Best of
Race

2002

Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays


June Jordan - 2002
    The essays in this collection, which include her last writings and span the length of her extraordinary career, reveal Jordan as an incisive analyst of the personal and public costs of remaining committed to the ideal and practice of democracy. Willing to venture into the most painful contradictions of American culture and politics, Jordan comes back with lyrical honesty, wit, and wide-ranging intelligence in these accounts of her reckoning with life as a teacher, poet, activist, and citizen.

The Time of Our Singing


Richard Powers - 2002
    Yet they cannot be protected from the world forever. Even as Jonah becomes a successful young tenor, the opera arena remains fixated on his race. Ruth turns her back on classical music and disappears, dedicating herself to activism and a new relationship. As the years pass, Joseph – the middle child, a pianist and our narrator – must battle not just to remain connected to his siblings, but to forge a future of his own. This is a story of the tragedy of race in America, told through the lives and choices of one family caught on the cusp of identities.

Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope


bell hooks - 2002
    Now comes Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope - a powerful, visionary work that will enrich our teaching and our lives. Combining critical thinking about education with autobiographical narratives, hooks invites readers to extend the discourse of race, gender, class and nationality beyond the classroom into everyday situations of learning. bell hooks writes candidly about her own experiences. Teaching, she explains, can happen anywhere, any time - not just in college classrooms but in churches, in bookstores, in homes where people get together to share ideas that affect their daily lives.In Teaching Community bell hooks seeks to theorize from the place of the positive, looking at what works. Writing about struggles to end racism and white supremacy, she makes the useful point that "No one is born a racist. Everyone makes a choice." Teaching Community tells us how we can choose to end racism and create a beloved community. hooks looks at many issues-among them, spirituality in the classroom, white people looking to end racism, and erotic relationships between professors and students. Spirit, struggle, service, love, the ideals of shared knowledge and shared learning - these values motivate progressive social change.Teachers of vision know that democratic education can never be confined to a classroom. Teaching - so often undervalued in our society -- can be a joyous and inclusive activity. bell hooks shows the way. "When teachers teach with love, combining care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust, we are often able to enter the classroom and go straight to the heart of the matter, which is knowing what to do on any given day to create the best climate for learning."

Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination


Robin D.G. Kelley - 2002
    Focusing on the visions of activists from C. L. R. James to Aime Cesaire and Malcolm X, Kelley writes of the hope that Communism offered, the mindscapes of Surrealism, the transformative potential of radical feminism, and of the four-hundred-year-old dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. From 'the preeminent historian of black popular culture' (Cornel West), an inspiring work on the power of imagination to transform society.

Die Nigger Die!


H. Rap Brown - 2002
    Rap Brown, chairman of the radical Black Power organization Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), came to symbolize the ideology of black revolution. This autobiography—which was first published in 1969, went through seven printings and has long been unavailable—chronicles the making of a revolutionary. It is much more than a personal history, however; it is a call to arms, an urgent message to the black community to be the vanguard force in the struggle of oppressed people. Forthright, sardonic, and shocking, this book is not only illuminating and dynamic but also a vitally important document that is essential to understanding the upheavals of the late 1960s. University of Massachusetts professor Ekwueme Michael Thelwell has updated this edition, covering Brown’s decades of harassment by law enforcement agencies, his extraordinary transformation into an important Muslim leader, and his sensational trial.

This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation


Gloria E. Anzaldúa - 2002
    Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating have brought together an ambitious new collection of over 80 original contributions offering a bold new vision of women-of-color consciousness for the 21st century.Through personal narratives, theoretical essays, textual collage, poetry, letters, artwork and fiction, this bridge we call home examines and extends the discussion of issues at the center of the first Bridge, such as classism, homophobia, racism, identity politics, and community building, while exploring the additional issues of third wave feminism, Native sovereignty, lesbian pregnancy and mothering, transgendered issues, Arab-American stereotyping, Jewish identities, spiritual activism, and surviving academe. Written by women and men---both 'of color' and 'white,' located inside and outside the United States---and motivated by a desire for social justice, this bridge we call home invites feminists of all colors and genders to develop new forms of transcultural dialogues, practices, and alliances.Building on and pushing forward the revolutionary call for transformation announced over two decades ago, this bridge we call home will challenge readers to rethink existing categories and invent new individual and collective identities.

Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism


Bushra Rehman - 2002
    Now a new generation of brilliant, outspoken women of color is speaking to the concerns of a new feminism, and their place in it. Daisy Hernandez of Ms. magazine and poet Bushra Rehman have collected a diverse, lively group of emerging writers who speak to their experience—to the strength and rigidity of community and religion, to borders and divisions, both internal and external—and address issues that take feminism into the twenty-first century. One writer describes herself as a “mixed brown girl, Sri-Lankan and New England mill-town white trash,” and clearly delineates the organizing differences between whites and women of color: “We do not kick ass the way the white girls do, in meetings of NOW or riot grrl. For us, it’s all about family.” A Korean-American woman struggles to create her own identity in a traditional community: “Yam-ja-neh means nice, sweet, compliant. I’ve heard it used many times by my parents’ friends who don’t know shit about me.” An Arab-American feminist deconstructs the “quaint vision” of Middle-Eastern women with which most Americans feel comfortable. This impressive array of first-person accounts adds a much-needed fresh dimension to the ongoing dialogue between race and gender, and gives voice to the women who are creating and shaping the feminism of the future.

Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem


bell hooks - 2002
    With visionary insight, hooks exposes the underlying reality that it has been difficult—if not impossible—for our nation to create a culture that promotes and sustains healthy self-esteem. Without self-esteem people begin to lose their sense of agency. They feel powerless. They feel they can only be victims. The need for self-esteem never goes away. But it is never too late for any of us to acquire the healthy self-esteem that is needed for a fulfilling life. hooks gets to the heart and soul of the African-American identity crisis, offering critical insight and hard-won wisdom about what it takes to heal the scars of the past, promote and maintain self-esteem, and lay down the roots for a grounded community with a prosperous future. She examines the way historical movements for racial uplift fail to sustain our quest for self-esteem. Moving beyond a discussion of race, she identifies diverse barriers keeping us from well-being: the trauma of abandonment, constant shaming, and the loss of personal integrity. In highlighting the role of desegregation, education, the absence of progressive parenting, spiritual crisis, or fundamental breakdowns in communication between black women and men, bell hooks identifies mental health as the new revolutionary frontier—and provides guidance for healing within the black community.

ego trip's Big Book of Racism!


Sacha Jenkins - 2002
    This one-of-a-kind encounter with the absurdities, complexities, and nuances of race relations is brought to you by five writers of color whose groundbreaking independent magazine, ego trip, has been called "the world's rawest, stinkiest, funniest magazine" by Spin.Filled with enough testifying and truth to satisfy even the good Reverend Sharpton, ego trip's Big Book of Racism is a riotous and revolutionary look at race and popular culture that's sure to spark controversy and ignite debate.

The Huey P. Newton Reader


Huey P. Newton - 2002
    Newton Reader combines now-classic texts ranging in topic from the formation of the Black Panthers, African Americans and armed self-defense, Eldridge Cleaver's controversial expulsion from the Party, FBI infiltration of civil rights groups, the Vietnam War, and the burgeoning feminist movement with never-before-published writings from the Black Panther Party archives and Newton's private collection, including articles on President Nixon, prison martyr George Jackson, Pan-Africanism, affirmative action, and the author's only written account of his political exile in Cuba in the mid-1970s. Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, Angela Davis, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Geronimo Pratt all came to international prominence through Newton's groundbreaking political activism. Additionally, Newton served as the Party's chief intellectual engine, conversing with world leaders such as Yasser Arafat, Chinese Premier Chou Enlai, and Mozambique President Samora Moises Machel among others.

A Life in Letters


Zora Neale Hurston - 2002
    Arriving in Harlem in 1925 with little more than a dollar to her name, Hurston rose to become one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance, only to die in obscurity. Not until the 1970s was she rediscovered by Alice Walker and other admirers. Although Hurston has entered the pantheon as one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century, the true nature of her personality has proven elusive.Now, a brilliant, complicated and utterly arresting woman emerges from this landmark book. Carla Kaplan, a noted Hurston scholar, has found hundreds of revealing, previously unpublished letters for this definitive collection; she also provides extensive and illuminating commentary on Hurston’s life and work, as well as an annotated glossary of the organizations and personalities that were important to it. From her enrollment at Baltimore’s Morgan Academy in 1917, to correspondence with Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Langston Hughes, Dorothy West and Alain Locke, to a final query letter to her publishers in 1959, Hurston’s spirited correspondence offers an invaluable portrait of a remarkable, irrepressible talent.

Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare


Dorothy Roberts - 2002
    foster care system and its effects on black communities and the country as a whole. Tying the origins and impact of this disparity to racial injustice, Dorothy Roberts contends that child-welfare policy reflects a political choice to address startling rates of black child poverty by punishing parents instead of tackling poverty's societal roots. Using conversations with mothers battling the Chicago child-welfare system for custody of their children, along with national data, Roberts levels a powerful indictment of racial disparities in foster care and tells a moving story of the women and children who earn our respect in their fight to keep their families intact.

Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual African American Fiction


Devon W. Carbado - 2002
    Beginning with the turn-of-the-century writings of Angelina Welde Grimke and Alice Dunbar Nelson, it charts the evolution of black lesbian and gay fiction into the Harlem Renaissance of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen and the later postwar era, in which works by Audre Lorde and James Baldwin signal the emerging sexual liberation movements. The 40 authors featured also include Alice Walker, E. Lynn Harris, Audre Lorde, April Sinclair, Jewelle Gomez, Thomas Glave, and Jacqueline Woodson.

Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society


Sherene H. Razack - 2002
    Writers who share this terrain reject the idea that spaces, and the arrangement of bodies in them, emerge naturally over time. Instead, they look at how spaces are created and the role of law in shaping and supporting them. They expose hierarchies that emerge from, and in turn produce, oppressive spatial categories. The authors' unmapping takes us through drinking establishments, parks, slums, classrooms, urban spaces of prostitution, parliaments, the main streets of cities, mosques, and the U.S.-Canada and U.S.-Mexico borders. Each example demonstrates that "place," as a Manitoba Court of Appeal judge concluded after analyzing a section of the Indian Act, "becomes race.

Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy


James S. Hirsch - 2002
    In the aftermath, as many as 300 were dead, and 6,000 Greenwood residents were herded into detention camps.James Hirsch focuses on the de facto apartheid that brought about the Greenwood riot and informed its eighty-year legacy, offering an unprecedented examination of how a calamity spawns bigotry and courage and how it has propelled one community's belated search for justice. Tulsa's establishment and many victims strove to forget the events of 1921, destroying records pertaining to the riot and refusing even to talk about it. This cover-up was carried through the ensuing half-century with surprising success. Even so, the riot wounded Tulsa profoundly, as Hirsch demonstrates in a compelling combination of history, journalism, and character study. White Tulsa thrived, and the city became a stronghold of Klan activity as workingmen and high civic officials alike flocked to the Hooded Order. Meanwhile, Greenwood struggled as residents strove to rebuild their neighborhood despite official attempts to thwart them. As the decades passed, the economic and social divides between white and black worlds deepened. Through the 1960s and 1970s, urban renewal helped to finish what the riot had started, blighting Greenwood. Paradoxically, however, the events of 1921 saved Tulsa from the racial strife that befell so many other American cities in the 1960s, as Tulsans white and black would do almost anything to avoid a reprise of the riot.Hirsch brings the riot's legacy up to the present day, tracing how the memory of the massacre gradually revived as academics and ordinary citizens of all colors worked tirelessly to uncover evidence of its horrors. Hirsch also highlights Tulsa's emergence at the forefront of the burgeoning debate over reparations. RIOT AND REMEMBRANCE shows vividly, chillingly, how the culture of Jim Crow caused not only the grisly incidents of 1921 but also those of Rosewood, Selma, and Watts, as well as less widely known atrocities. It also addresses the cruel irony that underlies today's battles over affirmative action and reparations: that justice and reconciliation are often incompatible goals. Finally, Hirsch details how Tulsa may be overcoming its horrific legacy, as factions long sundered at last draw together.

Freedom: A Photographic History of the African American Struggle


Manning Marable - 2002
    It is organized chronologically in five sections with introductory essays and narrative captions by two noted scholars, Manning Marable and Leith Mullings. This selection of photographs, many never seen before, reveals the journey in all its complexity and nuance, covering the struggle in its many different aspects - political, social, economic and cultural. Still relevant today, the photographs tell of the tremendous courage, determination and power of a people fighting for a common goal.

Kara Walker: Pictures from Another Time


Kara Walker - 2002
    In her choice of black cut-paper silhouettes, Walker takes a medium that was extremely fashionable in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as part of the neoclassical revival, when the silhouetted images on ancient Greek and Roman vases were emulated on such goods as Wedgwood ware. The silhouette was a parlor art practiced by genteel ladies and gentlemen, who created portraits, landscapes, and decorative motifs. There were also traveling silhouettists who took their craft around the country. The 18th- and 19th-century silhouette was also associated with the pseudo-science of physiognomy, which held that one could analyze psychological and racial types by studying profiles. Adopting the antiquated medium of the silhouette, Walker has turned it into a powerful force to evoke the complexities of the system of slavery, exploring themes of exploitation, accommodation, and complicity on the part of both the powerful and the oppressed. "Pictures From Another Time" is the first major publication on the work of this extraordinary artist. It includes nearly 70 examples of her work, including her silhouettes, prints, drawings, projected installations, and watercolors. Texts include an interview with the artist by curator Thelma Golden, Deputy Director of Programs at The Studio Museum in Harlem; and essays by literary critic Robert Reid-Pharr, Professor of English at the City University of New York and Annette Dixon, Curator of Western Art at the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow


Jerrold M. Packard - 2002
    Together with its rigidly enforced canon of racial "etiquette," these rules governed nearly every aspect of life—and outlined draconian punishments for infractions.The purpose of Jim Crow was to keep African Americans subjugated at a level as close as possible to their former slave status. Exceeding even South Africa's notorious apartheid in the humiliation, degradation, and suffering it brought, Jim Crow left scars on the American psyche that are still felt today. American Nightmare examines and explains Jim Crow from its beginnings to its end: how it came into being, how it was lived, how it was justified, and how, at long last, it was overcome only a few short decades ago. Most importantly, this book reveals how a nation founded on principles of equality and freedom came to enact as law a pervasive system of inequality and virtual slavery.Although America has finally consigned Jim Crow to the historical graveyard, Jerrold Packard shows why it is important that this scourge—and an understanding of how it happened—remain alive in the nation's collective memory.

Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor


Evelyn Nakano Glenn - 2002
    Evelyn Nakano Glenn untangles this complex history in a unique comparative regional study from the end of Reconstruction to the eve of World War II. During this era the country experienced enormous social and economic changes with the abolition of slavery, rapid territorial expansion, and massive immigration, and struggled over the meaning of free labor and the essence of citizenship as people who previously had been excluded sought the promise of economic freedom and full political rights.After a lucid overview of the concepts of the free worker and the independent citizen at the national level, Glenn vividly details how race and gender issues framed the struggle over labor and citizenship rights at the local level between blacks and whites in the South, Mexicans and Anglos in the Southwest, and Asians and haoles (the white planter class) in Hawaii. She illuminates the complex interplay of local and national forces in American society and provides a dynamic view of how labor and citizenship were defined, enforced, and contested in a formative era for white-nonwhite relations in America.

A Sorrowful Joy


Albert J. Raboteau - 2002
    Louis, Mississippi, three months after his father was shot and killed by a white man. It was during the 1940s, when blacks couldn't swim at the same beach as whites, when the priest gave communion to white Catholics first and made others wait. In a moving account of his life, Raboteau tells how the boy grew into a man, married, became a success as a college administrator, then learned sorrow, lost his way and had to start over again. His is an American spiritual journey that is redolent of sacramental Christianity marking the sacredness of time, place, and community. The journey brought him to a conversation that reconciled him to his own past, including his religious heritage, his African roots, and his family members. In the end his spiritual quest became a journey home, to a human circle that opened to him and brought him to God. Endorsements: ""If you want to see why Albert Raboteau is among the most elegant writers now contemplating the most important things, begin with his brief spiritual autobiography, A Sorrowful Joy. Next read the epilogue A Fire in the Bones. Then return to Slave Religion, the book for which he is famous, and you will understand why it first moved you as deeply as it did."" --Jeffrey Stout, author of Blessed Are the Organized About the Contributor(s): Albert J. Raboteau is the Henry W. Putnam Professor of Religion at Princeton University. The text of this book was originally delivered as a Harold M. Wit Lecture at Harvard University Divinity School.

The Condemnation of Little B


Elaine Brown - 2002
    The story of 'Little B' is riveting, a stunning example of the particular burden racism imposes on black youths. Most astonishing, almost all of the officials involved in bringing him to 'justice' are black.Michael Lewis was officially declared a ward of the state at age eleven, and then systematically ignored until his arrest for murder. Brown wondered how this boy could possibly have aroused so much public resentment, why he was being tried (and roundly condemned, labeled a 'super-predator') in the press. Then she met Michael and began investigating his case on her own. Brown adeptly builds a convincing case that the prosecution railroaded Michael, looking for a quick, symbolic conviction. His innocence is almost incidental to the overwhelming evidence that the case was unfit for trial. Little B was convicted long before he came to court, and effectively sentenced years before, when the 'safety net' allowed him to slip silently down. Brown cites studies and cases from all over America that reveal how much more likely youth of color are to be convicted of crimes and to serve long-even life-sentences, and how deeply the new black middle class is implicated in this devastating reality.

Race and the Cosmos: An Invitation to View the World Differently


Barbara A. Holmes - 2002
    At the intersection of ethics, cosmology and physics, a new view of human life is emerging - a view not neatly divided along lines of race, ethnicity, class or sexual orientation. Human life at cosmic and quantum levels has a unity independent of external social categories such as science and religion.

Sister Nations: Native American Women Writers On Community


Heid E. Erdrich - 2002
    Editors Heid E. Erdrich and Laura Tohe have gathered stories from across the nation that celebrate, record, and explore Native American women's roles in community. The result is a rich tapestry that contains work by established writers along with emerging and first-time authors. Contributors include Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Diane Glancy, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Allison Hedge Coke, LeAnne Howe, Roberta Hill, Kim Blaeser, Linda LeGarde Grover, with a foreword by Winona LaDuke.

Passed On: African American Mourning Stories: A Memorial


Karla F.C. Holloway - 2002
    Through poignant reflection and thorough investigation of the myths, rituals, economics, and politics of African American mourning and burial practices, Karla FC Holloway finds that ways of dying are just as much a part of black identity as ways of living. Gracefully interweaving interviews, archival research, and analyses of literature, film, and music, Holloway shows how the vulnerability of African Americans to untimely death is inextricably linked to how black culture represents itself and is represented. With a focus on the “death-care” industry—black funeral homes and morticians, the history of the profession and its practices—Holloway examines all facets of the burial business, from physicians, hospital chaplains, and hospice administrators, to embalming- chemical salesmen, casket makers, and funeral directors, to grieving relatives. She uses narrative, photographs, and images to summon a painful history of lynchings, white rage and riot, medical malpractice and neglect, executions, and neighborhood violence. Specialized caskets sold to African Americans, formal burial photos of infants, and deathbed stories, unveil a glimpse of the graveyards and burial sites of African America, along with burial rituals and funeral ceremonies. Revealing both unexpected humor and anticipated tragedy, Holloway tells a story of the experiences of black folk in the funeral profession and its clientele. She also reluctantly shares the story of her son and the way his death moved her research from page to person.In the conclusion, which follows a sermon delivered by Maurice O. Wallace at the funeral for the author’s son, Bem, Holloway strives to commemorate—through observation, ceremony, and the calling of others to remembrance and celebration.

Alice Walker's "the Colour Purple": A Readers Companion


Nandita Sinha - 2002
    

The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism


Elizabeth A. Povinelli - 2002
    Elizabeth A. Povinelli argues that the multicultural legacy of colonialism perpetuates unequal systems of power, not by demanding that colonized subjects identify with their colonizers but by demanding that they identify with an impossible standard of authentic traditional culture.Povinelli draws on seventeen years of ethnographic research among northwest coast indigenous people and her own experience participating in land claims, as well as on public records, legal debates, and anthropological archives to examine how multicultural forms of recognition work to reinforce liberal regimes rather than to open them up to a true cultural democracy. The Cunning of Recognition argues that the inequity of liberal forms of multiculturalism arises not from its weak ethical commitment to difference but from its strongest vision of a new national cohesion. In the end, Australia is revealed as an exemplary site for studying the social effects of the liberal multicultural imaginary: much earlier than the United States and in response to very different geopolitical conditions, Australian nationalism renounced the ideal of a unitary European tradition and embraced cultural and social diversity. While addressing larger theoretical debates in critical anthropology, political theory, cultural studies, and liberal theory, The Cunning of Recognition demonstrates that the impact of the globalization of liberal forms of government can only be truly understood by examining its concrete—and not just philosophical—effects on the world.

Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South


Catherine Fosl - 2002
    One of the few white people, particularly from the South, to join the southern black freedom movement in its nascent years in the 1950s, Braden became a role model and inspiration for the thousands of young white people that joined the mass movement a decade later. Braden stands nearly alone among other women of her race, class, region, and generation in her dedication to social change. Born in 1924, Braden came of age after the women's rights and social reform crusades of the early part of the 20th century, and after the young activist women of the 1960s launched the civil rights, student, and women's liberation movements. Yet Braden's life has intersected on some level with most of the great social movements of her lifetime, and represents a central link that connects the southern protest movements of the 1930s and 1940s to the mass civil rights movement of the 1960s.

The Black Female Body: A Photographic History


Deborah Willis - 2002
    In long-forgotten books, in art museums, in European and U.S. archives and private collections, a hidden history of representation awaited discovery. The Black Female Body offers a stunning array of familiar and many virtually unknown photographs, showing how photographs reflected and reinforced Western culture's fascination with black women's bodies.In the nineteenth century, black women were rarely subjects for artistic studies but posed before the camera again and again as objects for social scientific investigation and as exotic representatives of faraway lands. South Africans, Nubians, enslaved Abyssinians and Americans, often partially or completely naked and devoid of identity, were displayed for the armchair anthropologist or prurient viewer. Willis and Williams relate these social science photographs and the blatantly pornographic images of this era with those of black women as domestics and as nursemaids for white children in family portraits. As seen through the camera lens, Jezebel and Mammy took the form of real women made available to serve white society.Bringing together some 185 images that span three centuries, the authors offer counterpoints to these exploitive images, as well as testaments to a vibrant culture. Here are nineteenth century portraits of well-dressed and beautifully coifed creoles of color and artistic studies of dignified black women. Here are Harlem Renaissance photographs of entertainer Josephine Baker and writer Zora Neale Hurston. Documenting the long struggle for black civil rights, the authors draw on politicallypointed images by noted photographers like Dorothea Lange, Louis Hine, and Gordon Parks. They also feature the work of contemporary artists such as Ming Smith Murray, Renee Cox, Coreen Simpson, Chester Higgins, Joy Gregory, and Catherine Opie, who photograph black women asserting their subjectivity, reclaiming their bodies, and refusing the representations of the past.A remarkable history of the black woman's image, The Black Female Body makes an exceptional gift book and keepsake.

Leaving: A Novel


Richard Dry - 2002
    There, far from the violent events that forced her to flee her home, Ruby hopes to make a new life for her family.Ruby gives birth to a daughter, Lida, and strives to raise the girl and Easton. But as their Oakland neighborhood changes during the turbulent 1960s, the three are driven apart by forces that Ruby cannot control. Easton becomes involved with civil rights activism and the Black Panthers; Lida, keeping a hurtful family secret to herself, spirals into a cycle of dependency and denial. Finally, Lida's sons Love LeRoy and Li'l Pit must fend for themselves in the inhospitable streets of America, leaving one city for another, searching for a home.Centered around three generations of a family and set against the larger dispossession of African Americans, Leaving is a blend of history and intimately-observed everyday life.

Standing on Holy Ground: A Triumph Over Hate Crime in the Deep South


Sandra E. Johnson - 2002
    John Baptist Church in Dixiana, South Carolina, in 1984, two courageous women risked their lives to organize the rebuilding effort. Ammie Murray, a white union leader, and her African American friend Barbara Simmons braved death threats to successfully lead an interracial group of volunteers to reconstruct the historic African American church. But their joy was short-lived. In 1995, St. John was the first of more than one hundred southern black churches plagued by a series of arsons during a two-year period. The obstacles to erecting the church once more seemed insurmountable but proved no match for the tenacity of those determined to see St. John rise again.Standing on Holy Ground is an inspiring tale that proves friendship, reconciliation, spiritual strength, and enduring hope can transcend racial hatred. In a moving narrative, Sandra E. Johnson chronicles how the fearless duo of Murray and Simmons sparked a victory against hate crime in their community and became leaders in a national battle against violence and vandalism.

The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment


Julia V. Douthwaite - 2002
    Julia V. Douthwaite recounts reports of feral children such as the wild girl of Champagne (captured in 1731 and baptized as Marie-Angélique Leblanc), offering a fascinating glimpse into beliefs about the difference between man and beast and the means once used to civilize the uncivilized.A variety of educational experiments failed to tame these feral children by the standards of the day. After telling their stories, Douthwaite turns to literature that reflects on similar experiments to perfect human subjects. Her examples range from utopian schemes for progressive childrearing to philosophical tales of animated statues, from revolutionary theories of regenerated men to Gothic tales of scientists run amok. Encompassing thinkers such as Rousseau, Sade, Defoe, and Mary Shelley, Douthwaite shows how the Enlightenment conceived of mankind as an infinitely malleable entity, first with optimism, then with apprehension. Exposing the darker side of eighteenth-century thought, she demonstrates how advances in science gave rise to troubling ethical concerns, as parents, scientists, and politicians tried to perfect mankind with disastrous results.

White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism


Paula S. Rothenberg - 2002
    But no discussion of race is complete without exploring the other side--the ways in which some people or groups actually benefit, deliberately or inadvertently, from racial bias. White Privilege, Second Edition, the revision to the ground-breaking anthology from Paula Rothenberg, continues her efforts from the first edition. Two new essays contribute to the discussion of the nature and history of white power. The concluding section again challenges readers to explore ideas for using the power and the concept of white privilege to help combat racism in their own lives. Brief, inexpensive, and easily integrated with other texts, this interdisciplinary collection of commonsense, non-rhetorical readings lets educators incorporate discussions of whiteness and white privilege into a variety of disciplines, including sociology, English composition, psychology, social work, women's studies, political science, and American studies.

