Best of
Race

2003

Are Prisons Obsolete?


Angela Y. Davis - 2003
    Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable.In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.

Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America


Mamie Till-Mobley - 2003
    Each has a unique story, a path that led to a role as leader or activist. Death of Innocence is the heartbreaking and ultimately inspiring story of one such hero: Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till—an innocent fourteen-year-old African-American boy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and who paid for it with his life. His outraged mother’s actions galvanized the civil rights movement, leaving an indelible mark on American racial consciousness. Mamie Carthan was an ordinary African-American woman growing up in 1930s Chicago, living under the strong, steady influence of her mother’s care. She fell in love with and married Louis Till, and while the marriage didn’t last, they did have a beautiful baby boy, Emmett. In August 1955, Emmett was visiting family in Mississippi when he was kidnapped from his bed in the middle of the night by two white men and brutally murdered. His crime: allegedly whistling at a white woman in a convenience store. His mother began her career of activism when she insisted on an open-casket viewing of her son’s gruesomely disfigured body. More than a hundred thousand people attended the service. The trial of J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, accused of kidnapping and murdering Emmett (the two were eventually acquitted of the crime), was considered the first full-scale media event of the civil rights movement. What followed altered the course of this country’s history, and it was all set in motion by the sheer will, determination, and courage of Mamie Till-Mobley—a woman who would pull herself back from the brink of suicide to become a teacher and inspire hundreds of black children throughout the country.Mamie Till-Mobley, who died in 2003 just as she completed this memoir, has honored us with her full testimony: “I focused on my son while I considered this book. . . . The result is in your hands. . . . I am experienced, but not cynical. . . . I am hopeful that we all can be better than we are. I’ve been brokenhearted, but I still maintain an oversized capacity for love.” Death of Innocence is an essential document in the annals of American civil rights history, and a painful yet beautiful account of a mother’s ability to transform tragedy into boundless courage and hope.From the Hardcover edition.

Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision


Barbara Ransby - 2003
    A gifted grassroots organizer, Baker shunned the spotlight in favor of vital behind-the-scenes work that helped power the black freedom struggle. She was a national officer and key figure in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and a prime mover in the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Baker made a place for herself in predominantly male political circles that included W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, and Martin Luther King Jr., all the while maintaining relationships with a vibrant group of women, students, and activists both black and white.In this deeply researched biography, Barbara Ransby chronicles Baker's long and rich political career as an organizer, an intellectual, and a teacher, from her early experiences in depression-era Harlem to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Ransby shows Baker to be a complex figure whose radical, democratic worldview, commitment to empowering the black poor, and emphasis on group-centered, grassroots leadership set her apart from most of her political contemporaries. Beyond documenting an extraordinary life, the book paints a vivid picture of the African American fight for justice and its intersections with other progressive struggles worldwide across the twentieth century.

At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America


Philip Dray - 2003
    Philip Dray also tells the story of the men and women who led the long and difficult fight to expose and eradicate lynching, including Ida B. Wells, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and W.E.B. Du Bois. If lynching is emblematic of what is worst about America, their fight may stand for what is best: the commitment to justice and fairness and the conviction that one individual’s sense of right can suffice to defy the gravest of wrongs. This landmark book follows the trajectory of both forces over American history—and makes lynching’s legacy belong to us all.

Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States


Eduardo Bonilla-Silva - 2003
    Bonilla-Silva documented how beneath the rhetorical maze of contemporary racial discourse lies a full-blown arsenal of arguments, phrases, and stories that whites use to account for and ultimately justify racial inequities.In the new edition Bonilla-Silva has added a chapter dealing with the future of racial stratification in America that goes beyond the white / black dichotomy. He argues that the U.S. is developing a more complex and apparently "plural" racial order that will mimic Latin American patterns of racial stratification. Another new chapter addresses a variety of questions from readers of the first edition. And he has updated the book throughout with new information, data, and references where appropriate. The book ends with a new Postscript, "What is to be Done (For Real?)". As in the highly acclaimed first edition, Bonilla-Silva continues to challenge color-blind thinking.

Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity


Chandra Talpade Mohanty - 2003
    This collection highlights the concerns running throughout her pioneering work: the politics of difference and solidarity, decolonizing and democratizing feminist practice, the crossing of borders, and the relation of feminist knowledge and scholarship to organizing and social movements. Mohanty offers here a sustained critique of globalization and urges a reorientation of transnational feminist practice toward anticapitalist struggles.Feminism without Borders opens with Mohanty's influential critique of western feminism ("Under Western Eyes") and closes with a reconsideration of that piece based on her latest thinking regarding the ways that gender matters in the racial, class, and national formations of globalization. In between these essays, Mohanty meditates on the lives of women workers at different ends of the global assembly line (in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States); feminist writing on experience, identity, and community; dominant conceptions of multiculturalism and citizenship; and the corporatization of the North American academy. She considers the evolution of interdisciplinary programs like Women's Studies and Race and Ethnic Studies; pedagogies of accommodation and dissent; and transnational women's movements for grassroots ecological solutions and consumer, health, and reproductive rights.Mohanty's probing and provocative analyses of key concepts in feminist thought—"home," "sisterhood," "experience," "community"—lead the way toward a feminism without borders, a feminism fully engaged with the realities of a transnational world.

We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity


bell hooks - 2003
    "If the topic gets specific and the focus is on black men, the news is even worse."In this powerful new book, bell hooks arrests our attention from the first page. Her title--We Real Cool; her subject--the way in which both white society and weak black leaders are failing black men and youth. Her subject is taboo: "this is a culture that does not love black males: " "they are not loved by white men, white women, black women, girls or boys. And especially, black men do not love themselves. How could they? How could they be expected to love, surrounded by so much envy, desire, and hate?

The Chinese in America: A Narrative History


Iris Chang - 2003
    She chronicles the many accomplishments in America of Chinese immigrants and their descendents: building the infrastructure of their adopted country, fighting racist and exclusionary laws, walking the racial tightrope between black and white, contributing to major scientific and technological advances, expanding the literary canon, and influencing the way we think about racial and ethnic groups. Interweaving political, social, economic, and cultural history, as well as the stories of individuals, Chang offers a bracing view not only of what it means to be Chinese American, but also of what it is to be American.

Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)


Stokely Carmichael - 2003
    Honorary prime minister of the Black Panther Party. Bestselling author. Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) is an American legend, one whose work as a civil rights leader fundamentally altered the course of history—and our understanding of Pan-Africanism today. Ready for Revolution recounts the extraordinary course of Carmichael's life, from his Trinidadian youth to his consciousness-raising years in Harlem to his rise as the patriarch of the Black Power movement. In his own words, Carmichael tells the story of his fight for social justice with candor, wit, and passion—and a cast of luminaries that includes James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro, among others. Carmichael's personal testimony captures the pulse of the cultural upheavals that characterize the modern world. This landmark, posthumously published autobiography reintroduces us to a man whose love of freedom fueled his fight for revolution to the end.

Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America


Kristian Williams - 2003
    But just what is the role of police in a democracy: to serve the public or to protect the powerful? Tracing the evolution of the modern police force back to the slave patrols, this controversial study observes the police as the armed defender of a violent status quo.Kristian Williams is the author of American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination.

Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life


Annette Lareau - 2003
    Drawing on in-depth observations of black and white middle-class, working-class, and poor families, Unequal Childhoods explores this fact, offering a picture of childhood today. Here are the frenetic families managing their children's hectic schedules of "leisure" activities; and here are families with plenty of time but little economic security. Lareau shows how middle-class parents, whether black or white, engage in a process of "concerted cultivation" designed to draw out children's talents and skills, while working-class and poor families rely on "the accomplishment of natural growth," in which a child's development unfolds spontaneously—as long as basic comfort, food, and shelter are provided. Each of these approaches to childrearing brings its own benefits and its own drawbacks. In identifying and analyzing differences between the two, Lareau demonstrates the power, and limits, of social class in shaping the lives of America's children.The first edition of Unequal Childhoods was an instant classic, portraying in riveting detail the unexpected ways in which social class influences parenting in white and African-American families. A decade later, Annette Lareau has revisited the same families and interviewed the original subjects to examine the impact of social class in the transition to adulthood.

