Reconsidering Reagan by Daniel Lucks

Reconsidering Reagan by Daniel Lucks

2021 Prose Award Finalist

A long-overdue and sober examination of President Ronald Reagan's racist politics that continue to harm communities today and helped shape the modern conservative movement.

Ronald Reagan is hailed as a transformative president and an American icon, but within his twentieth-century politics lies a racial legacy that is rarely discussed. Both political parties point to Reagan as the right kind of conservative but fail to acknowledge his political attacks on people of color prior to and during his presidency. Reconsidering Reagan corrects that narrative and reveals how his views, policies, and actions were devastating for Black Americans and racial minorities, and that the effects continue to resonate today.

Using research from previously untapped resources including the Black press which critically covered Reagan's entire political career, Daniel S. Lucks traces Reagan's gradual embrace of conservatism, his opposition to landmark civil rights legislation, his coziness with segregationists, and his skill in tapping into white anxiety about race, riding a wave of white backlash all the way to the Presidency. He argues that Reagan has the worst civil rights record of any President since the 1920s--including supporting South African apartheid, packing courts with conservatives, targeting laws prohibiting discrimination in education and housing, and launching the War on Drugs--which had cataclysmic consequences on the lives of Black and Brown people.

Linking the past to the present, Lucks expertly examines how Reagan set the blueprint for President Trump and proves that he is not an anomaly, but in fact the logical successor to bring back the racially tumultuous America that Reagan conceptualized.

Lucks, Daniel S.: - Daniel S. Lucks holds a Ph.D. in American history from the University of California, Berkeley. He is an attorney of law and lives in Los Angeles.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780807029572
ISBN 10	0807029572
Title	Reconsidering Reagan
Author	Daniel Lucks
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Beacon Press
Year published	2020-08-04
Number of pages	416
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable