Best of
Race

2012

How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective


Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor - 2012
    In this collection, founding members of the organization and contemporary activists reflect on the legacy of its contributions to black feminism and its impact on today's struggles.

Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America


Gilbert King - 2012
    Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court when he became embroiled in an explosive and deadly case that threatened to change the course of the civil rights movement and cost him his life.In 1949, Florida’s orange industry was booming, and citrus barons got rich on the backs of cheap Jim Crow labor. To maintain order and profits, they turned to Willis V. McCall, a violent sheriff who ruled Lake County with murderous resolve. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl cried rape, McCall was fast on the trail of four young blacks who dared to envision a future for themselves beyond the citrus groves. By day’s end, the Ku Klux Klan had rolled into town, burning the homes of blacks to the ground and chasing hundreds into the swamps, hell-bent on lynching the young men who came to be known as “the Groveland Boys.”And so began the chain of events that would bring Thurgood Marshall, the man known as “Mr. Civil Rights,” into the deadly fray. Associates thought it was suicidal for him to wade into the “Florida Terror” at a time when he was irreplaceable to the burgeoning civil rights movement, but the lawyer would not shrink from the fight—not after the Klan had murdered one of Marshall’s NAACP associates involved with the case and Marshall had endured continual threats that he would be next.Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, including the FBI’s unredacted Groveland case files, as well as unprecedented access to the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund files, King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights crusader, setting his rich and driving narrative against the heroic backdrop of a case that U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson decried as “one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice.”

The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010


Lucille Clifton - 2012
    The lines that surface most frequently in praise of her work and her person are moving declarations of racial pride, courage, steadfastness."—Toni Morrison, from the ForewordThe Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965�2010 combines all eleven of Lucille Clifton's published collections with more than fifty previously unpublished poems. The unpublished poems feature early poems from 1965�1969, a collection-in-progress titled the book of days (2008), and a poignant selection of final poems. An insightful foreword by Nobel Prize�winning author Toni Morrison and comprehensive afterword by noted poet Kevin Young frames Clifton's lifetime body of work, providing the definitive statement about this major America poet's career.On February 13, 2010, the poetry world lost one of its most distinguished members with the passing of Lucille Clifton. In the last year of her life, she was named the first African American woman to receive the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honoring a US poet whose "lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition," and was posthumously awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America."mother-tongue: to man-kind" (from the unpublished the book of days):all that I am asking isthat you see me as somethingmore than a common occurrence,more than a woman in her ordinary skin.

Across That Bridge: A Vision for Change and the Future of America


John Lewis - 2012
    With an engaged electorate once again confronting questions of social inequality, there's no better time to revisit the lessons of the '60s and no better leader to learn from than Congressman John Lewis. In Across That Bridge, Lewis draws from his experience as a leader of the Civil Rights Movement to offer timeless guidance to anyone seeking to live virtuously and transform the world. His wisdom, poignant recollections, and powerful ideas will inspire a new generation to usher in a freer, more peaceful society. The Civil Rights Movement gave rise to the protest culture we know today, and the experiences of leaders like Lewis have never been more relevant. Now, more than ever, this nation needs a strong and moral voice to guide an engaged population through visionary change. Lewis was a leader in the American Civil Rights Movement. He was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and played a key role in the struggle to end segregation. Despite more than forty arrests, physical attacks, and serious injuries, Lewis remained a devoted advocate of the philosophy of nonviolence. He is the author of his autobiography, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of a Movement, and is the recipient of numerous awards from national and international institutions, including the Lincoln Medal; the John F. Kennedy "Profile in Courage" Lifetime Achievement Award (the only one of its kind ever awarded); the NAACP Spingarn Medal; and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor, among many others. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia. "The most important lesson I have learned in the fifty years I have spent working toward the building of a better world is that the true work of social transformation starts within. It begins inside your own heart and mind, because the battleground of human transformation is really, more than any other thing, the struggle within the human consciousness to believe and accept what is true. Thus to truly revolutionize our society, we must first revolutionize ourselves. We must be the change we seek if we are to effectively demand transformation from others." --from John Lewis's Across That Bridge

The Summer We Got Free


Mia McKenzie - 2012
    Once loved and respected in their community and in their church, they are ostracized by their neighbors, led by their church leader, and a seventeen-year feud between the Delaneys and the church ensues. Ava and her family are displaced from the community even as they continue to live within it, trapped inside their creaky, shadowy old house.When a mysterious woman arrives unexpectedly for a visit, her presence stirs up the past and ghosts and other restless things begin to emerge. And something is reignited in Ava: the indifferent woman she has become begins to give way to the wild girl, and the passionate artist, she used to be. But not without a struggle that threatens her well-being and, ultimately, her life.Mia McKenzie is a winner of the Astraea Foundation's Writers Fund Award and the Leeway Foundation's Transformation Award. She describes herself as "a black feminist and a freaking queer." Her work has been recommended by The Root, Colorlines, Feministing, Angry Asian Man, and Crunk Feminist Collective, among others. She is the creator of the blog BlackGirlDangerous.org.

What Does It Mean to Be White?; Developing White Racial Literacy


Robin DiAngelo - 2012
    These factors contribute to what she terms white racial illiteracy.Speaking as a white person to other white people, Dr. DiAngelo clearly and compellingly takes readers through an analysis of white socialization. She describes how race shapes the lives of white people, explains what makes racism so hard for whites to see, identifies common white racial patterns, and speaks back to popular white narratives that work to deny racism.Written as an accessible introduction to white identity from an anti-racist framework, What Does It Mean To Be White? is an invaluable resource for members of diversity and anti-racism programs and study groups and students of sociology, psychology, education, and other disciplines.

On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life


Sara Ahmed - 2012
    Diversity is an ordinary even unremarkable feature of institutional life. And yet, diversity practitioners often experience institutions as resistant to their work, as captured through their use of the metaphor of the “brick wall.” On Being Included offers an explanation of this apparent paradox. It explores the gap between symbolic commitments to diversity and the experience of those who embody diversity. Commitments to diversity are understood as "non-performatives" that do not bring about what they name. The book provides an account of institutional whiteness and shows how racism can be obscured by the institutionalization of diversity. Diversity is used as evidence that institutions do not have a problem with racism. On Being Included offers a critique of what happens when diversity is offered as a solution. It also shows how diversity workers generate knowledge of institutions in attempting to transform them.

A Different Mirror for Young People: A History of Multicultural America


Ronald Takaki - 2012
    When the first edition of A Different Mirror was published in 1993, Publishers Weekly called it "a brilliant revisionist history of America that is likely to become a classic of multicultural studies" and named it one of the ten best books of the year. Now Rebecca Stefoff, who adapted Howard Zinn's best-selling A People's History of the United States for younger readers, turns the updated 2008 edition of Takaki's multicultural masterwork into A Different Mirror for Young People. Drawing on Takaki's vast array of primary sources, and staying true to his own words whenever possible, A Different Mirror for Young People brings ethnic history alive through the words of people, including teenagers, who recorded their experiences in letters, diaries, and poems. Like Zinn's A People's History, Takaki's A Different Mirror offers a rich and rewarding "people's view" perspective on the American story.

Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America's Prison Nation


Beth E. Richie - 2012
    Through the compelling stories of Black women who have been most affected by racism, persistent poverty, class inequality, limited access to support resources or institutions, Beth E. Richie shows that the threat of violence to Black women has never been more serious, demonstrating how conservative legal, social, political and economic policies have impacted activism in the U.S.-based movement to end violence against women. Richie argues that Black women face particular peril because of the ways that race and culture have not figured centrally enough in the analysis of the causes and consequences of gender violence. As a result, the extent of physical, sexual and other forms of violence in the lives of Black women, the various forms it takes, and the contexts within which it occurs are minimized—at best—and frequently ignored. Arrested Justice brings issues of sexuality, class, age, and criminalization into focus right alongside of questions of public policy and gender violence, resulting in a compelling critique, a passionate re-framing of stories, and a call to action for change.

Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia


Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs - 2012
    Through personal narratives and qualitative empirical studies, more than 40 authors expose the daunting challenges faced by academic women of color as they navigate the often hostile terrain of higher education, including hiring, promotion, tenure, and relations with students, colleagues, and administrators. The narratives are filled with wit, wisdom, and concrete recommendations, and provide a window into the struggles of professional women in a racially stratified but increasingly multicultural America.

Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life


Karen E. Fields - 2012
    Sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields argue otherwise: the practice of racism produces the illusion of race, through what they call “racecraft.” And this phenomenon is intimately entwined with other forms of inequality in American life. So pervasive are the devices of racecraft in American history, economic doctrine, politics, and everyday thinking that the presence of racecraft itself goes unnoticed.That the promised post-racial age has not dawned, the authors argue, reflects the failure of Americans to develop a legitimate language for thinking about and discussing inequality. That failure should worry everyone who cares about democratic institutions.

Noughts & Crosses Sequence Boxset


Malorie Blackman - 2012
    For Sephy is a Cross, and Callum is a nough - and noughts and Crosses must never fall in love. It's as simple as black and white . . .But they have defied the rules. A passionate love is growing, and a powerful rebellion is beginning to stir. For generations to come, nothing will ever be the same again.Groundbreaking and explosive, Malorie Blackman's original dystopian masterpieces are collected together here for the first time.

Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected


Lisa Marie Cacho - 2012
    Lisa Marie Cacho forcefully argues that the demands for personhood for those who, in the eyes of society, have little value, depend on capitalist and heteropatriarchal measures of worth.With poignant case studies, Cacho illustrates that our very understanding of personhood is premised upon the unchallenged devaluation of criminalized populations of color. Hence, the reliance of rights-based politics on notions of who is and is not a deserving member of society inadvertently replicates the logic that creates and normalizes states of social and literal death. Her understanding of inalienable rights and personhood provides us the much-needed comparative analytical and ethical tools to understand the racialized and nationalized tensions between racial groups. Driven by a radical, relentless critique, Social Death challenges us to imagine a heretofore "unthinkable" politics and ethics that do not rest on neoliberal arguments about worth, but rather emerge from the insurgent experiences of those negated persons who do not live by the norms that determine the productive, patriotic, law abiding, and family-oriented subject.

White Flour


David LaMotte - 2012
    It is intended as a conversation starter with youth and adults regarding a third way to deal with aggression, beyond fight and flight.

Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority


Tim Wise - 2012
    Now that notion is being challenged, as white people wrestle with what it means to be part of a fast-changing, truly multicultural nation. Facing chronic economic insecurity, a popular culture that reflects the nation's diverse cultural reality, a future in which they will no longer constitute the majority of the population, and with a black president in the White House, whites are growing anxious.This anxiety has helped to create the Tea Party movement, with its call to "take our country back." By means of a racialized nostalgia for a mythological past, the Right is enlisting fearful whites into its campaign for reactionary social and economic policies.In urgent response, Tim Wise has penned his most pointed and provocative work to date. Employing the form of direct personal address, he points a finger at whites' race-based self-delusion, explaining how such an agenda will only do harm to the nation's people, including most whites. In no uncertain terms, he argues that the hope for survival of American democracy lies in the embrace of our multicultural past, present and future.

I Am Mixed


Garcelle Beauvais - 2012
    From Mommy's jazz beats to Daddy's classical piano, we will dance with the twins through a book that explores what it is to be of mixed ancestry, proving that a child is more than the sum of their parents.This book is the first in the I Am Book Series. Future books shallhelp shed light on topics such as divorce and adoption, all from a child's perspective.

The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture


Kevin Quashie - 2012
    In The Sovereignty of Quiet, Kevin Quashie explores quiet as a different kind of expressiveness, one which characterizes a person’s desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, and fears. Quiet is a metaphor for the inner life, and as such, enables a more nuanced understanding of black culture. The book revisits such iconic moments as Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s protest at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and Elizabeth Alexander’s reading at the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama. Quashie also examines such landmark texts as Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and Toni Morrison’s Sula to move beyond the emphasis on resistance, and to suggest that concepts like surrender, dreaming, and waiting can remind us of the wealth of black humanity.

Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery


Heather Andrea Williams - 2012
    Inspired by the power of these ads, Heather Andrea Williams uses slave narratives, letters, interviews, public records, and diaries to guide readers back to devastating moments of family separation during slavery when people were sold away from parents, siblings, spouses, and children. Williams explores the heartbreaking stories of separation and the long, usually unsuccessful journeys toward reunification. Examining the interior lives of the enslaved and freedpeople as they tried to come to terms with great loss, Williams grounds their grief, fear, anger, longing, frustration, and hope in the history of American slavery and the domestic slave trade. Williams follows those who were separated, chronicles their searches, and documents the rare experience of reunion. She also explores the sympathy, indifference, hostility, or empathy expressed by whites about sundered black families. Williams shows how searches for family members in the post-Civil War era continue to reverberate in African American culture in the ongoing search for family history and connection across generations.

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975


Göran Olsson - 2012
    . . . Göran Hugo Olsson's Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 is a collage of archival footage recorded in America, mostly by Swedish journalists, in the era of African-American militancy. The images, accompanied by present-day voice-over reflections from historians, rappers, artists, and veterans of the era's racial politics, offer revelations about events and personalities we thought we understood completely."—The New York Times, reviewing the Black Power Mixtape documentary"We have much to learn from these visionary organizers who sought to redefine and re-imagine democracy, whose sense of empowerment derived from the belief that the people could be the architects for change."—Danny Glover, from the prefaceFeaturing images and transcripts only recently discovered in the archives of Swedish television, here is the Black Power movement as you've never seen it. Based on the award-winning documentary of the same name, Black Power Mixtape presents powerful interviews with Stokely Carmichel, Angela Davis, and others who shaped the struggle of their day. Mixed with the contemporary reflections of leading activists, musicians, and scholars, this book aims to introduce a new generation to the legacy of Black Power.Includes historical speeches and interviews by: Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton, Emile de Antonio, and Angela Davis.Includes new commentary voiced by: Erykah Badu, Talib Kweli, Harry Belafonte, Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis, Robin Kelley, Abiodun Oyewole, Sonia Sanchez, Bobby Seale, and Questlove.

For Colored Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Still Not Enough: Coming of Age, Coming Out, and Coming Home


Keith BoykinWade Davis - 2012
    The book would go on to inspire legions of women for decades and would later become the subject and title of a hugely popular movie in the fall of 2010. While the film was selling out movie theaters, young black gay men were literally committing suicide in the silence of their own communities.When a young Rutgers University student named Tyler Clementi took his own life after a roommate secretly videotaped him in an intimate setting with another young man, syndicated columnist and author Dan Savage created a YouTube video with his partner Terry to inspire young people facing harassment. Their message, It Gets Better, turned into a popular movement, inspiring thousands of user-created videos on the Internet. Savage's project targeted people of all races, backgrounds and colors, but Boykin has created something special "for colored boys."The new book, For Colored Boys, addresses longstanding issues of sexual abuse, suicide, HIV/AIDS, racism, and homophobia in the African American and Latino communities, and more specifically among young gay men of color. The book tells stories of real people coming of age, coming out, dealing with religion and spirituality, seeking love and relationships, finding their own identity in or out of the LGBT community, and creating their own sense of political empowerment. For Colored Boys is designed to educate and inspire those seeking to overcome their own obstacles in their own lives.

Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S.


H. Samy Alim - 2012
    Without missing a beat, he often moves between Washington insider talk and culturally Black ways of speaking--as shown in a famous YouTube clip, where Obama declined the change offered to him by aBlack cashier in a Washington, D.C. restaurant with the phrase, Nah, we straight.In Articulate While Black, two renowned scholars of Black Language address language and racial politics in the U.S. through an insightful examination of President Barack Obama's language use--and America's response to it. In this eloquently written and powerfully argued book, H. Samy Alim and GenevaSmitherman provide new insights about President Obama and the relationship between language and race in contemporary society. Throughout, they analyze several racially loaded, cultural-linguistic controversies involving the President--from his use of Black Language and his articulateness to hisRace Speech, the so-called fist-bump, and his relationship to Hip Hop Culture.Using their analysis of Barack Obama as a point of departure, Alim and Smitherman reveal how major debates about language, race, and educational inequality erupt into moments of racial crisis in America. In challenging American ideas about language, race, education, and power, they help take thenational dialogue on race to the next level. In much the same way that Cornel West revealed nearly two decades ago that race matters, Alim and Smitherman in this groundbreaking book show how deeply language matters to the national conversation on race--and in our daily lives.

I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin's Life in Letters


Bayard Rustin - 2012
    Bayard Rustin has been called the “lost prophet” of the civil rights movement. A master strategist and tireless activist, he is best remembered as the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, one of the largest nonviolent protests ever held in the U.S. He brought Gandhi’s protest techniques to the American civil rights movement and played a deeply influential role in the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., helping to mold him into an international symbol of nonviolence. Despite these achievements, Rustin often remained in the background. He was silenced, threatened, arrested, beaten, imprisoned and fired from important leadership positions, largely because he was an openly gay man in a fiercely homophobic era. Here we have Rustin in his own words in a collection of over 150 of his letters; his correspondents include the major progressives of his day — for example, Eleanor Holmes Norton, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Ella Baker, and of course, Martin Luther King, Jr.Bayard Rustin’s eloquent, impassioned voice, his ability to chart the path “from protest to politics,” is both timely and deeply informative. As the Occupy movement ushers America into a pivotal election year, and as politicians and citizens re-assess their goals and strategies, these letters provide direct access to the strategic thinking and tactical planning that led to the successes of one of America’s most transformative and historic social movements.

The Classroom and the Cell: Conversations on Black Life in America


Mumia Abu-Jamal - 2012
    Covering topics such as race, politics, hip-hop culture,education, mass incarceration, and love, their discussions shine a spotlight on some of the most pressing issues in 21st century African American life.

Sex, Race and Class: The Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings 1952-2011


Selma James - 2012
    Arguing that class struggle manifests itself as the conflict between the reproduction and survival of the human race, the general theme of the collected essays leans left and warns of market exploitation, war, and ecological disaster. Spanning nearly six decades and compiling essays that have appeared in anthologies or are selections from Selma James' books—some printed here for the first time—these selections preach equality in wages for men and women alike, especially in nontraditional work environments.

If You've Forgotten the Names of the Clouds, You've Lost Your Way: An Introduction to American Indian Thought and Philosophy


Russell Means - 2012
    The civilization of the American Indian was predicated on the people's relationships with every form of life, from the perspective of close-knit family communities. This introduction partially explains why indigenous people the world over never overpopulate their environment or destroy the lands where they live. This is the only philosophy that can stop the worldwide ongoing rape by the patriarchs.