In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition


Fred Moten - 2003
    In the Break is an extended riff on “The Burton Greene Affair,” exploring the tangled relationship between black avant-garde in music and literature in the 1950s and 1960s, the emergence of a distinct form of black cultural nationalism, and the complex engagement with and disavowal of homoeroticism that bridges the two. Fred Moten focuses in particular on the brilliant improvisatory jazz of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, and others, arguing that all black performance—culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself—is improvisation.For Moten, improvisation provides a unique epistemological standpoint from which to investigate the provocative connections between black aesthetics and Western philosophy. He engages in a strenuous critical analysis of Western philosophy (Heidegger, Kant, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Derrida) through the prism of radical black thought and culture. As the critical, lyrical, and disruptive performance of the human, Moten’s concept of blackness also brings such figures as Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx, Cecil Taylor and Samuel R. Delany, Billie Holiday and William Shakespeare into conversation with each other.Stylistically brilliant and challenging, much like the music he writes about, Moten’s wide-ranging discussion embraces a variety of disciplines—semiotics, deconstruction, genre theory, social history, and psychoanalysis—to understand the politicized sexuality, particularly homoeroticism, underpinning black radicalism. In the Break is the inaugural volume in Moten’s ambitious intellectual project-to establish an aesthetic genealogy of the black radical tradition.

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race


Edwin Black - 2003
    Based on selective breeding of human beings, eugenics began in laboratories on Long Island but ended in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Cruel and racist laws were enacted in 27 U.S. states, while the supporters of eugenics included progressive thinkers like Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Ultimately, over 60,000 "unfit" Americans were coercively sterilized, a third of them after Nuremberg had declared such practices crimes against humanity. This is a timely and shocking chronicle of bad science at its worst—with many important lessons for the genetic age in which an interest in eugenics has been dangerously revived.

Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin


John D'Emilio - 2003
    the methods of Gandhi, spearheaded the 1963 March on Washington, and helped bring the struggle of African Americans to the forefront of a nation's consciousness. But despite his incontrovertibly integral role in the movement, the openly gay Rustin is not the household name that many of his activist contemporaries are. In exploring history's Lost Prophet, acclaimed historian John D'Emilio explains why Rustin's influence was minimized by his peers and why his brilliant strategies were not followed, or were followed by those he never meant to help.

Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique


Roderick A. Ferguson - 2003
    But what is missing from the picture--sexual difference--can be as instructive as what is present. In this ambitious work, Roderick A. Ferguson reveals how the discourses of sexuality are used to articulate theories of racial difference in the field of sociology. He shows how canonical sociology--Gunnar Myrdal, Ernest Burgess, Robert Park, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and William Julius Wilson--has measured African Americans' unsuitability for a liberal capitalist order in terms of their adherence to the norms of a heterosexual and patriarchal nuclear family model. In short, to the extent that African Americans' culture and behavior deviated from those norms, they would not achieve economic and racial equality. Aberrations in Black tells the story of canonical sociology's regulation of sexual difference as part of its general regulation of African American culture. Ferguson places this story within other stories--the narrative of capital's emergence and development, the histories of Marxism and revolutionary nationalism, and the novels that depict the gendered and sexual idiosyncrasies of African American culture--works by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison. In turn, this book tries to present another story--one in which people who presumably manifest the dys-functions of capitalism are reconsidered as indictments of the norms of state, capital, and social science. Ferguson includes the first-ever discussion of a new archival discovery--a never-published chapter of Invisible Man that deals with a gay character in a way thatcomplicates and illuminates Ellison's project. Unique in the way it situates critiques of race, gender, and sexuality within analyses of cultural, economic, and epistemological formations, Ferguson's work introduces a new mode of discourse--which Ferguson calls queer of color analysis--that helps to lay bare the mutual distortions of racial, economic, and sexual portrayals within sociology. A hard-hitting look at the regulation of sexual difference and its role in circumscribing African American culture.

Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household


Thavolia Glymph - 2003
    Mistresses were powerful beings in the hierarchy of slavery rather than powerless victims of the same patriarchal system responsible for the oppression of the enslaved. Glymph challenges popular depictions of plantation mistresses as "friends" and "allies" of slaves and sheds light on the political importance of ostensible private struggles, and on the political agendas at work in framing the domestic as private and household relations as personal.Recommended by the Association of Black Women Historians.

Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin


Bayard Rustin - 2003
    to the precepts of nonviolence during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, thereby launching the birth of the Civil Rights Movement in 1955. Widely acclaimed as a founding father of modern black protest, Rustin reached his pinnacle of notoriety in 1963 as organizer of the March on Washington.Long before the March on Washington and King’s ascendance to international prominence, Rustin put his life on the line to challenge racial segregation. His open homosexuality, however, remained a point of contention among black church leaders, with controversy sometimes embroiling even King himself.Time on Two Crosses showcases the extraordinary career of this black gay civil rights pioneer. Spanning five decades, the book combines classic texts ranging in topic from Gandhi’s impact on African Americans, white supremacists in Congress, the antiwar movement, and the assassination of Malcolm X, with never-before published selections on the call for gay rights, Louis Farrakhan, affirmative action, AIDS, and women’s rights. Also included are twenty-five photos from the Rustin estate.

Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America


Charisse Jones - 2003
    Black women "shift" by altering the expectations they have for themselves or their outer appearance. They modify their speech. They shift "White" as they head to work in the morning and "Black" as they come back home each night. They shift inward, internalizing the searing pain of the negative stereotypes that they encounter daily. And sometimes they shift by fighting back.With deeply moving interviews, poignantly revealed on each page, Shifting is a much-needed, clear, and comprehensive portrait of the reality of African American women's lives today.

Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture


Hortense Spillers - 2003
    Spanning her work from the early 1980s, in which she pioneered a broadly poststructuralist approach to African American literature, and extending through her turn to cultural studies in the 1990s, these essays display her passionate commitment to reading as a fundamentally political act-one pivotal to rewriting the humanist project.Spillers is best known for her race-centered revision of psychoanalytic theory and for her subtle account of the relationships between race and gender. She has also given literary criticism some of its most powerful readings of individual authors, represented here in seminal essays on Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, and William Faulkner. Ultimately, the essays collected in Black, White, and in Color all share Spillers's signature style: heady, eclectic, and astonishingly productive of new ideas. Anyone interested in African American culture and literature will want to read them.

Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir


Dorothy I. Height - 2003
    Yet as the sole woman among powerful, charismatic men, someone whose personal ambition was secondary to her passion for her cause, she has received little mainstream recognition—until now. In her memoir, Dr. Height, now ninety-one, reflects on a life of service and leadership. We witness her childhood encounters with racism and the thrill of New York college life during the Harlem Renaissance. We see her protest against lynchings. We sit with her onstage as Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his "I Have a Dream" speech. We meet people she knew intimately throughout the decades: W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mary McLeod Bethune, Adam Clayton Powell Sr., Langston Hughes, and many others. And we watch as she leads the National Council of Negro Women for forty-one years, her diplomatic counsel sought by U.S. presidents from Eisenhower to Clinton. After the fierce battles of the 1960s, Dr. Height concentrates on troubled black communities, on issues like rural poverty, teen pregnancy and black family values. In 1994, her efforts are officially recognized. Along with Rosa Parks, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America


Mae M. Ngai - 2003
    immigration policy--a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the 20th century.Mae Ngai offers a close reading of the legal regime of restriction that commenced in the 1920s--its statutory architecture, judicial genealogies, administrative enforcement, differential treatment of European and non-European migrants, and long-term effects. In well-drawn historical portraits, Ngai peoples her study with the Filipinos, Mexicans, Japanese, and Chinese who comprised, variously, illegal aliens, alien citizens, colonial subjects, and imported contract workers.She shows that immigration restriction, particularly national-origin and numerical quotas, re-mapped the nation both by creating new categories of racial difference and by emphasizing as never before the nation's contiguous land borders and their patrol. This yielded the illegal alien, a new legal and political subject whose inclusion in the nation was a social reality but a legal impossibility--a subject without rights and excluded from citizenship. Questions of fundamental legal status created new challenges for liberal democratic society and have directly informed the politics of multiculturalism and national belonging in our time.Ngai's analysis is based on extensive archival research, including previously unstudied records of the U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization Service. Contributing to American history, legal history, and ethnic studies, Impossible Subjects is a major reconsideration of U.S. immigration in the 20th century.

The Prosaic Soul of Nikki Giovanni


Nikki Giovanni - 2003
    Giovanni gives searing commentary on Spike Lee and the making of Malcolm X, W.E.B. DuBois, affirmative action, President JFK and the state of urban schools. Racism 101 adds an important chapter to the debate on American national values. Sacred Cows and Other Edibles (1988) received the Ohioana Library Award. In it Nikki’s esays and articles take on the loftiness of higher education and personal major life crises. In Gemini (1971), Giovanni explores one of the most tumultuous periods in our history. Her essays take us from her childhood in Knoxville, Tennessee, through her work in the Black revolution of the sixties, to her emergence as an acclaimed poet. Nikki interweaves warm recollections of her personal history with incisive vignettes of cultural and political history, including her often surprising opinions of Amiri Baraka, Angela Davis, Lena Horne, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown and others.

Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress


Kara Walker - 2003
    1969) has emerged as one of her generation's most important artists. Best known for her provocative black paper cutout silhouettes, she confronts stereotypes, sex, violence, and power relationships through Civil War-era parodies, narratives, and a mastery of craft and installation.This book, which accompanies an exhibition organized by the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College and the Williams College Museum of Art, presents a comprehensive overview of Walker's work, beginning with her first cut-paper wall installation, "Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart" (1994). Other highlights include the 1996 series of twenty-four watercolor drawings, "Brown Follies," which is reproduced in full as an artist's book within the book, and installation views of many of Walker's exhibitions. Recent drawings and projections are also featured. Throughout the book are a selection of the Walker's writings reproduced as they were created typed on index cards. These writings reveal a rarely seen side of the artist, whose words are as provocative as her installations and drawings. The essays discuss Walker's place in art history, formal and narrative readings of her work, her relation to culture at large, and issues of race, sexuality, and representation addressed in her work.Copublished with the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College and Williams College Museum of Art.

Then There Were None


Martha H. Noyes - 2003
    Noyes, is a personal and emotional account, in words and pictures, of the effect of Western contact on the Hawaiian population. Drawing from a variety of sources, Noyes chronicles the effects, from the arrival of Capt. Cook to the present, of disease, written language, the missionaries, landownership, the overthrow of the monarchy, and the suppression of hula and Hawaiian language, concluding with a look at present-day activism. Photographs vividly contrast tourist images with scenes from the real Hawai‘i and highlight the contrast between a culture rooted in cosmology and the material culture of those who made Hawai‘i their own.

Genocide of the Mind: New Native American Writing


MariJo Moore - 2003
    However over the past decade there has been a rising movement to accurately describe Native cultures and histories. In particular, people have begun to explore the experience of urban Indians—individuals who live in two worlds struggling to preserve traditional Native values within the context of an ever-changing modern society. In Genocide of the Mind, the experience and determination of these people is recorded in a revealing and compelling collection of essays that brings the Native American experience into the twenty-first century. Contributors include: Paula Gunn Allen, Simon Ortiz, Sherman Alexie, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Maurice Kenny, as well as emerging writers from different Indian nations.

Black: A Celebration of Culture


Deborah Willis - 2003
    "Black, A Celebration of a Culture," presents the vibrant panorama of 20th-century black culture in America and around the world in more than 500 photographs from the turn of the last century to the present day. Each photograph, hand-picked by Deborah Willis, America's leading historian of African-American photography, celebrates the world of music, art, fashion, sports, family, worship or play. From Saturday night parties to Sunday morning worship, Jessie Owens to Barry Bonds, Ella Fitzgerald to Halle Berry, "Black: A Celebration of a Culture" is joyous and inspiring.

A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration


Steven Hahn - 2003
    As Steven Hahn demonstrates, rural African-Americans were central political actors in the great events of disunion, emancipation, and nation-building. At the same time, Hahn asks us to think in more expansive ways about the nature and boundaries of politics and political practice.Emphasizing the importance of kinship, labor, and networks of communication, A Nation under Our Feet explores the political relations and sensibilities that developed under slavery and shows how they set the stage for grassroots mobilization. Hahn introduces us to local leaders, and shows how political communities were built, defended, and rebuilt. He also identifies the quest for self-governance as an essential goal of black politics across the rural South, from contests for local power during Reconstruction, to emigrationism, biracial electoral alliances, social separatism, and, eventually, migration.Hahn suggests that Garveyism and other popular forms of black nationalism absorbed and elaborated these earlier struggles, thus linking the first generation of migrants to the urban North with those who remained in the South. He offers a new framework--looking out from slavery--to understand twentieth-century forms of black political consciousness as well as emerging battles for civil rights. It is a powerful story, told here for the first time, and one that presents both an inspiring and a troubling perspective on American democracy.

Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions


María Lugones - 2003
    A deeply original essayist, Lugones writes from her own perspective as an inhabitant of a number of different 'worlds.' Born in Argentina but living for a number of years in the United States, she sees herself as neither quite a U.S. citizen, nor quite an Argentine. An activist against the oppression of Latino/a people by the dominant U.S. culture, she is also an academic participating in the privileges of that culture. A lesbian, she experiences homophobia in both Anglo and Latino world. A woman, she moves uneasily in the world of patriarchy. Lugones writes out of multiple and conflicting subjectivities that shape her sense of who she is, resisting the demand for a unified self in light of her necessary ambiguities. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes explores the possibility of deep coalition with other women of color, based on 'multiple understandings of oppressions and resistances'-understandings whose logic she subjects to philosophical investigation.

Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self


Coco Fusco - 2003
    They include: Jessica Craig-Martin, Chester Higgins, Nikki Lee, Catherine Opie, Lorna Simpson, Vanessa Beecroft, Simon Johan, Carrie Mae Weems, Nancy Burson, Garry Winogrand, Pedro Meyer, Robert Misrach, Lewis Hine, Lee Friedlander, John Baldessari, Ansel Adams, Man Ray, F. Holland Day and Thomas Eakins.

Privilege: A Reader


Michael S. Kimmel - 2003
    In addition to readings from well-known authors in the field, this edition includes pieces from contemporary scholars breaking new ground in superordinate studies. Seventeen carefully selected essays explore the multifaceted aspects of privilege: how race, gender, class, and sexual preference interact in the lives of those who are privileged by one or more of these identities. Written from a variety of viewpoints, personal and analytic, the essays in this volume help students understand that “race” can mean white people, “gender” can mean men, and “sexuality” can mean heterosexuals.I. MAKING PRIVILEGE VISIBLE1. McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege and Male Privilege.”2. Woods, Jewel.“Black Male Privilege.” *3. Larew, John, “Why are Droves of Unqualified, Unprepared Kids Getting Into our Top Colleges?”4. Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. “On Being Okie.”5. Messner, Michael A. “Becoming 100% Straight” 6. Rochlin, M. “The Heterosexual Questionnaire.” II. UNDERSTANDING PRIVILEGE7. Johnson, Allan. “Privilege Power and Difference and Us,” from Privilege Power and Difference.*8. Brodkin Sacks, Karen. “How Jews Became White”9. Kimmel, Michael S. “Masculinity as Homophobia.” 10. Wise, Tim. “Anti-Racist Reflections From an Angry White Male.” *11. Kendall, Diana. “Class in the United States: Not Only Alive but Reproducing.” *III. EXAMINING INTERSECTIONS12. Redding, Maureen T. “Invisibility/Hypervisibility: The Paradox of Normative Whiteness.” *13. hooks, bell. “Class and Race: The New Black Elite.”14. Bérubé, Allan. “How Gay Stays White and What Kind of White it Stays.”IV. MOVING FORWARD15. Thompson, Becky. “Subverting Racism From Within.”16. Hill Collins, Patricia. “Toward a New Vision.” 17.Ferber, Abby. “Dismantling Privilege and Becoming an Ally.” *

Frederick Douglass on Slavery and the Civil War: Selections from His Writings


Frederick Douglass - 2003
    Recognized as one of the first great African-American speakers in the United States, Douglass was an advisor to President Lincoln during the Civil War and fought for the adoption of constitutional amendments that guaranteed voting rights and other civil liberties for blacks.This book includes representative selections from the speeches and writings of this great statesman, with topics focusing on the slave trade, the Civil War, suffrage for African-Americans, reconstruction in the South, and other vital issues.A powerful voice for human rights throughout much of the 19th century, Douglass remains highly respected today for his fight against racial injustice.

Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway ... and More


Russell Simmons - 2003
    Among them: Suheir Hammad, Beau Sia, Steve Colman, Stacyann Chin, Mayda del Valle, Georgia Me, Poetri, and other well-established and up-and-coming Slam artists who have forever changed the face of poetry and offer a fresh, exuberant, insightful, and comedic look at who we are as Americans today.

The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality


Thomas M. Shapiro - 2003
    But alongside these encouraging signs, Thomas Shapiro argues in The Hidden Cost of Being African American, fundamentallevels of racial inequality persist, particularly in the area of asset accumulation--inheritance, savings accounts, stocks, bonds, home equity, and other investments. Shapiro reveals how the lack of these family assets along with continuing racial discrimination in crucial areas like homeownershipdramatically impact the everyday lives of many black families, reversing gains earned in schools and on jobs, and perpetuating the cycle of poverty in which far too many find themselves trapped. Shapiro uses a combination of in-depth interviews with almost 200 families from Los Angeles, Boston, and St. Louis, and national survey data with 10,000 families to show how racial inequality is transmitted across generations. We see how those families with private wealth are able to move up fromgeneration to generation, relocating to safer communities with better schools and passing along the accompanying advantages to their children. At the same time those without significant wealth remain trapped in communities that don't allow them to move up, no matter how hard they work. Shapirochallenges white middle class families to consider how the privileges that wealth brings not only improve their own chances but also hold back people who don't have them. This wealthfare is a legacy of inequality that, if unchanged, will project social injustice far into the future. Showing that over half of black families fall below the asset poverty line at the beginning of the new century, The Hidden Cost of Being African American will challenge all Americans to reconsider what must be done to end racial inequality.

Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education


Catherine Prendergast - 2003
    Board of Education decision, Catherine Prendergast draws on a combination of insights from legal studies and literacy studies to interrogate contemporary multicultural literacy initiatives, thus providing a sound historical basis that informs current debates over affirmative action, school vouchers, reparations, and high-stakes standardized testing.As a result of Brown and subsequent crucial civil rights court cases, literacy and racial justice are firmly enmeshed in the American imagination—so much so that it is difficult to discuss one without referencing the other. Breaking with the accepted wisdom that the Brown decision was an unambiguous victory for the betterment of race relations, Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education finds that the ruling reinforced traditional conceptions of literacy as primarily white property to be controlled and disseminated by an empowered majority. Prendergast examines civil rights era Supreme Court rulings and immigration cases spanning a century of racial injustice to challenge the myth of assimilation through literacy. Advancing from Ways with Words, Shirley Brice Heath’s landmark study of desegregated communities, Prendergast argues that it is a shared understanding of literacy as white property which continues to impact problematic classroom dynamics and education practices.To offer a positive model for reimagining literacy instruction that is truly in the service of racial justice, Prendergast presents a naturalistic study of an alternative public secondary school. Outlining new directions and priorities for inclusive literacy scholarship in America, Literacy and Racial Justice concludes that a literate citizen is one who can engage rather than overlook longstanding legacies of racial strife.

Civil Rights Chronicle (The African-American Struggle for Freedom)


Clayborne Carson - 2003
    The dramatic personal and political stories behind the Civil Rights Movement as it happened across the North and the South with a key focus from 1950-1975.

Always Wear Joy: My Mother Bold and Beautiful


Susan Fales-Hill - 2003
    But it was from her mother -- a woman who was dressed by Givenchy and sculpted by Alexander Calder, yet rejected by many a casting agent for her "dark," unconventional looks -- that Susan drew inspiration, particularly when she faced challenges in her own career as a television writer in Hollywood, a town that wasn't always receptive to positive images of people of color. As a result the two developed a bond that mothers and daughters everywhere will find inspiring. Both a universally touching mother-daughter story and a portrait of a dazzling American family, Always Wear Joy is a memoir readers won't soon forget.

Myths America Lives By


Richard T. Hughes - 2003
    Hughes identifies the five key myths that lie at the heart of the American experience--the myths of the Chosen Nation, of Nature's Nation, of the Christian Nation, of the Millennial Nation, and of the Innocent Nation. Drawing on a range of dissenting voices, Hughes shows that by canonizing these seemingly harmless myths of national identity as absolute truths, America risks undermining the sweepingly egalitarian promise of the Declaration of Independence. The Chosen Nation myth led to the wholesale slaughter of indigenous peoples during the pioneer era. More recently the Innocent Nation myth prevented many Americans from understanding, or even discussing, the complex motivations of the 9/11 terrorists. Myths America Lives By demonstrates that Americans must rethink these myths in the spirit of extraordinary humility if the United States is to fulfill its true promise as a nation. Hughes locates the roots of each myth in a different period of America's development, and from each of these periods he finds stirring critiques offered by marginalized commentators--especially African Americans and Native Americans--who question the predominant myth of their age. Myths America Lives By is a dialogue between the mainstream mythmakers and the many critics--including Martin Luther King Jr., Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, Black Elk, Anna J. Cooper, Booker T. Washington, Malcom X, Angela Davis, and W. E. B. Du Bois--whose dissent, rather than being un-American, was often grounded in a patriotic belief in the "self-evident" equality of America's fundamental creed.

On Being Black and Reformed: A New Perspective on the African-American Christian Experience


Anthony J. Carter - 2003
    Demonstrates the historical, biblical, and theological consistency of Reformed theology, the richness of the African-American Christian experience, and the merit of bringing the two together.

Chicana Without Apology: The New Chicana Cultural Studies


Eden E. Torres - 2003
    Through compelling prose, Torres masterfully weaves her own story as a first-generation Mexican American with interviews with activists and other Mexican-American women to document the present fight for social justice and the struggles of living between two worlds.

Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society


Michael K. Brown - 2003
    If the experience of most black Americans says otherwise, an explanation has been sorely lacking—or obscured by the passions the issue provokes. At long last offering a cool, clear, and informed perspective on the subject, this book brings together a team of highly respected sociologists, political scientists, economists, criminologists, and legal scholars to scrutinize the logic and evidence behind the widely held belief in a color-blind society—and to provide an alternative explanation for continued racial inequality in the United States. While not denying the economic advances of black Americans since the 1960s, Whitewashing Race draws on new and compelling research to demonstrate the persistence of racism and the effects of organized racial advantage across many institutions in American society—including the labor market, the welfare state, the criminal justice system, and schools and universities. Looking beyond the stalled debate over current antidiscrimination policies, the authors also put forth a fresh vision for achieving genuine racial equality of opportunity in a post-affirmative action world.

American Indian Contributions to the World: 15,000 Years of Inventions and Innovations


Emory Dean Keoke - 2003
    Each item or process originated in North, Central or South America and has been adopted in some way by other cultures.

Notes from the Divided Country: Poems


Suji Kwock Kim - 2003
    She considers what a homeland would be for a divided nation and a divided self: what it means to enter language, the body, the family, the community; to be a daughter, sister, lover, citizen, or exile.In settings from New York to San Francisco, from Scotland to Seoul, her poems question "what threads hold / our lives together" in cities and gardens, battlefields and small towns. Across the no-man's-land between every "you" and "I," her speakers encounter, quarrel with, or honor others, traveling between the living and the dead, between horror over the disastrous events of the past and hope for the future. Drawing upon a wide range of voices, styles, and perspectives, Notes from the Divided Country bears witness to the vanishing world.

Betty Shabazz: A Remarkable Story of Survival and Faith Before and After Malcolm X


Russell J. Rickford - 2003
    The thunder of shotgun blasts ripped through the ballroom, and Betty Shabazz turned to see her husband float backward, keel over and crash to the ballroom stage. She grabbed her children, hurling them beneath a booth and shielding them with her body while the room erupted into screams and chaos. As she lay there squeezing her family, the Betty Shabazz who was the dutiful and obedient wife of the Civil Rights Movement's most feared leader ceased to be, and the woman who emerged would become one of the greatest heroines of our day. Betty Shabazz: A Remarkabe Story of Survival and Faith before and after Malcolm X is the first major biography of Dr. Betty Shabazz, the unsung and controversial champion of the Civil Rights era. From her early marriage to black liberation's raging voice through her evolution into a powerful and outspoken African-American leader, Betty Shabazz was in constant struggle to bring freedom and justice to her people. Yet, at times her greatest fight was to struggle through tragedy and hold on to her faith amidst the stereotypes forced on her by a culture of racism and the very people she was trying to liberate. To read Betty Shabazz is to experience this remarkable life. With eloquent and intimate prose, Russell J. Rickford puts you on the scene as a young Betty Sanders is taken in by foster parents after a troubled childhood. You are there as Malcolm X comes home from a hard day of railing against oppression to hug his children, dote on his wife and laugh. You dive under the table at the Audubon Ballroom as bullets strike Malcolm down. You struggle with Betty Shabazz as she fights to raise sixgirls alone while earning a doctorate. You stand triumphant with her as she claims her own individuality and fights to build respect for Malcolm. And you stand watch with her daughters as Betty passes away, a victim of yet another tragedy, but this time after a life lived full. Russell J. Rickford has conducted extensive research to compile this biography, interviewing more than seventy of Betty Shabazz's family members, friends, colleagues and contemporaries as well as researching countless records and documents, including recently declassified FBI, CIA and New York Police files. This is the first complete look at the life of Betty Shabazz and a new insight into the man who was known as Malcolm X. Betty Shabazz is the story of a strong woman who faced incredible tragedy and emerged triumphant, compassionate and always full of life. In the end, it is the story of a nation torn apart by hatred learning to heal and forgive.

Are Italians White?: How Race Is Made in America


Jennifer Guglielmo - 2003
    This dazzling collection of original essays from some of the country's leading thinkers asks the rather intriguing question - Are Italians White? Each piece carefully explores how, when and why whiteness became important to Italian Americans, and the significance of gender, class and nation to racial identity.

Blood for Dignity: The Story of the First Integrated Combat Unit in the U.S. Army


David P. Colley - 2003
    The experiences of these soldiers were truly radical and a harbinger of things to come. Clearly, these black infantrymen planted the seeds of integration in the army--and the nation.Blood for Dignity tells the story of these soldiers through the eyes of 5th platoon, K Company, 394th Regiment, 99th Division--the first integrated combat unit since the Revolutionary War. These men were involved in heavy combat at the Remagen Bridgehead and several other critical junctures as they drove back the German army. The performance of these men laid to rest the accepted white attitude of a century and a half that blacks were cowardly and inferior fighters. In fact, they proved to be just the opposite. Author David Colley interviewed many of the members of the 99th. Their accounts along with years of reseach paint a gripping, combat-heavy portrait of young men fighting together for their nation. For as they will tell you, in combat situations, prejudice and the color line disappears.

The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool


Brenda Dixon Gottschild - 2003
    From feet to buttocks, hair, skin, face and beyond to soul and spirit, the author explores the endeavors, ordeals and triumphs of this body with some of the major dancers and choreographers of our time--Fernando Bujones, Brenda Bufalino, Trisha Brown, Garth Fagan, Rennie Harris, Bill T. Jones, Ralph Lemon, Susanne Linke, Meredith Monk and a cadre of their esteemed colleagues. Since race and color are usually taboo subjects in the dance world, what the author finds out is sure to cause controversy and turn heads. Written by one of the foremost American dance critics of our day, The Black Dancing Body is a key to the ineffable rhythms and movement of dance in America.

The Military Strategy of Women and Children


Butch Lee - 2003
    Now in this exploration, we are moving onto the ground of meta-politics. Wild, vast and more primal than the little fenced-in suburban plots of what amerikkka calls 'politics'. From the rape bordellos of the Balkans to the mass murder by AIDS in Afrika, women are being pushed to understand men's society and, most importantly, ourselves, in a different way. The longest Amazon journey begins today.

American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland


Robert O. Self - 2003
    American Babylon tells this story through Oakland and its nearby suburbs, tracing both the history of civil rights and black power politics as well as the history of suburbanization and home-owner politics. Robert Self shows that racial inequities in both New Deal and Great Society liberalism precipitated local struggles over land, jobs, taxes, and race within postwar metropolitan development. Black power and the tax revolt evolved together, in tension.American Babylon demonstrates that the history of civil rights and black liberation politics in California did not follow a southern model, but represented a long-term struggle for economic rights that began during the World War II years and continued through the rise of the Black Panthers in the late 1960s. This struggle yielded a wide-ranging and profound critique of postwar metropolitan development and its foundation of class and racial segregation. Self traces the roots of the 1978 tax revolt to the 1940s, when home owners, real estate brokers, and the federal government used racial segregation and industrial property taxes to forge a middle-class lifestyle centered on property ownership.Using the East Bay as a starting point, Robert Self gives us a richly detailed, engaging narrative that uniquely integrates the most important racial liberation struggles and class politics of postwar America.

Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk about Sexuality and Intimacy


Tricia Rose - 2003
    In their absence, commonly held perceptions of black women as teenage mothers, welfare recipients, mammies, or exotic sexual playthings remain unchanged. For fear that telling their stories will fulfill society's implicit expectations about their sexuality, most black women have retreated into silence. Tricia Rose seeks to break this silence and jump-start a dialogue by presenting, for the first time, the sexual testimonies of black women who span a broad range of ages, levels of education, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Both brilliantly conceived and sensitively executed, Longing to Tell is required reading for anyone interested in issues of race and gender.

Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces


Juana María Rodríguez - 2003
    Images of Latinos and Latinas in mainstream news and in popular culture suggest a Latin Explosion at center stage, yet the topic of queer identity in relation to Latino/a America remains under examined.Juana Mar�a Rodr�guez attempts to rectify this dearth of scholarship in Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces, by documenting the ways in which identities are transformed by encounters with language, the law, culture, and public policy. She identifies three key areas as the project's case studies: activism, primarily HIV prevention; immigration law; and cyberspace. In each, Rodr�guez theorizes the ways queer Latino/a identities are enabled or constrained, melding several theoretical and methodological approaches to argue that these sites are complex and dynamic social fields.As she moves the reader from one disciplinary location to the other, Rodr�guez reveals the seams of her own academic engagement with queer latinidad. This deftly crafted work represents a dynamic and innovative approach to the study of identity formation and representation, making a vital contribution to a new reformulation of gender and sexuality studies.

The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois


Aberjhani - 2003
    Original.

The Lewis and Clark Companion: An Encyclopedic Guide to the Voyage of Discovery


Stephenie Ambrose Tubbs - 2003
    They never did find the fabled Northwest Passage, but over twenty-eight months, the Corps of Discovery traveled more than eight thousand miles through eleven future states, named scores of places and rivers, met with many Native American tribes, and wrote the first descriptions of heretofore unknown plants and animals. By the end of their trip, Lewis and Clark had navigated and named two thirds of the American continent. They may have had undaunted courage, but the sheer volume of information related to their expedition can be more than a little daunting to the armchair historian. Written by two highly regarded Lewis and Clark experts, this book contains over five hundred lively and fascinating entries on everything from the members of the expedition and the places they went to the weapons and tools, trade goods, and medicines they carried, along with the food and amusements that sustained them. Highly readable and informative, it's the perfect introduction for the Lewis and Clark novice, and the comprehensive guide no buff will want to be without.

Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South


Robert Rodgers Korstad - 2003
    These workers confronted a system of racial capitalism that consigned African Americans to the basest jobs in the industry, perpetuated low wages for all southerners, and shored up white supremacy. Galvanized by the emergence of the CIO, African Americans took the lead in a campaign that saw a strong labor movement and the reenfranchisement of the southern poor as keys to reforming the South--and a reformed South as central to the survival and expansion of the New Deal. In the window of opportunity opened by World War II, they blurred the boundaries between home and work as they linked civil rights and labor rights in a bid for justice at work and in the public sphere. But civil rights unionism foundered in the maelstrom of the Cold War. Its defeat undermined later efforts by civil rights activists to raise issues of economic equality to the moral high ground occupied by the fight against legalized segregation and, Korstad contends, constrains the prospects for justice and democracy today.

American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism


Nancy Ordover - 2003
    The Nazis may have given eugenics its negative connotations, but the practice--and the "science" that supports it--is still disturbingly alive in America in anti-immigration initiatives, the quest for a "gay gene, " and theories of collective intelligence. Tracing the historical roots and persistence of eugenics in the United States, Nancy Ordover explores the political and cultural climate that has endowed these campaigns with mass appeal and scientific legitimacy. American Eugenics demonstrates how biological theories of race, gender, and sexuality are crucially linked through a concern with regulating the "unfit." These links emerge in Ordover's examination of three separate but ultimately related American eugenics campaigns: early twentieth-century anti-immigration crusades; medical models and interventions imposed on (and sometimes embraced by) lesbians, gays, transgendered people, and bisexuals; and the compulsory sterilization of poor women and women of color. Throughout, her work reveals how constructed notions of race, gender, sexuality, and nation are put to ideological uses and how "faith in science" can undermine progressive social movements, drawing liberals and conservatives alike into eugenics-based discourse and policies.

Erasing Racism: The Survival of the American Nation


Molefi Kete Asante - 2003
    As Asante makes clear, America continues to be a nation of two peoples with very different histories and perspectives - a white majority that mainly perceives a land of promise and a black minority very much aware that too many African Americans are still consigned to a ghetto wilderness on the margins of society. Despite the legal and social progress of African Americans since the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the bitter legacy of slavery and subsequent racial injustice continues to haunt American society.Asante pinpoints the greatest source of frustration and anger among African Americans in recent decades: what he calls "the wall of ignorance" that attempts to hide the long history of racial injustice from public consciousness. This is most evident in each race's differing perspectives on racial matters. Though most whites view racism as a thing of the past, a social problem largely solved by the Civil Rights movement, blacks continue to experience racism in many areas of social life: encounters with the police; the practice of red lining in housing; difficulties in getting bank loans, mortgages, and insurance policies; and glaring disparities in health care, educational opportunities, unemployment levels, and incarceration rates. Though such problems are not expressions of the overt racism of legal segregation and lynch mobs - what most whites probably think of when they hear the word "racism" - their negative effect on black Americans is almost as pernicious. Such daily experiences create a lingering feeling of resentment that percolates in a slow boil till some event triggers an outburst of rage, like the Los Angeles riots of 1992. Only then does the majority start to pay attention.Asante argues that America cannot long continue as a cohesive society under these conditions. As we embark upon the new century, he urges more public focus on redressing the wrongs of the past and their continuing legacy. Above all, he thinks that Americans must seriously consider some system of reparations to deal with both past and present injustices, an apology, and our own truth-and-reconciliation committee that addresses both the history of slavery and present-day racism. Only in this way, he feels, can we ever hope to heal the racial divide that never seems to be erased.This is a powerful, deeply perceptive analysis of a crucial social problem by one of America's leading thinkers on race.

Just Don't Marry One: Interracial Dating, Marriage, and Parenting


George Yancey - 2003
    If you are a pastor, professor, or counselor, or if you are yourself involved in an interracial relationship or family, Just Don't Marry One will open your eyes and serve as a compass as you navigate the uncharted waters surrounding multiracial families.

Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity


E. Patrick Johnson - 2003
    Patrick Johnson’s provocative study examines how blackness is appropriated and performed—toward widely divergent ends—both within and outside African American culture. Appropriating Blackness develops from the contention that blackness in the United States is necessarily a politicized identity—avowed and disavowed, attractive and repellent, fixed and malleable. Drawing on performance theory, queer studies, literary analysis, film criticism, and ethnographic fieldwork, Johnson describes how diverse constituencies persistently try to prescribe the boundaries of "authentic" blackness and how performance highlights the futility of such enterprises.Johnson looks at various sites of performed blackness, including Marlon Riggs’s influential documentary Black Is . . . Black Ain’t and comedic routines by Eddie Murphy, David Alan Grier, and Damon Wayans. He analyzes nationalist writings by Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver, the vernacular of black gay culture, an oral history of his grandmother’s experience as a domestic worker in the South, gospel music as performed by a white Australian choir, and pedagogy in a performance studies classroom. By exploring the divergent aims and effects of these performances—ranging from resisting racism, sexism, and homophobia to excluding sexual dissidents from the black community—Johnson deftly analyzes the multiple significations of blackness and their myriad political implications. His reflexive account considers his own complicity, as ethnographer and teacher, in authenticating narratives of blackness.

White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism


Ashley W. Doane - 2003
    White Out brings together the original work of leading scholars across the disciplines of sociology, philosophy, history, and anthropology to give readers an important and cutting-edge study of "whiteness".

Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique


Kandice Chuh - 2003
    Recognizing that the rubric "Asian American" elides crucial differences, Kandice Chuh argues for reframing Asian American studies as a study defined not by its subjects and objects, but by its critique. Toward that end, she urges the foregrounding of the constructedness of "Asian American" formations and shows how this understanding of the field provides the basis for continuing to use the term "Asian American" in light of—and in spite of—contemporary critiques about its limitations.Drawing on the insights of poststructuralist theory, postcolonial studies, and investigations of transnationalism, Imagine Otherwise conceives of Asian American literature and U.S. legal discourse as theoretical texts to be examined for the normative claims about race, gender, and sexuality that they put forth. Reading government and legal documents, novels including Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart, John Okada's No-No Boy, Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, Ronyoung Kim's Clay Walls, and Lois Ann Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging, and the short stories "Immigration Blues" by Bienvenido Santos and "High-Heeled Shoes" by Hisaye Yamamoto, Chuh works through Filipino American and Korean American identity formation and Japanese American internment during World War II as she negotiates the complex and sometimes tense differences that constitute 'Asian America' and Asian American studies.

Grandma Hekmatt Remembers: An Arab-American Family Story


Ann Morris - 2003
    - Encourages kids to explore their own genealogy- Timely--demystifies the hejab and other aspects of Arab culture- Series teacher guide available

Black & Reformed: Seeing God's Sovereignty in the African-American Christian Experience


Anthony Carter - 2003
    

Standing in the Need of Prayer: A Celebration of Black Prayer


Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture - 2003
    As Mrs. Coretta Scott King writes in her foreword to Standing in the Need of Prayer, "It is said that every prayer is heard and every prayer is answered in some way [and] I still believe that the millions of prayers spoken by African Americans from the Middle Passage on down to today have been heard by a righteous and loving God." In this remarkable book, striking photographs and powerful prayers drawn from the unparalleled collections of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture span the broad spectrum of black religious traditions during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. From the plaintive Yoruba prayer to "Look after us,/Look after our children" and the humble opening prayer of the Qur'ân to "Guide us on the right path" to W. E. B. Du Bois's prideful prayer to "Let [Thy children] grow in the capacity for worthy work...and may they in the end prove worthy of their great heritage," this extraordinary volume reflects the struggle, despair, determination, and triumph of the black experience through the ages. Drawing from faiths as diverse as Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Vodou, the book also includes prayers from some of history's most powerful voices, among them Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and Martin Luther King, Jr. At once beautiful and evocative, Standing in the Need of Prayer captures the most varied, striking, and powerful photographic and poetic expressions of prayer in a joyous celebration of the rich spiritual roots of a courageous people whose incredible spiritual journey will inspire generations to come.

