Freespace

This year's reading

Best book I read this year:

1. Roots by Alex Haley*

This is a great novel, and deserves a place among the classics. I’m mystified by the allegations of plagiarism, which appear to me so minor as to amount to trivial nit-picking. Yet Haley is treated almost like a pariah as a result. That’s unfair. Like all writers, Haley incorporated other things into his work. And while he worked with an assistant, that’s true also of such undisputed classic authors as Laura Wilder. This book is flawed, no doubt, and it was wrong for Haley to call it fact. But read it as a novel, and it is in the same category as Twain, and a mile above Margaret Mitchell.

 Most disappointing:

2. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is, by a wide margin, the worst book I have ever read.

Honorable Mentions:

What should I read in 2018?

Every year, I put together a list of books to read. I rarely have the discipline to stick to it, but it’s nice to try. I’m making my 2018 list now and I’d welcome any suggestions.

Suffer the little children

The newest issue of Regulation is out, and it includes my article about the Indian Child Welfare Act. Here's an excerpt:

[W]hile state laws impose no racial limits on adoption or foster care, the ICWA overrides those laws and mandates race-matching by requiring that Indian children be placed with Indians except in unusual cases. The racial nature of this requirement is made clear by the fact that it gives priority to “Indian” families even if they are of different tribes, meaning that an Inuit child must be placed with a Seminole or Penobscot family instead of a white family regardless of the vast differences between those cultures. The law thus incorporates the concept of “generic Indianness”—a notion invented by white settlers who ignored the distinctions between aboriginal North Americans and regarded them as fungible. As Justice Clarence Thomas recently observed, “treating all Indian tribes as an undifferentiated mass” is “ahistorical.” It is also fundamentally racist....

Given the right circumstances, of course, Indian kids do as well as other kids. But the ICWA often prevents them from getting the support and protection they need and compromises their best interests in order to perpetuate racial separatism. Its burdensome requirements deter foster parents from taking in Indian children and make them less likely to try adopting. Although it was passed with good intentions—to prevent abuses by state officials who wield tremendous power over families that are often unable to protect themselves in court—the law often ends up harming the very children it was supposed to protect.

Read the rest...