The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative


Christopher Metress - 2002
    on August 28, 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, visiting from Chicago, was abducted from his great-uncle's cabin in Money, Mississippi, and never seen alive again. When his battered and bloated corpse floated to the surface of the Tallahatchie River three days later and two local white men were arrested for his murder, young Till's death was primed to become the spark that set off the civil rights movement.With a collection of more than one hundred documents spanning almost half a century, Christopher Metress retells Till's story in a unique and daring way. Juxtaposing news accounts and investigative journalism with memoirs, poetry, and fiction, this documentary narrative not only includes material by such prominent figures as Hodding Carter, Chester Himes, Eleanor Roosevelt, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Eldridge Cleaver, Bob Dylan, John Edgar Wideman, Lewis Nordan, and Michael Eric Dyson, but it also contains several previously unpublished works - among them a newly discovered Langston Hughes poem - and a generous selection of hard-to-find documents never before collected.Exploring the means by which historical events become part of the collective social memory, The Lynching of Emmett Till is both an anthology that tells an important story and a narrative about how we come to terms with key moments in history.

Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent


Richard Bruce Nugent - 2002
    Protégé of Alain Locke, roommate of Wallace Thurman, and friend of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, the precocious Nugent stood for many years as the only African-American writer willing to clearly pronounce his homosexuality in print. His contribution to the landmark publication FIRE!!, "Smoke, Lilies and Jade," was unprecedented in its celebration of same-sex desire. A resident of the notorious "Niggeratti Manor," Nugent also appeared on Broadway in Porgy (the 1927 play) and Run, Little Chillun (1933).Thomas H. Wirth, a close friend of Nugent's during the last years of the artist's life, has assembled a selection of Nugent's most important writings, paintings, and drawings-works mostly unpublished or scattered in rare and obscure publications and collected here for the first time. Wirth has written an introduction providing biographical information about Nugent's life and situating his art in relation to the visual and literary currents which influenced him. A foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr. emphasizes the importance of Nugent for African American history and culture.

Sing, Whisper, Shout, Pray!: Feminist Visions for a Just World


M. Jacqui Alexander - 2002
    It will become a definitive work for academics and activists committed to an unflinching inquiry into the mechanisms of global justice.

Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter


Winson Hudson - 2002
    A lifelong native of the rural, all-black community of Harmony, Winson has lived through some of the most racially oppressive periods in her state's history--and has devoted her life to combatting discrimination. With her sister Dovie, Winson filed the first lawsuit to desegregate the public schools in a rural county. Helping to establish the county NAACP chapter in 1961, Winson served as its president for 38 years. Her work has included voting rights, school desegregation, health care, government loans, telephone service, good roads, housing, and childcare--issues that were intertwined with the black freedom struggle. Winson's narrative, presented in her own words with historical background from noted author and activist Constance Curry, is both triumphant and tragic, inspiring and disturbing. It illustrates the virtually untold story of the role that African American women played in the civil rights movement at the local level in black communities throughout the South.

Understanding Prejudice and Discrimination


Scott Plous - 2002
    Interdisciplinary in scope and approach, this anthology combines research articles, opinion polls, legal decisions, news reports, personal narratives, and more. It focuses on perpetrators, bystanders, and social institutions.

Race Real Estate and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900-2000


Kevin Fox Gotham - 2002
    In Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900-2000, Kevin Fox Gotham reexamines the assumptions behind these explanations and offers a provocative new thesis. Using the Kansas City metropolitan area as a case study, Gotham provides both quantitative and qualitative documentation of the role of the real estate industry and the Federal Housing Administration, demonstrating how these institutions have promulgated racial residential segregation and uneven development. Gotham challenges contemporary explanations while providing fresh insights into the racialization of metropolitan space, the interlocking dimensions of class and race in metropolitan development, and the importance of analyzing housing as a system of social stratification.

Scottsboro, Alabama: A Story in Linoleum Cuts


Lin Shi Khan - 2002
    They were arrested and tried in four days, convicted of rape, and eight of them were sentenced to death. The ensuing legal battle spanned six years and involved two landmark decisions by the Supreme Court. One of the most well known and controversial legal decisions of our time, the Scottsboro case ignited the collective emotions of the country, which was still struggling to come to terms with fundamental issues of racial equality.Scottsboro, Alabama, which consists of 118 exceptionally powerful linoleum prints, provides a unique graphic history of one of the most infamous, racially-charged episodes in the annals of the American judicial system, and of the racial and class struggle of the time. Originally printed in Seattle in 1935, this hitherto unknown document, of which no other known copies exist, is presented here for the first time. It includes a foreword by Robin D.G. Kelley and an introduction by Andrew H. Lee. Mr. Lee discovered the book as part of a gift to the Tamiment Library by the family of Joe North, an important figure in the Communist Party-USA, and an editor at the seminal left-wing journal, the New Masses.A true historical find and an excellent tool for teaching the case itself and the period which it so indelibly marked, this book allows us to see the Scottsboro case through a unique and highly provocative lens.

Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain


Dan Stone - 2002
    With the rise of fascism after 1918, these debates became more ideologically driven, with science and vitalist philosophy being hailed in some quarters as saviors from bourgeois decadence, vituperated in others as heralding the onset of barbarism. Breeding Superman looks at several of the leading Nietzscheans and eugenicists, and challenges the long-cherished belief that British intellectuals were fundamentally uninterested in race. The result is a study of radical ideas which are conventionally written out of histories of the politics and culture of the period.