Swirly


Sara Saunders - 2012
    But when she meets another swirly kid and his swirly mom, she finds out that she does belong somewhere . . . with a very special swirly Someone.

Geography of Grace: Doing Theology From Below


Kris Rocke - 2012
    Graphic but never gratuitous, Rocke and Van Dyke are lyrical, poetic, irreverent, and playful. They are as rigorous in their study of applied theology as they are accessible in their storytelling. The authors share their own discovery of that which has been "hidden since the foundations of the earth," and they do it by standing with those who have stood alone, finding joy in being counted among the transgressors. They offer a new kind of orthodoxy that is as old as the gospel itself. Far from a dogmatic theology, the burden of this book is uncommonly light, but it is not without its demands. If you are up for a life-changing adventure, then get ready to "assume the risks." "In this challenging book, graceful writing meets grace-full theology. The wounds of the world cry out in poetry and poignancy; the call to care crushes complacency; places below rise to expose suffering and healing in the depths; darkness shines upon light, transforming Word and world in reading, hearing and doing." Phyllis Trible, Author of Texts of Terror "This is a beautiful book and a true book, proving again that they are the same thing! You will get to the essentials quickly here, and in a way that will change you both painlessly and painfully." Fr. Richard Rohr, O.F.M. Author and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation

Chalk Outlines of Snow Angels


Jasmine Mans - 2012
    

My People Are Rising: Memoir of a Black Panther Party Captain


Aaron Dixon - 2012
    In My People Are Rising, he traces the course of his own radicalization, and that of a generation. Through his eyes, we witness the courage and commitment of the young men and women who rose up in rebellion, risking their lives in the name of freedom. My People are Rising is an unforgettable tale of their triumphs and tragedies, and the enduring legacy of Black Power.

Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing


Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o - 2012
    In 1977 he was imprisoned after his most controversial work, "Ngaahika Ndeenda" ( "I Will Marry When I Want"), produced in Nairobi, sharply criticized the injustices of Kenyan society and unequivocally championed the causes of ordinary citizens. Following his release, Ngugi decided to write only in his native Gikuyu, communicating with Kenyans in one of the many languages of their daily lives, and today he is known as one of the most outspoken intellectuals working in postcolonial theory and the global postcolonial movement.In this volume, Ngugi wa Thiong'o summarizes and develops a cross-section of the issues he has grappled with in his work, which deploys a strategy of imagery, language, folklore, and character to "decolonize the mind." Ngugi confronts the politics of language in African writing; the problem of linguistic imperialism and literature's ability to resist it; the difficult balance between orality, or "orature," and writing, or "literature"; the tension between national and world literature; and the role of the literary curriculum in both reaffirming and undermining the dominance of the Western canon. Throughout, he engages a range of philosophers and theorists writing on power and postcolonial creativity, including Hegel, Marx, L?vi-Strauss, and Aim? C?saire. Yet his explorations remain grounded in his own experiences with literature (and orature) and reworks the difficult dialectics of theory into richly evocative prose.

Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique


Sally Haslanger - 2012
    In these previously published essays, Sally Haslanger draws on insights from feminist and critical race theory to explore and develop the idea that gender and race are positions within a structure of social relations. On this interpretation, the point of saying that gender and race are socially constructed is not to make a causal claim about the origins of our concepts of gender and race, or to take a stand in the nature/nurture debate, but to locate these categories within a realist social ontology. This is politically important, for by theorizing how gender and race fit within different structures of social relations we are better able to identify and combat forms of systematic injustice.Although the central essays of the book focus on a critical social realism about gender and race, these accounts function as case studies for a broader critical social realism. To develop this broader approach, several essays offer reworked notions of ideology, practice, and social structure, drawing on recent research in sociology and social psychology. Ideology, on the proposed view, is a relatively stable set of shared dispositions to respond to the world, often in ways that also shape the world to evoke those very dispositions. This looping of our dispositions through the material world enables the social to appear natural.Additional essays in the book situate this approach to social phenomena in relation to philosophical methodology, and to specific debates in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language. The book as a whole explores the interface between analytic philosophy and critical theory.

Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice


bell hooks - 2012
    From the films Precious and Crash to recent biographies of Malcolm X and Henrietta Lacks, hooks offers provocative insights into the way race is being talked about in this "post-racial" era.

The Voice Of The Jamaican Ghetto: Incarcerated but not Silenced


Adidja Palmer - 2012
    I hope after reading you realize there is something wrong with Jamaica that needs to be fixed......I hope you will never look at a ghetto person the same again. I hope you will never see a young girl in a compromising position with an older man and not question what is going on. I hope you will never see a young man in jail and write him off as 'wutless' or bad.....Most importantly, I hope that you will not only hear but listen to the voice of the ghetto. I end in the words of Marcus Garvey - One God, One Aim, One Destiny, one Love. Until we meet again, I remain, yours truly.

Race to Incarcerate: A Graphic Retelling


Sabrina Jones - 2012
    How did this happen? As the director of The Sentencing Project, Marc Mauer has long been one of the country’s foremost experts on sentencing policy, race, and the criminal justice system. His book Race to Incarcerate has become the essential text for understanding the exponential growth of the U.S. prison system; Michelle Alexander, author of the bestselling The New Jim Crow, calls it "utterly indispensable." Now, Sabrina Jones, a member of the World War 3 Illustrated collective and an acclaimed author of politically engaged comics, has collaborated with Mauer to adapt and update the original book into a vivid and compelling comics narrative. Jones's dramatic artwork adds passion and compassion to the complex story of the penal system’s shift from rehabilitation to punishment and the ensuing four decades of prison expansion, its interplay with the devastating "War on Drugs," and its corrosive effect on generations of Americans.With a preface by Mauer and a foreword by Alexander, Race to Incarcerate: A Graphic Retelling presents a compelling argument about mass incarceration’s tragic impact on communities of color—if current trends continue, one of every three black males and one of every six Latino males born today can expect to do time in prison. The race to incarcerate is not only a failed social policy, but also one that prevents a just, diverse society from flourishing.

Racing to Justice: Transforming Our Conceptions of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society


John A. Powell - 2012
    powell persuasively argues that we have not achieved a post-racial society and that there is much work to do to redeem the American promise of inclusive democracy. Culled from a decade of writing about social justice and spirituality, these meditations on race, identity, and social policy provide an outline for laying claim to our shared humanity and a way toward healing ourselves and securing our future. Racing to Justice challenges us to replace attitudes and institutions that promote and perpetuate social suffering with those that foster relationships and a way of being that transcends disconnection and separation.

BlackGirl Mansion


Angel Nafis - 2012
    These poems are “Sturdy and untethered”, they are an invitation to a warm seat, some kool-aid and a smack up-side your head. Free and brazen in form and invention, her ghazals are long-distance runners up-rocking over some horizon. Here are the horrors and the hope to survive and kick-the-ass of the whiteman’s world, to live and love instead anew, in the ALL-together new, vibrant, righteous & necessary BlackGirl Mansion.- Kevin Coval, author of the forthcoming collection Shtick and chapbook, More Shit Chief Keef Don’t Like." "These are poems that fill the mouth. They sing sorrow and stitch a family together, then rip it apart again and again. These are poems that fly, that tell the stories of women, their wounds, their love, their bodies, their deep, hungry song...these poems do not beg forgiveness. They do not ask permission or sit cute and quiet in the corner. They bellow. They call. They “clown.” This is signifying at its most original, its most funky. As poet, storyteller, and hymn-stringer, Angel Nafis has written a collection in the tradition of Ntozake Shange and her earth-changing For Colored Girls Who Have ConsideredSuicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf."---from the foreward by Tameka Cage Conley"Angel Nafis’ poems swallow blood and witness truth at its deepest roots. Nafis writes, “I count myself among the graced” and you do not doubt the wisdom of her spirit and her craft in BlackGirl Mansion. The poems you will find here climb mountains! They share the glory and pains of survival against and within the narrative of family and womanhood. They fight for the love they are and know. The cadence of her heart is to be celebrated! The poems of Angel Nafis undo gravity with their shine and holler. Listen, for hers is an original and astonishing voice: “I am here now,/speaking and giving/in bursts/of chest, and effort,/and temperature.” - Rachel Eliza Griffiths, author of "Mule & Pear" and "Miracle Arythmia "

Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself: Latina Girls and Sexual Identity


Lorena Garcia - 2012
    In Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself, Lorena Garcia examines how Latina girls negotiate their emerging sexual identities and attempt to create positive sexual experiences for themselves. Through a focus on their sexual agency, Garcia demonstrates that Latina girls' experiences with sexism, racism, homophobia and socioeconomic marginality inform how they engage and begin to rework their meanings and processes of gender and sexuality, emphasizing how Latina youth themselves understand their sexuality, particularly how they conceptualize and approach sexual safety and pleasure. At a time of controversy over the appropriate role of sex education in schools, Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself, provides a rare look and an important understanding of the sexual lives of a traditionally marginalized group.