If The Legends Fade


Tom Hendrix - 2003
    Only the stones will remain." ....In northwest Alabama, there is a stone wall dedicated to my great-great-grandmother's journey about which this book is written, and to all Native American women. The wall is my way of honoring my ancestors. It has become a special place to many who visit it, for reasons that relate to their own lives. After walking the length of the wall, Charlie Two Moons, a spiritual person, explained it this way: "The wall does not belong to you, Brother Tom, it belongs to all people. You are just the keeper. I will tell you that it is wichahpi, which means 'like the stars.' When they come, some will ask, 'Why does it bend and why is it higher and wider in some places than in others?' Tell them it is like your great-great-grandmother's journey, and their journey through life—it is never straight." If the Legends Fade is the story of Te-lah-nay's journey. The story, like the wall, belongs to all people.

Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850-1950


Charles M. Payne - 2003
    Yet the version of the story recounted time and again by both history books and PBS documentaries is a simplified one, reduced to an inspirational but ultimately facile narrative framed around Dr. King, the Kennedys, and the redemptive days of Montgomery and Memphis, in which black individuals become the rescued survivors. This story renders the mass of black people invisible, refusing to take seriously everyday people whose years of persistent struggle often made the big events possible.Time Longer than Rope unearths the ordinary roots of extraordinary change, demonstrating the depth and breadth of black oppositional spirit and activity that preceded the civil rights movement. The diversity of activism covered by this collection extends from tenant farmers' labor reform campaign in the 1919 Elaine, Arkansas massacre to Harry T. Moore s leadership of a movement that registered 100,000 black Floridians years before Montgomery, and from women's participation in the Garvey movement to the changing meaning of the Lincoln Memorial. Concentrating on activist efforts in the South, key themes emerge, including the under appreciated importance of historical memory and community building, the divisive impact of class and sexism, and the shifting interplay between individual initiative and structural constraints.More than simply illuminating a hitherto marginalized fragment of American history, Time Longer than Rope provides a crucial pre-history of the modern civil rights movement. In the process, it alters our entire understanding of African American activism and the very meaning of civil rights. "

One Sheaf, One Vine: Racially Conscious White Americans Talk About Race


Robert S. Griffin - 2003
    What they share is that, for them, the fact that they are white is more than an incidental, insignificant, or peripheral aspect of their being; it is central to how they view themselves and conduct their lives. The men and women you will meet in this book aren't public figures or leaders of organizations. They are everyday people: a postal worker from Philadelphia, a college student from Texas, an attorney from New York City, a bookstore owner from Washington State, an appliance repair man from Connecticut, a teacher from Chicago, and so on. We have a very negative image of racially conscious and committed whites gained largely from the media: neo-Nazi bigots, menacing skin heads, thugs who commit hate crimes. We are informed about people of this sort, but we don't hear from them. They aren't on television news shows speaking for themselves. They don't make movies or publish books. Politicians don't articulate their perspective or advocate their positions. Journalists and intellectuals don't write about them unless it is to be little them. Schools make no attempt to deal with them objectively. In this book, you'll hear from them. The words in this book are the speakers' as they spoke them; they haven't been altered, softened, or censored. And more than come to know their thoughts on race, you'll meet these people as human beings. Some of them you won't soon forget. Democracy depends on the free exchange of ideas. You make the call whether what these Americans have to say is to any extent valid. You decide whether what they say has any implications for what you believe and the way you believe.

High Stakes Education: Inequality, Globalization, and Urban School Reform


Pauline Lipman - 2003
    Noted scholar Pauline Lipman explores the implications of education accountability reforms, particularly in urban schools, in the current political, economic, and cultural context of intensifying globalization and increasing social inequality and marginalization along lines of race and class.

The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States


Jorge Duany - 2003
    mainland. Whether they live on the island, in the States, or divide time between the two, most imagine Puerto Rico as a separate nation and view themselves primarily as Puerto Rican. At the same time, Puerto Ricans have been U.S. citizens since 1917, and Puerto Rico has been a U.S. commonwealth since 1952. Jorge Duany uses previously untapped primary sources to bring new insights to questions of Puerto Rican identity, nationalism, and migration. Drawing a distinction between political and cultural nationalism, Duany argues that the Puerto Rican "nation" must be understood as a new kind of translocal entity with deep cultural continuities. He documents a strong sharing of culture between island and mainland, with diasporic communities tightly linked to island life by a steady circular migration. Duany explores the Puerto Rican sense of nationhood by looking at cultural representations produced by Puerto Ricans and considering how others--American anthropologists, photographers, and museum curators, for example--have represented the nation. His sources of information include ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, interviews, surveys, censuses, newspaper articles, personal documents, and literary texts.

What They Don't Learn in School: Literacy in the Lives of Urban Youth


Eeva Martikainen - 2003
    Their descriptions and assessments of these practices are anchored in perspectives of �New Literacy Studies�. The ten studies explore a number of urban scenes in order to engage, understand, and present multiple youth identities, attitudes, activities, representations, and stories connected to a range of situated, adaptive, and voluntary uses of literacy. The authors use a variety of conceptual and methodological approaches to explicate the various skills, the distinct methods of production or composition, the subjective and collective meanings, the mutable and variegated texts, and the dynamic contexts that urban youth utilize for expression, affirmation, and pleasure. There is a response to each chapter by a major scholar in its area of focus. Together, these studies and responses contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the pedagogies, politics, and possibilities of literacy and learning in and out of school.

Black Women, Identity, and Cultural Theory: (Un)Becoming the Subject


Kevin Quashie - 2003
    He considers how the work of writers such as Toni Morrison, Ama Ata Aidoo, Dionne Brand, photographer Lorna Simpson, and many others, inform debates over the concept of identity. Quashie argues that these authors and artists replace the notion of a stable, singular identity with the concept of the self developing in a process both communal and perpetually fluid, a relationship that functions in much the same way that an adult woman negotiates with her girlfriend(s). He suggests that memory itself is corporeal, a literal body that is crucial to the process of becoming. Quashie also explores the problem language poses for the black woman artist and her commitment to a mastery that neither colonizes nor excludes.The analysis throughout interacts with schools of thought such as psychoanalysis, postmodernism, and post-colonialism, but ultimately moves beyond these to propose a new cultural aesthetic, one that ultimately aims to center black women and their philosophies.

Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955


Carol Anderson - 2003
    The prize they sought was not civil rights, but human rights. Only the human rights lexicon, shaped by the Holocaust and articulated by the United Nations, contained the language and the moral power to address not only the political and legal inequality but also the education, health care, housing, and employment needs that haunted the black community. The NAACP understood this and wielded its influence and resources to take its human rights agenda before the United Nations. But the onset of the Cold War and rising anti-communism allowed powerful southerners to cast those rights as Soviet-inspired and a threat to the American ways of life. Enemies and friends excoriated the movement, and the NAACP retreated to a narrow civil rights agenda that was easier to maintain politically. Thus the Civil Rights Movement was launched with neither the language nor the mission it needed to truly achieve black equality. Carol Anderson is the recipient of major grants from the Ford Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, and numerous awards for excellence in teaching. Her scholarly interests are 20th century American, African-American, and diplomatic history, and the impact of the Cold War and U.S. foreign policy on the struggle for black equality in particular. Her publications include From Hope to Disillusion published in Diplomatic History and reprinted in The African-American Voice in U.S. Foreign Policy.

White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art


Maurice Berger - 2003
    Since the advent of the modern civil rights movement, people of color have usually been responsible for leading the debate and discussion about race and racism, forced to evaluate the status of their race in relation to the prejudice they experience every day--while most white people, even the most liberal, are usually oblivious to the psychological and political weight of their own color. The study of whiteness asks all Americans--and especially white people--to take stock of the political, psychological, economic and cultural implication of white skin, white entitlement and white privilege. White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art, the first exhibition and book devoted to the subject, gives voice to 11 artists who explicitly address the issue of whiteness: Max Becher and Andrea Robbin, Nayland Blake, Nancy Burson, Wendy Ewald and Mike Kelley, William Kentridge, Barbara Kruger, Nikki S. Lee, Cindy Sherman and Gary Simmons. David R. Roediger, Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Minnesota, contributes an essay on whiteness in the culture at large, and Patricia J. Williams, Professor of Law at Columbia University, writes about the social and legal implications of whiteness. Curator Maurice Berger, author of White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness, provides an introductory text on whiteness and art as well as individual artist essays.