100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia


Molefi Kete Asante - 2002
    This book attempts to distill from many wonderful possibilities the 100 most outstanding examples of greatness. Pioneering scholar of African American Studies Molefi Kete Asante has used four criteria in his selection: the individual's significance in the general progress of African Americans toward full equality in the American social and political system; self-sacrifice and the demonstration of risk for the collective good; unusual will and determination in the face of the greatest danger or against the most stubborn odds; and personal achievement that reveals the best qualities of the African American people. In adopting these criteria Professor Asante has sought to steer away from the usual standards of popular culture, which often elevates the most popular, the wealthiest, or the most photogenic to the cult of celebrity. The individuals in this book - examples of lasting greatness as opposed to the ephemeral glare of celebrity fame - come from four centuries of African American history. Each entry includes brief biographical information, relevant dates, an assessment of the individual's place in African American history with particular reference to a historical timeline, and a discussion of his or her unique impact on American society. Numerous pictures and illustrations will accompany the articles. This superb reference work will complement any library and be of special interest to students and scholars of American and African American history.

Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America


Viet Thanh Nguyen - 2002
    This idealization of Asian America means that Asian American intellectuals can neither grapple with their culture's ideological diversity nor recognize their own involvement with capitalist practices such as the selling of racial identity. Making his case through the example of literature, which remains a critical arena of cultural production for Asian Americans, Nguyen demonstrates that literature embodies the complexities, conflicts, and potential future options of Asian American culture.

A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970


Matt Garcia - 2002
    As the citrus-growing regions of the San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys in eastern Los Angeles County expanded during the early twentieth century, the agricultural industry there developed along segregated lines, primarily between white landowners and Mexican and Asian laborers. Initially, these communities were sharply divided. But Los Angeles, unlike other agricultural regions, saw important opportunities for intercultural exchange develop around the arts and within multiethnic community groups. Whether fostered in such informal settings as dance halls and theaters or in such formal organizations as the Intercultural Council of Claremont or the Southern California Unity Leagues, these interethnic encounters formed the basis for political cooperation to address labor discrimination and solve problems of residential and educational segregation. Though intercultural collaborations were not always successful, Garcia argues that they constitute an important chapter not only in Southern California's social and cultural development but also in the larger history of American race relations.

Dakota Life in the Upper Midwest


Samuel William Pond - 2002
    Pond and his brother Gideon built a cabin near Cloud Man's village of the Dakota Indians on the shore of Lake Calhoun--now present-day Minneapolis--intending to preach Christianity to the Indians. The brothers were to spend nearly twenty years learning the Dakota language and observing how the Indians lived.In the 1860s and 1870s, after the Dakota had fought a disastrous war with the whites who had taken their land, Samuel Pond recorded his recollections of the Indians "to show what manner of people the Dakotas were . . . while they still retained the customs of their ancestors."Pond's work, first published in 1908, is now considered a classic. Gary Clayton Anderson's introduction discusses Pond's career and the effects of his background on this work, "unrivaled today for its discussion of Dakota material culture and social, political, religious, and economic institutions."

Race Ing Art History: Critical Readings In Race And Art History


K. Pinder - 2002
    Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Soul Work: Anti-Racist Theologies in Dialogue


Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley - 2002
    

Grace Matters: A True Story of Race, Friendship, and Faith in the Heart of the South


Chris P. Rice - 2002
    The story of friendship between Chris Rice and my son Spencer and their work of racial reconciliation and healing represents the heart of the Christian witness. My prayer is that the 'seeds' of this story of struggle and hope they planted will spread and bloom and grow in the lives of many people." --John Perkins, chairman, Christian Community Development Association and author, Let Justice Roll Down "Grace is the most potent counter force at work in our violent species, and our only hope. Chris Rice gives a very personal account, at once inspiring and disturbing, of its transforming power." -- Philip Yancey, author, What's So Amazing About Grace?"Chris Rice has a keen eye for detail and a gift for setting a scene. This remarkable, inspiring story he tells reads like a good novel. It is a story of powerful Christian faith, intense personal commitment, and maddening human frailty. But more than anything else, and though it ends in tragedy, this is a story of hope: My encounter with Grace Matters has left me daring to hope that, even at this late date, we Christians might yet live out the true meaning of our radical creed in regard to relations between blacks and whites in the United States." --Glenn C. Loury, director, Institute on Race and Social Division, Boston University"In a rare and deeply significant way, Chris Rice honestly probes the difficult but essential journey toward genuine racial reconciliation. It is confessional, candid, and even painful as the author bares his soul and his struggles.... This is a book with a fundamental and hopeful message-that grace can become a way of life." --Jim Wallis, editor, Sojourners and convener, Call to Renewal"Grace Matters is an extraordinary love story that is improbable as it was difficult. That a black man and a white man might be joined in a common love of God in Mississippi defies the imagination. But Chris Rice has helped us see that friendship--indeed a difficult friendship--is possible just to the extent a community existed in which truth mattered. Hopefully this book will be read and read widely, not simply to inform us about 'race relations' but because the story told here is one of hope and perseverance that hopefully will make more friendships possible." --Stanley Hauerwas, author of A Community of Character and named by Time magazine as America's Best Theologian

Beyond the Frontier: African American Poetry for the 21st Century


E. Ethelbert Miller - 2002
    It includes a section titled “Blood and Disappointment in the Land,” which documents ongoing social struggles. Other poems focus on the love that is essential for survival, rebirth, and dreams. More than 100 prominent African American poets contribute, including the distinguished and award-winning poets Toi Derricotte, Sam Cornish, Jabari Asim, and Pinkie Gordon Lane.