Memorable Quotations: James Baldwin


James Baldwin - 2012
    The firstborn of nine children, his stepfather was a minister. When he was fourteen, Baldwin became a preacher at the small Fireside Pentecostal Church in Harlem. After graduating from high school, he moved to Greenwich Village. In the early 1940s, he shifted his faith from religion to literature. Critics, though, note the fervent cadences of Black churches are still apparent in his writing. Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), his initial novel, is a partly autobiographical description of his youth. His essay collections, Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), and The Fire Next Time (1963), were effective in informing a large white audience.From 1948, Baldwin made his home mainly in the south of France, but often returned to the United States to lecture or teach. He began spending half of each year in New York City in 1957. His novels include Giovanni's Room (1956), about a white American expatriate who must come to terms with his homosexuality, and Another Country (1962), about racial and gay sexual anxieties among New York intellectuals. His inclusion of gay themes resulted in a lot of ferocious criticism from the Black community. Baldwin's play, Blues for Mister Charlie, was produced in 1964. Going to Meet the Man (1965) and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968) presented compelling descriptions of American racism. As an openly gay man, he became more and more candid in attacking discrimination against lesbian and gay people.

On Intellectual Activism


Patricia Hill Collins - 2012
    This book is a collection of those lectures, along with new and (a few) previously-published essays.

The Militarization of Indian Country


Winona LaDuke - 2012
    Geronimo descendant Harlyn Geronimo explained, “Obviously to equate Geronimo with Osama bin Laden is an unpardonable slander of Native America and its most famous leader.” The Militarization of Indian Country illuminates the historical context of these negative stereotypes, the long political and economic relationship between the military and Native America, and the environmental and social consequences. This book addresses the impact that the U.S. military has had on Native peoples, lands, and cultures. From the use of Native names to the outright poisoning of Native peoples for testing, the U.S. military’s exploitation of Indian country is unparalleled and ongoing.

Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color


Nina G. Jablonski - 2012
    In a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion, Nina G. Jablonski begins with the biology and evolution of skin pigmentation, explaining how skin color changed as humans moved around the globe. She explores the relationship between melanin pigment and sunlight, and examines the consequences of rapid migrations, vacations, and other lifestyle choices that can create mismatches between our skin color and our environment.Richly illustrated, this book explains why skin color has come to be a biological trait with great social meaning— a product of evolution perceived by culture. It considers how we form impressions of others, how we create and use stereotypes, how negative stereotypes about dark skin developed and have played out through history—including being a basis for the transatlantic slave trade. Offering examples of how attitudes about skin color differ in the U.S., Brazil, India, and South Africa, Jablonski suggests that a knowledge of the evolution and social importance of skin color can help eliminate color-based discrimination and racism.

The Song and the Silence


Yvette Johnson - 2012
    At the time, Wright spent his evenings waiting tables for Whites at a local restaurant and his mornings running his own business. The ripple effect from his remarks would cement Booker as a civil rights icon because he did the unthinkable: before a national audience, Wright described what life truly was like for the Black people of Greenwood, Mississippi.Four decades later, Yvette Johnson, Wright’s granddaughter, found footage of the controversial documentary. No one in her family knew of his television appearance. Even more curious for Johnson was that for most of her life she’d barely heard mention of her grandfather’s name. Born a year after Wright’s death and raised in a wealthy San Diego neighborhood, Johnson admits she never had to confront race the way Southern Blacks did in the 1960s. Compelled to learn more about her roots, she travels to Greenwood, Mississippi, a beautiful Delta town steeped in secrets and a scarred past, to interview family members and townsfolk about the real Booker Wright. As she uncovers her grandfather’s compelling story and gets closer to the truth behind his murder, she also confronts her own conflicted feelings surrounding race, family, and forgiveness.Told with powerful insights and harrowing details of civil rights–era Mississippi, The Song and the Silence is an astonishing chronicle of one woman’s passionate pursuit of her own family’s past. In the stories of those who came before, she finds not only a new understanding of herself, but a hopeful vision of the future for all of us.

The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations


José Medina - 2012
    It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from interacting epistemically in fruitful ways--from listening to each other, learning from each other, and mutually enriching each other's perspectives. Medina's epistemology of resistance offers a contextualist theory of our complicity with epistemic injustices and a social connection model of shared responsibility for improving epistemic conditions of participation in social practices. Through the articulation of a new interactionism and polyphonic contextualism, the book develops a sustained argument about the role of the imagination in mediating social perceptions and interactions. It concludes that only through the cultivation of practices of resistance can we develop a social imagination that can help us become sensitive to the suffering of excluded and stigmatized subjects. Drawing on Feminist Standpoint Theory and Critical Race Theory, this book makes contributions to social epistemology and to recent discussions of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, epistemic responsibility, counter-performativity, and solidarity in the fight against racism and sexism.

Britain's Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide


Hilary McD. Beckles - 2012
    Written by a leading economic historian of the region, a seasoned activist in the wider movement for social justice and advocacy of historical truth, Britain’s Black Debt looks at the origins and development of reparations as a regional and international process.

Looking for Esperanza: The story of a mother, a child lost, and why they matter to us


Adriana Paramo - 2012
    This fieldwork and the anonymous voices of the women she encountered while looking for the mother in the story are captured in Looking for Esperanza, winner of the 2011 Social Justice and Equity Award in creative nonfiction.

Taino


José Barreiro - 2012
    This novel, based on a true story, penetrates the historical veil that still enshrines the "discovery." Presently a senior fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, José Barreiro is a novelist, essayist, and an activist of nearly four decades on American indigenous hemispheric themes. Barreiro is a member of the Taino Nation of the Antilles.

Nine-tenths of the Law: Property and Resistance in the United States


Hannah Dobbz - 2012
    Hannah Dobbz makes the necessary addition of resources and needs in a book that is both a brilliant history of squatting in the USA and a template for the next stage of the Occupy movement.--Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums and Buda's WagonHow does "property" fit into designs for an equitable society? Nine-tenths of the Law examines the history of squatting and property struggles in the United States, from colonialism to twentieth century urban squatting and the foreclosure crisis of the late 2000s, and how such resistance movements shape the law. Stories from our most hard-hit American cities show that property is truly in crisis:One in five homes in Buffalo, NY, are abandoned.Our national housing vacancy rate is 14 percent. If we gave a house to every homeless person in the United States two-thirds of that stock would remain empty.In May of 2011, one in every 103 homes in Nevada was in foreclosure.Nine-tenths of the Law expands our understanding of property law and highlights recent tactics like creative squatting ventures and the use of adverse possession to claim title to vacant homes. Hannah Dobbz unveils the tangled relationship Americans have always had in creating and sustaining healthy communities.Hannah Dobbz is a writer, editor, filmmaker, and former squatter. In 2007 she produced a film about squatters in the Bay Area called Shelter. The film has screened widely at universities, bookstores, and community spaces, including the 2009 Three Rivers Film Festival in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race


Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman - 2012
    Abdur-Rahman interrogates and challenges cultural theorists' interpretations of sexual transgression in African American literature. She argues that, from the mid-nineteenth century through the twentieth, black writers used depictions of erotic transgression to contest popular theories of identity, pathology, national belonging, and racial difference in American culture. Connecting metaphors of sexual transgression to specific historical periods, Abdur-Rahman explains how tropes such as sadomasochism and incest illuminated the psychodynamics of particular racial injuries and suggested forms of social repair and political redress from the time of slavery, through post-Reconstruction and the civil rights and black power movements, to the late twentieth century.Abdur-Rahman brings black feminist, psychoanalytic, critical race, and poststructuralist theories to bear on literary genres from slave narratives to science fiction. Analyzing works by African American writers, including Frederick Douglass, Pauline Hopkins, Harriet Jacobs, James Baldwin, and Octavia Butler, she shows how literary representations of transgressive sexuality expressed the longings of African Americans for individual and collective freedom. Abdur-Rahman contends that those representations were fundamental to the development of African American forms of literary expression and modes of political intervention and cultural self-fashioning.Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman is Assistant Professor of English at Brandeis University."Against the Closet is an important and much-needed book, a significant contribution to African American literature, cultural studies, sexuality studies, and critical race theory. Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman's close readings of fictional representations of race and sex are nuanced and illuminating, and the history of racial thought and sexual science that she presents is indispensable."—Maurice O. Wallace, author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995"In this significant and timely text, Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman complicates and expands our understanding of the queerness of blackness, making a welcome contribution to black cultural studies, black queer studies, literary studies, and work on lynching and the making of post-slavery whiteness."—Christina Sharpe, author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects

Living Apart: How the Government Betrayed a Landmark Civil Rights Law


Nikole Hannah-Jones - 2012
    Designed to help dismantle the nation’s racially divided housing patterns, the act has gone largely ignored by every presidential administration—Democrat and Republican alike—since 1968.  In Living Apart, ProPublica investigates this failing, particularly how subsequent leaders, following President Nixon’s lead, have declined to use the billions in grant dollars awarded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development as leverage to fight segregation. Their reluctance to enforce a law passed by both houses of Congress and repeatedly upheld by the courts reflects a larger political reality. Again and again, attempts to create integrated neighborhoods have foundered This ebook includes an exclusive afterword by the author, as well as an appendix of original documents dating from the Nixon administration, revealing the internal politics swirling around the Fair Housing Act shortly after its enactment.