Through Survivors' Eyes: From the Sixties to the Greensboro Massacre from the Sixties to the Greensboro Massacre


Sally Avery Bermanzohn - 2003
    Eighty-eight seconds later, five demonstrators lay dead and ten others were wounded. Four TV stations recorded their deaths by Klan gunfire. Yet, after two criminal trials, not a single gunman spent a day in prison. Despite this outrage, the survivors won an unprecedented civil-court victory in 1985 when a North Carolina jury held the Greensboro police jointly liable with the KKK for wrongful death.In passionate first-person accounts, Through Survivors' Eyes tells the story of six remarkable people who set out to change the world. The survivors came of age as the protest generation, joining the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. They marched for civil rights, against war, for textile and healthcare workers, and for black power and women's liberation. As the mass mobilizations waned in the mid-1970s, they searched for a way to continue their activism, studied Marxism, and became communists.Nelson Johnson, who grew up on a farm in eastern North Carolina in a family proud of its African American heritage, settled in Greensboro in the 1960s and became a leader of the Black Liberation Movement and a decade later the founder of the Faith Community Church. Willena Cannon, the daughter of black sharecroppers, witnessed a KKK murder as a child and was spurred to a life of activism. Her son, Kwame Cannon, was only ten when he saw the Greensboro killings. Marty Nathan, who grew up the daughter of a Midwestern union organizer and came to the South to attend medical school, lost her husband to the Klan/Nazi gunfire. Paul Bermanzohn, the son of Jewish Holocaust survivors, was permanently injured during the shootings. Sally Bermanzohn, a child of the New York suburbs who came south to join the Civil Rights Movement, watched in horror as her friends were killed and her husband was wounded.Through Survivors' Eyes is the story of people who abandoned conventional lives to become civil rights activists and then revolutionaries. It is about blacks and whites who united against Klan/Nazi terror, and then had to overcome unbearable hardship, and persist in seeking justice. It is also a story of one divided southern community, from the protests of black college students of the late 1960s to the convening this January of a Truth and Community Reconciliation Project (on the South African model) intended to reassess the Massacre.

Overcoming Our Racism: The Journey to Liberation


Derald Wing Sue - 2003
    It defines racism not only as extreme acts of hatred, but as "any attitude, action or institutional structure or social policy that subordinates a person or group because of their color." This landmark work offers an antidote to this pervasive social problem.*Shows how each of us has a role in the oppression of others, and what we can do about it*Offers a way to overcome racism on a very intimate level*Outlines specific guidelines and suggested activities

Lewis & Clark: An American Journey


Daniel B. Thorp - 2003
    Thorp, the courage and perseverance of these two visionaries shine forth. Follow the Corps of Discovery as they head across the then-frontier of St. Louis, through the plains where they meet and befriend various Indian tribes, over the Bitterroot Mountains, and then down the Snake and Columbia Rivers to the sea. Intriguing sidebars highlight lesser-known aspects of the expedition, including how Clark used the European medicine he brought along to help forge a relationship with the native peoples they encountered.

Terror and Triumph


Anthony B. Pinn - 2003
    In this work, which he also delivered as the Edward Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham, England, he searches out the basic structure of black religion, tracing the black religious spirit in its many historical manifestations. Pinn finds in the terrors of enslavement of black bodies and subsequent oppressions the primal experience to which the black religious impulse provides a perennial and cumulative response. Oppressions entailed the denial of personhood and creation of an object: the negro. Slave auctions, punishments, and later, lynchings created an existential dread but also evoked a quest, a search, for complex subjectivity or authentic personhood that still fuels black religion today. Pinn's promising work offers a major new understanding of what it means to be black and religious in the United States.

Backfire: How the Ku Klux Klan Helped the Civil Rights Movement


David M. Chalmers - 2003
    David Chalmers skillfully shows how Klan violence actually aided the civil rights movement of the 1960s and revolutionized the role of the national government in the protection of civil rights. He follows the forty-year struggle to punish Klan murderers through the courts of Alabama, Georgia, and the U.S. Supreme Court, and how Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center finally found a way to bring the Klan down. As it looks to the future, Backfire examines the emergence of today's violent conspiracies of the white supremacist Right.

Gramsci's Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?


Frank B. Wilderson III - 2003
    The most ridiculous question a black person can ask a cop is, ‘why did you shoot me?’ How does one account for the gratuitous? The cop is at a disadvantage: ‘I shot you because you are black; you are black because I shot you.’ Here is the tautology at the heart of the colonial experience.

Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement


Jennifer Nelson - 2003
    She explores the relationship between second-wave feminists, who were concerned with a woman's right to choose, Black and Puerto Rican Nationalists, who were concerned that Black and Puerto Rican women have as many children as possible "for the revolution," and women of color themselves, who negotiated between them. Contrary to popular belief, Nelson shows that women of color were able to successfully remake the mainstream women's liberation and abortion rights movements by appropriating select aspects of Black Nationalist politics--including addressing sterilization abuse, access to affordable childcare and healthcare, and ways to raise children out of poverty--for feminist discourse.

Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism


Madhu Dubey - 2003
    Dubey argues that for African-American studies, postmodernity best names a period, beginning in the early 1970s, marked by acute disenchantment with the promises of urban modernity and of print literacy.Dubey shows how black novelists from the last three decades have reconsidered the modern urban legacy and thus articulated a distinctly African-American strain of postmodernism. She argues that novelists such as Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Ishmael Reed, Sapphire, and John Edgar Wideman probe the disillusionment of urban modernity through repeated recourse to tropes of the book and scenes of reading and writing. Ultimately, she demonstrates that these writers view the book with profound ambivalence, construing it as an urban medium that cannot recapture the face-to-face communities assumed by oral and folk forms of expression

Dividing Classes: How the Middle Class Negotiates and Rationalizes School Advantage


Ellen A. Brantlinger - 2003
    Building on her findings, she examines the relationship between class structure and educational success. This book asserts the need to look beyond poor peoples' values and aspirations--and rather to consider the values of dominant groups--to explain class stratification and educational outcomes.

What If All the Kids Are White?: Anti-Bias Multicultural Education with Young Children and Families


Louise Derman-Sparks - 2003
    Tackles a frequently asked question about multicultural education: How do I teach about racial and cultural diversity if all my students are white? This work proposes seven learning themes to help young white children resist messages of racism and build identity and skills for thriving in a multicultural country and world.

The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal


Frank B. Wilderson III - 2003
    

Breaking the Curse of Willie Lynch: The Science of Slave Psychology


Alvin Morrow - 2003
    "A psychic examination of slavery's haunting effects on the conscious of black men & women"--Cover.

December Sky


Evelyn Cortez-Davis - 2003
    in the early 80s, her years as an undocumented student and subsequent success, thanks to the 1986 AmnestyWhat do ILLEGAL ALIENS look like? Where do they live and work? Most intriguingly, WHY ARE THEY HERE? In search of a better future, millions from all over the world choose to start over from the bottom in the United States. They often take jobs others reject: they wash cars, mow lawns, clean houses, and raise other peoples children, while leaving their own thousands of miles away. Many uproot their entire families to find better opportunities in the U.S. They silently accept derogatory labels like ILLEGAL ALIEN Alien and WETBACK as a small price to pay for the American Dream. DECEMBER SKY by Evelyn Cortez-Davis is the true story of a Central American Child transplanted to suburban Los Angeles at age 12, among the one million who took part in the Salvadoran Diaspora of the 1980s. This is her journey as a child amidst a Civil War, as one of four daughters in a risky trip through Mexico, and as an undocumented student with American ideals, who realizes her vision of a college education. This is one of the thousands of unspoken success stories made possible by the Immigration Reform and Control Act (Amnesty) of 1986, which allowed so many to reach far beyond their underground lives as undocumented immigrants, often despite insurmountable odds.