Reconciliation


John W. de Gruchy - 2002
    Does Christianity have anything besides warmed-over pieties to offer a world torn by estrangement, alienation, and violently opposed worldviews? In this signal contribution to public theology, John de Gruchy, an internationally esteemed political theologian, emphatically affirms the possibility and necessity of reconciliation. For Christians, he says, reconciliation is the center and perennial test of their faith. De Gruchy expands reconciliation's relevance beyond personal piety and ecclesial harmony to encompass group relations, politics, and even the environment. In all cases, he argues, it involves the restoration of justice. Forged in the recent experience of South Africa, his work delineates the political and ecclesial significance of reconciliation and shows its importance for interreligious relations, addressing victimization, and international peace. Reconciliation will be welcomed by all whose faith leads them to help alleviate the world's mounting agonies.

Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past


David R. Roediger - 2002
    Roediger's powerful book argues that in its political workings, its distribution of advantages, and its unspoken assumptions, the United States is a "still white" nation. Race is decidedly not over. The critical portraits of contemporary icons that lead off the book--Rush Limbaugh, Bill Clinton, O.J. Simpson, and Rudolph Giuliani--insist that continuities in white power and white identity are best understood by placing the recent past in historical context. Roediger illuminates that history in an incisive critique of the current scholarship on whiteness and an account of race-transcending radicalism exemplified by vanguards such as W.E.B. Du Bois and John Brown. He shows that, for all of its staying power, white supremacy in the United States has always been a pursuit rather than a completed project, that divisions among whites have mattered greatly, and that "nonwhite" alternatives have profoundly challenged the status quo.Colored White reasons that, because race is a matter of culture and politics, racial oppression will not be solved by intermarriage or demographic shifts, but rather by political struggles that transform the meaning of race--especially its links to social and economic inequality. This landmark work considers the ways that changes in immigration patterns, the labor force, popular culture, and social movements make it possible--though far from inevitable--that the United States might overcome white supremacy in the twenty-first century. Roediger's clear, lively prose and his extraordinary command of the literature make this one of the most original and generative contributions to the study of race and ethnicity in the United States in many decades.

Supreme Justice: Speeches and Writings: Thurgood Marshall


Thurgood Marshall - 2002
    Clay Smith, Jr., focus on the Detroit riots of the 1940s and 1950s, one of the most important periods of Marshall's life, culminating in his arguments before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education and Bolling v. Sharpe, which in 1954 struck down de jure segregation in public education. Throughout the materials from the next four decades, Marshall comes to life as a teacher, leader, and strategist, explaining, preaching, and cajoling audiences to stand up for their rights. The addresses collected by Smith present a less formal picture of Marshall, from which one can learn much about the depth of his skills and strategies to conquer racism, promote democracy, and create a world influenced by his vision for a just and moral society.Supreme Justice reveals Marshall as a dogged opponent of unequal schools and a staunch proponent of the protection of black people from violence and the death penalty. Through his own words we see the genius of a man with an ability to inspire diverse crowds in clear language and see him also demonstrate his powers of persuasion in formal settings outside the court. His writings not only enhance our understanding of his groundbreaking advocacy in law and social conflicts, they reveal the names of men and women of all races who made significant contributions leading to Brown v. Board of Education and beyond.

Till Victory Is Won: Famous Black Quotations From the NAACP


Janet Cheatham Bell - 2002
     Focusing on five major topics -- Protecting Civil Rights, Achieving Educational Excellence, Nurturing Economic Development, Reaching Youth, and Gaining Political Power -- this extraordinary anthology inspires and informs. Featured voices include: Kweisi MfumeDuke EllingtonRosa ParksHank AaronCarter G. WoodsonW.E.B. Du BoisThurgood MarshallMaya AngelouHarry BelafonteSidney PoitierSara Lawrence LightfootMartin Luther King Jr.Halle BerryMichael JordanEarvin (Magic) JohnsonColin PowellGeorge Washington CarverJesse JacksonOprah WinfreyLauryn HillHenry Louis Gates Jr.Toni MorrisonSusan TaylorLangston HughesJackie RobinsonQuincy JonesAlice WalkerSpike LeeCornel WestPatti LaBelleJames Earl Jones ...and countless others who share their perspectives on the life-changing work of the NAACP and its place in history.

"Miscegenation": Making Race in America (New Cultural Studies)


Elise Lemire - 2002
    Novelists, short-story writers, poets, journalists, and political cartoonists imagined that political equality would be followed by widespread inter-racial sex and marriage. Legally possible yet socially unthinkable, this amalgamation of the races would manifest itself in the perverse union of whites with blacks, the latter figured as ugly, animal-like, and foul-smelling. In Miscegenation, Elise Lemire reads these literary and visual depictions for what they can tell us about the connection between the racialization of desire and the social construction of race.Previous studies of the prohibition of interracial sex and marriage in the U.S. have focused on either the slave South or the post-Reconstruction period. Looking instead to the North, and to such texts as the Federalist poetry about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, Edgar Allan Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue, and the 1863 pamphlet in which the word miscegenation was first used, Lemire examines the steps by which whiteness became a sexual category and same-race desire came to seem a biological imperative.