Reviews and Comments

Generally, the practical advice in Radical Candor is solid. As someone who is relatively new to management work, much of the common mistakes the book mentions was very revealing. I noticed a lot of things that I can improve in my work and the book gave me some good techniques to do so. For this I would recommend it.

However there’s a few things that stuck out badly. When talking about issues around gender, Kim Scott brings up the term “gender politics” without really explaining what she means by that and after one short anecdote concludes that “We must end gender politics”. Without any explanation this term encompasses a lot of things. For example I’d say working towards equal pay, unbiased hiring and promotion processes as well as access to reproductive and gender affirming healthcare are all issues of “gender politics”. Claiming that all those efforts should end with such a strong generalization is very strange.
The book also draws a false equivalence when describing “anti-gay jokes” and “anti-conservative jokes” in the workplace as both being equally inappropriate. Political affiliation is a person’s choice as opposed to one’s sexuality and discrimination as well as violence targeting people for their sexuality is a very real threat while this is not the case for conservative politics (which in fact are directly responsible for much of the discrimination against LGBT people).

In “Toward a Political Philosophy of Race” Falguni A. Sheth offers a very interesting framework for thinking about race: as a technology that especially liberal western societies deploy to manage populations that the dominant population perceive as “strange” and therefore threatening which Sheth calls “unruly”. She describes the various ways in which a population is “cut” from the society and how it’s perceived otherness (or “Strangeness” as Sheth elaborates early in the book) is used and exaggerated by treating the actions of a few as representative of the entire group. Sheth elaborates this with the example of how Muslim populations have been marked as sufficiently “strange” in western liberal societies in the late 20th century and how the terrorist attacks on September 11th 2001 in New York City have been used to remove legal protections from those populations.

The book focuses mostly on events and their consequences in the United States of America and only on occasion references how the technology of race is similarly used in other countries, with the notable exception of the racial conflicts and resulting genocides in Rwanda after Belgian colonial rule which is covered extensively.

Sheth also points out that the process of marking a population as “strange” and “unruly” and denying it legal protection can and is also applied to e.g. homosexual or transgender populations and is not exclusive to concepts of race.

However, despite making very interesting points and building a useful philosophical framework, I found the book to be too repetitive at times. Sheth often makes the same points multiple times in each chapter whiteout really adding to them substantially after introducing them. That made the book very challenging to read because it requires full attention and careful reading but at the same time, through its repetitive parts especially in later chapters, makes it hard to keep that level of attention.

Still, I would recommend “Toward a Political Philosophy of Race” to anyone who wants to dive deeper into this kind of political philosophy. For book that covers many of the same topics but through a different lens and in a more condensed form, I would suggest “Social Death” by Lisa Marie Cacho.

Note: (C)AMAB = (coercively) assigned male at birth

"Resilience" was a book that had me just think "Yes, exactly that" many times. This collections of writings from (C)AMAB trans writers manages to capture and resonate with the emotional experience of this live so well. I'm not sure if a cis person reading it would have a comparable experience, but it certainly will provide some valuable insight.

It includes perspectives from a variety of backgrounds, especially works from writers who face multiple forms of discrimination by not only being trans but also experiencing racism and the consequences of colonialism for example. I think those compounding issues are often overlooked even within trans communities.

Being an anthology, probably not every work in it will be to everyones taste. I personally didn't enjoy most of the poetry very much but I have my difficulty with poetry in general. I got much more out of the short stories, autobiographic accounts and essays. The pieces can be read in any order and do not depend on each other so skipping some is perfectly fine.

Without spoiling them, here are the ones I liked best:

- Black, Trans and Still Breathing
- Puzzle Box
- 1 AM
- Mosca's Last Ride
- Wednesday Morning
- The Most Important Trans Woman I Never Knew
- Her Name Was Pearl
- Behind Enemy Lines
- Girlhood, Interrupted
- Read to Me
- Goldilocks Lynched
- I don't think you understand what 'attraction' means
- Failure
- Hormones
- Elegy

Some of the works (most of them really) cover some heavy and sensitive topics that might be difficult for those living those experiences themselves. The book includes a full list of content warnings in the back. I recommend referring to it before reading on.

I'd absolutely recommend this book to anyone who wants some insight into the personal lives of (C)AMAB trans people, their feelings, struggles, failures and everyday problems but also joys and victories.

For me personally, reading this book provided a much needed feeling of kinship. Seeing myself reflected in so many of these stories helped in feeling less alone in this world.

First, I want to say: This book is excellent and absolutely worth a read. It is one of the best non-fiction books I have read.

However: This was also probably the most difficult book I've ever read. Mostly because it's clearly an academic text written for an academic audience. Because of that, its language is somewhat inaccessible and I found myself looking up words in a dictionary a lot that aren't specific to the subject matter. I thought my english was pretty good, but this book has proven me wrong. A more accessible writing style could probably make this book approachable for a wider audience.

"Social Death" is clearly not an introductory work when it comes to anti-racist philosophy. Before this, I've read "Why I No Longer Talk To White People About Race" by Reni Eddo-Lodge and, what I consider its (more or less) German counterpart, "Deutschland Schwarz Weiß" by Noah Sow. I had also already spent some time following anti-racist discourse on social media and was familiar with concepts like intersectional theory. Still, "Social Death" was a challenging read and I might have to read it again in a few years to fill in a few things I missed the first time.

Because it was so challenging, it took some dedication to actually finish it. This book in not what you can call a "page turner". I often had to re-read entire sections to really get what they were even about but it usually turned out to be worth it.

The book is split into large chapters that build on top of each other. They are definitely meant to be read on order for the first time. Cacho early on specifies a few terms that are used throughout the book, e.g. "social death", "death worlds" and "intelligible rights". Each chapter focuses on a different group in the US that is affected by structural racism. She also mentions that the mechanics of social death apply not only through racism but other forms of discrimination against deviance from the white, cis, hetero, male norm. In later chapters she explores how concepts of race, class and gender interact, specifically racialized masculinity. This could also be a point of criticism since most of the people who are talked about in "Social Death" are men. I would have hoped for a more balanced focus and more attention on how these issues affect women, non-binary or other gender-nonconforming people.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a very detailed analysis of how racial (and other) inequality functions, what role modern legal systems specifically play in it.