Beyond the Asterisk: Understanding Native Students in Higher Education


Heather Shotton - 2012
    This lack may be attributed to this population's invisibility within the academy - it is often excluded from institutional data and reporting, and frequently noted as not statistically significant - and its relegation to what is referred to as the "American Indian research asterisk."The purpose of this book is to move beyond the asterisk in an effort to better understand Native students, challenge the status quo, and provide an informed base for leaders in student and academic affairs, and administrators concerned with the success of students on their campuses.The authors of this book share their understanding of Native epistemologies, culture, and social structures, offering student affairs professionals and institutions a richer array of options, resources, and culturally-relevant and inclusive models to better serve this population.The book begins by providing insights into Native student experiences, presenting the first-year experience from a Native perspective, illustrating the role of a Native living/learning community in student retention, and discussing the importance of incorporating culture into student programming for Native students as well as the role of Native fraternities and sororities.The authors then consider administrative issues, such as the importance of outreach to tribal nations, the role of Tribal Colleges and Universities and opportunities for collaborations, and the development of Native American Student Services Units..The book concludes with recommendations for how institutions can better serve Native students in graduate programs, the role that Indigenous faculty play in student success, and how professional associations can assist student affairs professionals with fulfilling their role of supporting the success of Native American students, staff, and faculty.This book moves beyond the asterisk to provide important insights from Native American higher education leaders and non-Native practitioners who have made Native students a priority in their work.While predominantly addressed to the student affairs profession - providing an understanding of the needs of the Native students it serves, describing the multi-faceted and unique issues, characteristics and experiences of this population, and sharing proven approaches to developing appropriate services - it also covers issues of broader administrative concern, such as collaboration with tribal colleges; as well academic issues, such as graduate and professional education.The book covers new material, as well as expanding on topics previously addressed in the literature, including Native American Greek organizations, incorporating Native culture into student programming, and the role of Native American Special Advisors.The contributors are themselves products of colleges and universities where Native students are too often invisible, and who succeeded despite the odds. Their insights and the examples they provide add richness to this book. It will provide a catalyst for new higher education practices that lead to direct, and increased support for, Native Americans and others who are working to remove the Native American asterisk from research and practice.

Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism


Nadine Naber - 2012
    population, especially after the events of 9/11. In Arab America, Nadine Naber tells the stories of second generation Arab American young adults living in the San Francisco Bay Area, most of whom are political activists engaged in two culturalist movements that draw on the conditions of diaspora, a Muslim global justice and a Leftist Arab movement.Writing from a transnational feminist perspective, Naber reveals the complex and at times contradictory cultural and political processes through which Arabness is forged in the contemporary United States, and explores the apparently intra-communal cultural concepts of religion, family, gender, and sexuality as the battleground on which Arab American young adults and the looming world of America all wrangle. As this struggle continues, these young adults reject Orientalist thought, producing counter-narratives that open up new possibilities for transcending the limitations of Orientalist, imperialist, and conventional nationalist articulations of self, possibilities that ground concepts of religion, family, gender, and sexuality in some of the most urgent issues of our times: immigration politics, racial justice struggles, and U.S. militarism and war.For more, check out the author-run Facebook page for Arab America.

Prose and Lore: Memoir Stories About Sex Work


Melissa PetroJosh Ryley - 2012
    In this new collection of creative nonfiction, people who’ve tangled with the sex industry write about the complications that arise in the mix of sex and money. From the accounts of love and loss, occupational hazards and tricks of the trade to personal stories of hope, resistance and survival, Prose & Lore is a fiery collection of narratives by people who have walked the walk, and are now telling their tales.The contributions in the book were written by the participants of the Red Umbrella Project’s first memoir writing workshop, which took place in Fall 2012.

No Citizen Left Behind


Meira Levinson - 2012
    This is because of a civic empowerment gap that is as shameful and antidemocratic as the academic achievement gap targeted by No Child Left Behind. "No Citizen Left Behind" argues that students must be taught how to upend and reshape power relationships directly, through political and civic action. Drawing on political theory, empirical research, and her own on-the-ground experience, Levinson shows how "de facto" segregated urban schools can and must be at the center of this struggle.Recovering the civic purposes of public schools will take more than tweaking the curriculum. Levinson calls on schools to remake civic education. Schools should teach collective action, openly discuss the racialized dimensions of citizenship, and provoke students by engaging their passions against contemporary injustices. Students must also have frequent opportunities to take civic and political action, including within the school itself. To build a truly egalitarian society, we must reject myths of civic sameness and empower all young people to raise their diverse voices. Levinson s account challenges not just educators but all who care about justice, diversity, or democracy.

The Militant Genome


Braxton DeGarmo - 2012
    However, the Colonel, founder of the Missouri White Alliance, has devised a genetic weapon capable of devastating dark-skinned peoples globally. He is only weeks, maybe days away from implementing his viral version of racial cleansing’s “final solution.” There’s only one threat to his plan – a hotheaded member of the MWA has become the target of a nationwide police search for murder and the kidnapping of local celebrity Della Winston … and the unwanted attention risks bringing federal scrutiny to the previously unknown white supremacy group.Sarah Wade, MD, has enough stress as a senior Emergency Medicine resident. She never expected that her discovery of a murdered medical student would inadvertently jeopardize her career. Or that the next-day murder of a Nigerian diplomat would lead to the kidnapping of her best friend, Della Winston. The cascade of events pull her – and Seamus O’Connor, the detective assigned to the high-profile medical center murder – into a life-threatening conspiracy of murder, kidnapping, and rising racial tensions.

The Black Child-Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice


Geoff K. Ward - 2012
    Alongside this liberal "manufactory of citizens,” a parallel structure was enacted: a Jim Crow juvenile justice system that endured across the nation for most of the twentieth century. In The Black Child Savers, the first study of the rise and fall of Jim Crow juvenile justice, Geoff Ward examines the origins and organization of this separate and unequal juvenile justice system. Ward explores how generations of “black child-savers” mobilized to challenge the threat to black youth and community interests and how this struggle grew aligned with a wider civil rights movement, eventually forcing the formal integration of American juvenile justice. Ward’s book reveals nearly a century of struggle to build a more democratic model of juvenile justice—an effort that succeeded in part, but ultimately failed to deliver black youth and community to liberal rehabilitative ideals. At once an inspiring story about the shifting boundaries of race, citizenship, and democracy in America and a crucial look at the nature of racial inequality, The Black Child Savers is a stirring account of the stakes and meaning of social justice.

Between Torture and Resistance


Oscar López Rivera - 2012
    In 1981, Oscar was convicted of seditious conspiracy and other crimes for which he is still imprisoned, making him the longest-held political prisoner in the world. This is the story of his fight for the political independence of Puerto Rico based on letters between him and the renowned lawyer, sociologist, educator, and activist Luis Nieves Falcón. Also included is Oscar’s art, including photography and paintings created in his many years behind bars. Readers will explore his early life as a Latino child growing up in the small towns of Puerto Rico, following him as an adolescent as he and his family move to the big cities of the United States. After serving in Vietnam and earning a Bronze Star, Oscar returned home and worked to improve the quality of life for his people by becoming a community activist, which led to his underground life as a Puerto Rican Nationalist and his subsequent arrest. With a vivid assessment of the ongoing colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, the book helps to illustrate the sad tale of largely unreported human rights abuses for political prisoners in the United States, but it is also a story of hope and his ongoing struggle for freedom for his people and himself—a hope that there is beauty and strength in resistance.

All Eyes are Upon Us: Race and Politics from Boston to Brooklyn


Jason Sokol - 2012
    

Wildflowers in the Median: A Restorative Journey Into Healing, Justice, and Joy


Agnes Furey - 2012
    Even so, rather than hate, Furey chose peace, and she reached out to Scovens in prison.Wildflowers in the Median tells the story of their journey of restoration. Through a collection of poems, vignettes, and letters, both Furey and Scovens pour out their emotions and reflections. It is a tale not of forgiveness, but of understanding-a story of a survivor of crime and a criminal finding communion as each struggles with grief and suffering, eventually coming to terms with their spiritual identities and a desire to help others in similar circumstances.A valuable testament to the human heart and its capacity to love, Wildflowers in the Median shows how grace was found in the aftermath of a tragedy.

Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti


Jeb Sprague - 2012
    Sprague focuses on the period beginning in 1990 with the rise of Haiti's first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and the right-wing movements that succeeded in driving him from power. Over the ensuing two decades, paramilitary violence was largely directed against the poor and supporters of Aristide's Lavalas movement, taking the lives of thousands of Haitians. Sprague seeks to understand how this occurred, and traces connections between paramilitaries and their elite financial and political backers, in Haiti but also in the United States and the Dominican Republic.The product of years of original research, this book draws on over fifty interviews--some of which placed the author in severe danger--and more than 11,000 documents secured through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. It makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of Haiti today, and is a vivid reminder of how democratic struggles in poor countries are often met with extreme violence organized at the behest of capital.

Journey of Heroes : the Story of the 100th Infantry Battalion and 442nd Regimental Combat Team


Stacey T. Hayashi - 2012
    The Story of the 100th Infantry Battalion and 442 Regimental Combat Team told in graphic novel.

Look, a White!: Philosophical Essays on Whiteness


George Yancy - 2012
    Prompted by Eric Holder's charge, that as Americans, we are cowards when it comes to discussing the issue of race, noted philosopher George Yancy's essays map out a structure of whiteness.He considers whiteness within the context of racial embodiment, film, pedagogy, colonialism, its "danger," and its position within the work of specific writers. Identifying the embedded and opaque ways white power and privilege operate, Yancy argues that the Black countergaze can function as a "gift" to whites in terms of seeing their own whiteness more effectively.Throughout Look, a White! Yancy pays special attention to the impact of whiteness on individuals, as well as on how the structures of whiteness limit the capacity of social actors to completely untangle the way whiteness operates, thus preventing the erasure of racism in social life.

