These and other questions regarding the kinds of friendships lesbians imagine and experience have rarely been addressed. Lesbian Friendships focuses on actual accounts of friendships involving lesbians and examines a number of issues, including the transition from friends to lovers and/or lovers to friends, erotic attraction in friendship, diverse identities among lesbians, and friendships across sexuality and/or gender lines.
About the Author
Jacqueline S. Weinstock is Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies at the University of Washington Tacoma. She is co- author of Public Homeplaces: Women and the Struggle against Otherness (Belenky, Bond and Weinstock).
Esther D. Rothblum is professor of women's studies at San Diego State University. She is the editor or co-editor of over twenty books, including Overcoming Fear of Fat.