I Still Believe Anita Hill


Amy Richards - 2012
    We know what happened: she was challenged, disbelieved, and humiliated; he was given a life-long appointment to decide America's judicial fate. What is less known is how many women and men were inspired because of Anita Hill's bravery, how her testimony changed the feminist movement, and how she singlehandedly brought public awareness to the issue of sexual harassment. Thomas might have won his seat, but Anita Hill's legacy mobilized the women's movement and our need to demand more than the status quo.Twenty years later, this collection brings together three generations to witness, respond to, and analyze Hill's impact and present insights in law; politics; the confluence of race, class, and gender; the persistent questioning of women's credibility; and current cases of sexual harassment. With original contributions by Anita Hill, Melissa Harris-Perry, Catharine MacKinnon, Patricia J. Williams, Eve Ensler, Ai Jen Poo, Kimberly Crenshaw, Lynn Nottage, Gloria Steinem, Lani Guinier, Lisa Kron, Mary Oliver, Edwidge Danticat, Kevin Powell, and many others.Amy Richards is the author of Opting In, co-author of Manifesta, and co-founder of Soapbox, Inc.Cynthia Greenberg organized Sex, Power, and Speaking Truth: Anita Hill 20 Years Later, a conference at Hunter College in 2011.

Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America


Barbara Jensen - 2012
    This accessible book makes class visible in everyday life. Solely identifying political and economic inequalities between classes offers an incomplete picture of class dynamics in America, and may not connect with people's lived experiences. In Reading Classes, Barbara Jensen explores the anguish caused by class in our society, identifying classism--or anti-working class prejudice--as a central factor in the reproduction of inequality in America. Giving voice to the experiences and inner lives of working-class people, Jensen--a community and counseling psychologist--provides an in-depth, psychologically informed examination of how class in America is created and re-created through culture, with an emphasis on how working- and middle-class cultures differ and conflict. This book is unique in its claim that working-class cultures have positive qualities that serve to keep members within them, and that can haunt those who leave them behind.Through both autobiographical reflections on her dual citizenship in the working class and middle class and the life stories of students, clients, and relatives, Jensen brings into focus the clash between the realities of working-class life and middle-class expectations for working-class people. Focusing on education, she finds that at every point in their personal development and educational history, working-class children are misunderstood, ignored, or disrespected by middle-class teachers and administrators. Education, while often hailed as a way to cross classes, brings with it its own set of conflicts and internal struggles. These problems can lead to a divided self, resulting in alienation and suffering for the upwardly mobile student. Jensen suggests how to increase awareness of the value of working-class cultures to a truly inclusive American society at personal, professional, and societal levels.

Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944-1972


Robert Mickey - 2012
    It has re-sorted voters into parties, remapped presidential elections, and helped polarize Congress. Most important, it is the final step in America's democratization. Paths Out of Dixie illuminates this sea change by analyzing the democratization experiences of Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina.Robert Mickey argues that Southern states, from the 1890s until the early 1970s, constituted pockets of authoritarian rule trapped within and sustained by a federal democracy. These enclaves--devoted to cheap agricultural labor and white supremacy--were established by conservative Democrats to protect their careers and clients. From the abolition of the whites-only Democratic primary in 1944 until the national party reforms of the early 1970s, enclaves were battered and destroyed by a series of democratization pressures from inside and outside their borders. Drawing on archival research, Mickey traces how Deep South rulers--dissimilar in their internal conflict and political institutions--varied in their responses to these challenges. Ultimately, enclaves differed in their degree of violence, incorporation of African Americans, and reconciliation of Democrats with the national party. These diverse paths generated political and economic legacies that continue to reverberate today.Focusing on enclave rulers, their governance challenges, and the monumental achievements of their adversaries, Paths Out of Dixie shows how the struggles of the recent past have reshaped the South and, in so doing, America's political development.

Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation After 9/11


Evelyn Alsultany - 2012
    media. Arabs and Muslims in the Media examines this paradox and investigates the increase of sympathetic images of “the enemy” during the War on Terror. Evelyn Alsultany explains that a new standard in racial and cultural representations emerged out of the multicultural movement of the 1990s that involves balancing a negative representation with a positive one, what she refers to as “simplified complex representations.” This has meant that if the storyline of a TV drama or film represents an Arab or Muslim as a terrorist, then the storyline also includes a “positive” representation of an Arab, Muslim, Arab American, or Muslim American to offset the potential stereotype. Analyzing how TV dramas such as The Practice, 24, Law and Order, NYPD Blue, and Sleeper Cell, news-reporting, and non-profit advertising have represented Arabs, Muslims, Arab Americans, and Muslim Americans during the War on Terror, this book demonstrates how more diverse representations do not in themselves solve the problem of racial stereotyping and how even seemingly positive images can produce meanings that can justify exclusion and inequality.

White Bound: Nationalists, Antiracists, and the Shared Meanings of Race


Matthew W. Hughey - 2012
    Too frequently, debates are framed as clear points of opposition—us versus them. And when considering white racial identity, a split between progressive movements and a neoconservative backlash is all too frequently assumed. Taken at face value, it would seem that whites are splintering into antagonistic groups, with differing worldviews, values, and ideological stances.White Bound investigates these dividing lines, questioning the very notion of a fracturing whiteness, and in so doing offers a unique view of white racial identity. Matthew Hughey spent over a year attending the meetings, reading the literature, and interviewing members of two white organizations—a white nationalist group and a white antiracist group. Though he found immediate political differences, he observed surprising similarities. Both groups make meaning of whiteness through a reliance on similar racist and reactionary stories and worldviews.On the whole, this book puts abstract beliefs and theoretical projection about the supposed fracturing of whiteness into relief against the realities of two groups never before directly compared with this much breadth and depth. By examining the similarities and differences between seemingly antithetical white groups, we see not just the many ways of being white, but how these actors make meaning of whiteness in ways that collectively reproduce both white identity and, ultimately, white supremacy.

Irresistible Revolution


Urvashi Vaid - 2012
    This optimistic book challenges advocates for LGBT rights in the U.S. to aspire beyond the narrow framework of equality. It outlines a more substantive politics with race, class, and gender at its foundation, and suggests that such a politics will produce greater and more meaningful change for a larger number of people.Irresistible Revolution is intended for a broad and general audience. The book turns an experienced and thoughtful lens onto many common controversies, rhetoric, and strategic questions that face contemporary social change movements: pursuit of broad or narrow agendas, integration of economic and racial justice, integrating sexual orientation and gender identity in human rights frameworks, the persistence of sexism, the dilemmas of bipartisanship, and the challenge of seeing beyond the short term to secure gains made for the long run.

Blood and Bone: Truth and Reconciliation in a Southern Town


Jack Shuler - 2012
    Three young black men Samuel Hammond, Delano Middleton, and Henry Smith were killed, and twenty-seven other protestors were injured. Preceding the infamous events at Kent State University by more than two years, the Orangeburg Massacre, as it came to be known, was one of the first violent civil rights confrontations on an American college campus. The patrolmen involved were exonerated while victims and their families were left still seeking justice. To this day the community of Orangeburg endeavors to find resolution and reconciliation. In Blood and Bone, Orangeburg native Jack Shuler offers a multifaceted examination of the massacre and its aftermath, uncovering a richer history than the one he learned as a white youth growing up in Orangeburg. Shuler focuses on why events unfolded and escalated as they did and on the ramifications that still haunt the community. Despite the violence of the massacre and its contentious legacy, Orangeburg is a community of people living and working together. Shuler tells their fascinating stories and pays close attention to the ways in which the region is shaping a new narrative on its own, despite the lack of any official reexamination of the massacre. He also explores his own efforts to understand the tragedy in the context of Orangeburg s history of violence. His native connections gave him access to individuals, black and white, who have previously not spoken out publicly. Blood and Bone breaks new ground as an investigation of the massacre and also as a reflection by a proud Orangeburg native on the meanings of Southern community.Shuler concludes that the history of race and violence in Orangeburg mirrors the history of race relations in the United States a murky and contested narrative, complicated by the emotions and motivations of those who have shaped the story and of those who have refused to close the book on it. Orangeburg, like the rest of the nation, carries the historical burdens of slavery, war, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and civil rights. Blood and Bone exposes the ways in which historical memory affects the lives of ordinary Americans. Shuler explores how they remember the Orangeburg Massacre, what its meaning holds for them now, and what it means for the future of the South and the nation."

Sea Changes


Derek Turner - 2012
    As politicians and journalists jockey for position, an unlucky Iraqi immigrant and a plain-speaking English farmer are swept up in world-breaking weather, which threatens to overthrow England forever.

As I Remember It


Tara Lee Morin - 2012
    Removed from her adoptive parents home at 5 and caught shoplifting at 11. On the streets prostituting herself at 14. This is the stark childhood and adolescence of Tara Lee, the protagonist of As I Remember It. But she triumphs over rejection and abuse, thanks to her indomitable spirit and the efforts of a pair of unique foster parents. Breakdowns in the fostering system make the headlines, but what is day-to-day life really like for foster children and teens? What struggles do they face, and what resources do they draw on? Why are kids in care more liable to get involved in crime? As I Remember It yields first-person insight into these issues, but beyond that, it will draw you in with its unblinking portrait of a young girl who discovers that she possesses a core of strength equal to that of her storybook heroines."

Young Thurgood: The Making of a Supreme Court Justice


Larry S. Gibson - 2012
    He transformed the nation's legal landscape by challenging the racial segregation that had relegated millions to second-class citizenship. He won twenty-nine of thirty-three cases before the United States Supreme Court, was a federal appeals court judge, served as the US solicitor general, and, for twenty-four years, sat on the Supreme Court. Marshall is best known for achievements after he relocated to New York in 1936 to work for the NAACP. But Marshall's personality, attitudes, priorities, and work habits had crystallized during earlier years in Maryland. This work is the first close examination of the formative period in Marshall's life. As the authorn shows, Thurgood Marshall was a fascinating man of contrasts. He fought for racial justice without becoming a racist. Simultaneously idealistic and pragmatic, Marshall was a passionate advocate, yet he maintained friendly relationships with his opponents. Young Thurgood reveals how Marshall's distinctive traits were molded by events, people, and circumstances early in his life. Professor Gibson presents fresh information about Marshall's family, youth, and education. He describes Marshall's key mentors, the special impact of his high school and college competitive debating, his struggles to establish a law practice during the Great Depression, and his first civil rights cases. The author sheds new light on the NAACP and its first lawsuits in the campaign that led to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision. He also corrects some of the often-repeated stories about Marshall that are inaccurate.The only biography of Thurgood Marshall to be endorsed by Marshall’s immediate family, Young Thurgood is an exhaustively researched and engagingly written work that everyone interested in law, civil rights, American history, and biography will want to read.

Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam


Chouki El Hamel - 2012
    Chouki El Hamel argues that we cannot rely solely on Islamic ideology as the key to explain social relations and particularly the history of black slavery in the Muslim world, for this viewpoint yields an inaccurate historical record of the people, institutions, and social practices of slavery in Northwest Africa. El Hamel focuses on black Moroccans' collective experience beginning with their enslavement to serve as the loyal army of the Sultan Isma'il. By the time the Sultan died in 1727, they had become a political force, making and unmaking rulers well into the nineteenth century. The emphasis on the political history of the black army is augmented by a close examination of the continuity of black Moroccan identity through the musical and cultural practices of the Gnawa.

Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial


Ralina L. Joseph - 2012
    Some depict multiracial individuals as mired in painful confusion; others equate them with progress, as the embodiment of a postracial utopia. In Transcending Blackness, Ralina L. Joseph critiques both depictions as being rooted in—and still defined by—the racist notion that blackness is a deficit that must be overcome.Analyzing emblematic representations of multiracial figures in popular culture—Jennifer Beals's character in the The L Word; the protagonist in Danny Senza's novel Caucasia; the title character in the independent film Mixing Nia; and contestants in a controversial episode of the reality show America's Next Top Model, who had to "switch ethnicities" for a photo shoot—Joseph identifies the persistence of two widespread stereotypes about mixed-race African Americans, those of "new millennium mulattas" and "exceptional multiracials." The former inscribes multiracial African Americans as tragic figures whose blackness predestines them for misfortune; the latter rewards mixed-race African Americans for successfully erasing their blackness. Addressing questions of authenticity, sexuality, and privilege, Transcending Blackness refutes the idea that race no longer matters in American society.Ralina L. Joseph is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Washington."Transcending Blackness is unique in the field of multiracial studies and a truly groundbreaking and brilliant book. It is also a pleasure to read. Ralina L. Joseph is a rigorous interdisciplinarian, well versed in a number of fields, and she meticulously analyzes and cites these literatures throughout this important work."—Imani Perry, author of More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States"Transcending Blackness will make a great contribution to the literature on race, gender, and popular culture. Through close readings of diverse works in genres such as television, literature, film, and news media, Ralina L. Joseph explores how the ways that multiracial African Americans imagine themselves and are imagined by others have evolved, highlighting the significance of postracial and postfeminist discourses in this transformation."—E. Patrick Johnson, author of Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity

Transformation Now!: Toward a Post-Oppositional Politics of Change


AnaLouise Keating - 2012
    women-of-color feminist/womanist thought and queer studies, inviting us to transform how we think about identity, difference, social justice and social change, metaphysics, reading, and teaching. Through detailed investigations of women of color theories and writings, indigenous thought, and her own personal and pedagogical experiences, Keating develops transformative modes of engagement that move through oppositional approaches to embrace interconnectivity as a framework for identity formation, theorizing, social change, and the possibility of planetary citizenship. Speaking to many dimensions of contemporary scholarship, activism, and social justice work, Transformation Now! calls for and enacts innovative, radically inclusionary ways of reading, teaching, and communicating.

Last Segregated Hour: The Memphis Kneel-Ins and the Campaign for Southern Church Desegregation


Stephen R. Haynes - 2012
    In The Last Segregated Hour, Stephen Haynes tells the story of this dramatic yet little studied tactic which was the strategy of choice for bringing attention to segregationist policies in Southern churches. "Kneel-ins" involved surprise visits to targeted churches, usually during Easter season, and often resulted in physical standoffs with resistant church people. The spectacle of kneeling worshippers barred from entering churches made for a powerful image that invited both local and national media attention. The Memphis kneel-ins of 1964-65 were unique in that the protesters included white students from the local Presbyterian college (Southwestern, now Rhodes). And because the protesting students presented themselves in groups that were "mixed" by race and gender, white church members saw the visitations as a hostile provocation and responded with unprecedented efforts to end them. But when Church officials pressured Southwestern president Peyton Rhodes to "call off" his students or risk financial reprisals, he responded that "Southwestern is not for sale." Drawing on a wide range of sources, including extensive interviews with the students who led the kneel-ins, Haynes tells an inspiring story that will appeal not only to scholars of religion and history, but also to pastors and church people concerned about fostering racially diverse congregations.

Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds


Stef Craps - 2012
    Postcolonial Witnessing argues that the suffering engendered by colonialism needs to be acknowledged more fully, on its own terms, in its own terms, and in relation to traumatic First World histories if trauma theory is to have any hope of redeeming its promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement.

We Are Not the Hero


Jean Johnson - 2012
    Get it. Read it. Use it. And see your people, neighborhood, region, even your world, transformed.” -Brian Hogan, assistant director, Youth With A Mission's Church Planting Coaches; author of There's a Sheep in my Bathtub: Birth of a Mongolian Church Planting Movement.While globalization gives North American Christians unprecedented opportunities to influence the world, we need to take care not to slip into a type of postmodern colonialism in which we make ourselves the experts or the 'hero come to save the day.' Jesus commanded us to make disciples of all nations, not to spread Western cultural Christianity or solve the world with American dollars.In We Are Not the Hero, the author invites you on a learning journey—through Cambodia and other parts of the world—to discover ways to contribute to self-sustaining and reproducing church movements that are organic to the culture. If you are a student, missionary, church planter, missions-oriented church, or Great Commission-minded disciple you will find this book both inspirational and valuable to your experience. “New Testament guidelines for multiplying churches leap out with startling clarity from sharp, action-packed examples that need no abstract explanation. Had I read this before going to the field, I’d have avoided serious and painful cultural errors.” - Dr. George Patterson, originator of Train and Multiply and author of Church Planting Multiplication Guide.Jean Johnson speaks from real-life, hard-earned experience. She has seen firsthand the unintended consequences of ministry meant to help the poor that actually deepens their poverty. Her book provides important insights for those who desire to serve effectively, engaging both their hearts and their minds. -Dr. Robert Lupton, president of FCS Urban Ministries; Best-selling author of Toxic Charity. “A treasure of interesting personal incidents as well as the gleanings from other like-minded experts in the field of missions. I enthusiastically endorse (Jean’s) book as a convincing incentive to review our mission vision and to modify our mission efforts!” -Steve Saint, missionary to the (Ecuadorian) Waodani tribe, author of End of the Spear and Walking His Trail, narrator of Beyond the Gates of Splendor.

South Asian Feminisms


Ania Loomba - 2012
    In this collection of essays, prominent feminist scholars and activists build on that work to confront pressing new challenges for feminist theorizing and practice. Examining recent feminist interventions in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, they address feminist responses to religious fundamentalism and secularism; globalization, labor, and migration; militarization and state repression; public representations of sexuality; and the politics of sex work. Their essays attest to the diversity and specificity of South Asian locations and feminist concerns, while also demonstrating how feminist engagements in the region can enrich and advance feminist theorizing globally. Contributors. Flavia Agnes, Anjali Arondekar, Firdous Azim, Anannya Bhattacharjee, Laura Brueck, Angana P. Chatterji, Malathi de Alwis, Toorjo Ghose, Amina Jamal, Ratna Kapur, Lamia Karim, Ania Loomba, Ritty A. Lukose, Vasuki Nesiah, Sonali Perera, Atreyee Sen, Mrinalini Sinha, Ashwini Sukthankar

Prove It On Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s


Erin D. Chapman - 2012
    Chapman explores the gender and sexual politics of this modern racial ethos and reveals the constraining and exploitative underside of the New Negro era's vaunted liberation and opportunities. Chapman's cultural history documents the effects on black women of the intersection of primitivism, New Negro patriarchal aspirations, and the early twentieth-century consumer culture. As U.S. society invested in the New Negroes, turning their expressions and race politics into entertaining commodities in a sexualized, primitivist popular culture, the New Negroes invested in the idea of black womanhood as a pillar of stability against the unsettling forces of myriad social and racial transformations. And both groups used black women's bodies and identities to "prove" their own modern notions and new identities. Chapman's analysis brings together advertisements selling the blueswoman to black and white consumers in a "sex-race marketplace," the didactic preachments of New Negro reformers advocating a conservative gender politics of "race motherhood," and the words of the New Negro women authors and migrants who boldly or implicitly challenged these dehumanizing discourses. Prove It On Me investigates the uses made of black women's bodies in 1920s popular culture and racial politics and black women's opportunities to assert their own modern, racial identities.

Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery


Deborah Willis - 2012
    As we approach its 150th anniversary, what do we really know about those who experienced slavery?In their pioneering book, Envisioning Emancipation, renowned photographic historian Deborah Willis and historian of slavery Barbara Krauthamer have amassed 150 photographs--some never before published--from the antebellum days of the 1850s through the New Deal era of the 1930s. The authors vividly display the seismic impact of emancipation on African Americans born before and after the Proclamation, providing a perspective on freedom and slavery and a way to understand the photos as documents of engagement, action, struggle, and aspiration.Envisioning Emancipation illustrates what freedom looked like for black Americans in the Civil War era. From photos of the enslaved on plantations and African American soldiers and camp workers in the Union Army to Juneteenth celebrations, slave reunions, and portraits of black families and workers in the American South, the images in this book challenge perceptions of slavery. They show not only what the subjects emphasized about themselves but also the ways Americans of all colors and genders opposed slavery and marked its end.Filled with powerful images of lives too often ignored or erased from historical records, Envisioning Emancipation provides a new perspective on American culture and will be a keepsake for many years to come.

Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century


Kyla Wazana Tompkins - 2012
    At the same time, eating performs a kind of vulnerability to the world, revealing a fundamental interdependence between the eater and that which exists outside her body. Racial Indigestion explores the links between food and visual and literary culture in the nineteenth-century United States to reveal how eating produces political subjects by justifying the social discourses that create bodily meaning.Combing through a visually stunning and rare archive of children’s literature, architectural history, domestic manuals, dietetic tracts, novels and advertising, Racial Indigestion tells the story of the consolidation of nationalist mythologies of whiteness via the erotic politics of consumption. Less a history of commodities than a history of eating itself, the book seeks to understand how eating became a political act, linked to appetite, vice, virtue, race and class inequality and, finally, the queer pleasures and pitfalls of a burgeoning commodity culture. In so doing, Racial Indigestion sheds light on contemporary “foodie” culture’s vexed relationship to nativism, nationalism, and race privilege.

Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness


Rebecca Walker - 2012
    Soft Skull Press proudly offers this tenth-anniversary edition of visionary essays exploring the glory and power of Black Cool, curated by thought leader and bestselling author Rebecca Walker, with a foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.Originally published in 2012, this collection of illuminating essays exploring the ineffable and protean aesthetics of Black Cool has been widely cited for its contribution to much of the contemporary discussion of the influence of Black Cool on culture, politics, and power around the world.Curated by Rebecca Walker, and drawing on her lifelong study of the African roots of Black Cool and its expression within the African diaspora, this collection identifies ancestral elements often excluded from colloquial understandings of Black Cool: cultivated reserve, coded resistance, intentional audacity, transcendent intellectual and spiritual rigor, intentionally disruptive eccentricity, and more.With essays by some of America’s most innovative Black thinkers, including visual artist Hank Willis Thomas, writer and filmmaker dream hampton, MacArthur-winning photographer Dawoud Bey, fashion legend Michaela angela Davis, and critical theorist and cultural icon bell hooks, Black Cool offers an excavation of the African roots of Cool and its hitherto undefined legacy in American culture and beyond.This edition includes a new introduction from Rebecca Walker, a powerful meditation on the genesis, creation, completion, and subsequent impact of this landmark volume over the last decade.

Ernie K-Doe: The R&B Emperor of New Orleans


Ben Sandmel - 2012
    

Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America


Sohail Daulatzai - 2012
    (Determination)”: “The African diaspora represents strength in numbers, a giant can't slumber forever.”Linking discontent and unrest in Harlem and Los Angeles to anticolonial revolution in Algeria, Egypt, and elsewhere, Black leaders in the United States have frequently looked to the anti-imperialist movements and antiracist rhetoric of the Muslim Third World for inspiration. In Black Star, Crescent Moon, Sohail Daulatzai maps the rich, shared history between Black Muslims, Black radicals, and the Muslim Third World, showing how Black artists and activists imagined themselves not as national minorities but as part of a global majority, connected to larger communities of resistance. Daulatzai traces these interactions and alliances from the Civil Rights movement and the Black Power era to the “War on Terror,” placing them within a broader framework of American imperialism, Black identity, and the global nature of white oppression.From Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali to contemporary artists and activists like Rakim and Mos Def, Black Star, Crescent Moon reveals how Muslim resistance to imperialism came to occupy a central position within the Black radical imagination, offering a new perspective on the political and cultural history of Black internationalism from the 1950s to the present.

Radical Reconciliation: Beyond Political Pietism and Christian Quietism


Curtiss Paul DeYoung - 2012
    Too many initiatives for reconciliation, fail to remove the weeds of injustice at the roots, and thus stop short of completing the work required. Such political arrangements usually favor the rich and powerful, but deprive the powerless of justice and dignity. This is a form of political pietism, and when Christians refuse to name this situation for what it is, they are practicing Christian quietism. True reconciliation is radical. In this book the authors a South African prominent in the struggle against apartheid, and a white U.S. theologian who has served in pastoral roles in multi-racial congregations offer a vision of reconciliation and social justice grounded in the biblical story and their own experience of activism. After re-examining the meaning of reconciliation in the biblical context, the authors examine Jesus role as a radical reconciler and prophet of social justice. They go on to examine the role of reconciliation in religious communities and in the wider society.

The Harris Narratives: An Introspective Study of a Transracial Adoptee


Susan Harris O'Connor - 2012
    These monologues were developed and performed around the United States in academic, clinical and child welfare settings to wide acclaim over the last sixteen years. They will be of immediate interest to scholars of race, identity, emotional intelligence, adoption, child welfare, as well as clinicians and those directly impacted in families created by adoption. The book will also speak to writers, performers and individuals interested in developing their voice through self-exploration. In her narratives the author explores in depth: the impact of foster care during the first 14 months of her life; her relationship with her unknown birth father; the role of race and racism for transracial adoptees who grow up in white communities; the development of her racial identity and a model derived from these experiences, and the relationships between her different identities or mind constructs, her inner strengths and vulnerabilities, and the outside world. There is a progression one chapter to the next, chronicling greater understanding, deeper reflection, and a developing voice. This is an original and sophisticated exploration of the inner life of a transracial adoptee and the forces that helped shape her life. It is at once a case study and an observation of the human condition with universal appeal.

Making Paper Cranes: Toward an Asian American Feminist Theology


Mihee Kim-Kort - 2012
    Making Paper Cranes is an attempt to describe an ever emerging life, in an emerging community within Christianity in North America, that is intentionally taking flight and impacting the world. This theological book engages the social histories, literary texts, and narratives of Asian American women, as well as the theological projects of prominent Asian American feminist theologians. It seeks to offer another liberative theological voice. Inherent in its construction is the interconnectedness of all stories that articulate struggle, resistance, and the artistic flourishing of oppressed peoples. Simply put, Making Paper Cranes is about Asian American mothers, daughters, sisters, and women who are imaginatively and courageously crafting their journeys together in and through their Christian faith.

Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis: Housing Policy in Postwar Chicago


Preston H. Smith II - 2012
    In Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis, Preston H. Smith II examines housing debates in Chicago that go beyond black and white politics, and he shows how class and factional conflicts among African Americans actually helped to reproduce stunning segregation along economic lines.Class and factional conflicts were normal in the rough-and-tumble world of land use politics. They are, however, often not visible in accounts of the postwar fight against segregation. Smith outlines the ideological framework that black civic leaders in Chicago used to formulate housing policy, both within and outside the black community, to reveal a surprising picture of leaders who singled out racial segregation as the source of African Americans’ inadequate housing rather than attacking class inequalities. What are generally presented as black positions on housing policy in Chicago, Smith makes clear, belonged to the black elite and did not necessarily reflect black working-class participation or interests.This book details how black civic leaders fought racial discrimination in ways that promoted—or at least did not sacrifice—their class interests in housing and real estate struggles. And, as Smith demonstrates, their accommodation of the real estate practices and government policy of the time has had a lasting effect: it contributed to a legacy of class segregation in the housing market in Chicago and major metropolitan areas across the country that is still felt today.

Queer African Reader


Sokari Ekine - 2012
    It brings together academic writings, political analysis, life testimonies, conversations, and artistic works by Africans that engage with the struggle for LGBTI liberation. The book aims to engage the audience from the perspective that various traits of identity—such as gender, race, and class—interact to contribute to social inequality. Including experiences from diverse African contexts, this work breaks away from the homogenization of Africa as the homophobic continent to highlight the complexities of LGBTI lives and experiences through their own voices.

The Triumph of Reason - The Thinking Man's Guide to Adolf Hitler


Michael Walsh-McLaughlin - 2012
    His persona, that of his political colleagues, his political party; the rise and combined Capitalist/Communist destruction fall of the Third Reich, have led to the publication of - at the latest count - 120,000 different titles. Virtually all of them are the preposterous re-cycled one-sided propaganda of the victors. This absence of objectivity is equalled only by the difficulty of discovering first-hand what the German Leader actually said or thought. It is as if we sit in a court room in which the defendant, defence counsel and defence witnesses have been excluded. This publication provides a rare opportunity to examine the authentic first hand expressions uttered by the German leader, who won the hearts and minds of millions of Europeans.

Tombs of the Vanishing Indian


Marie Clements - 2012
    This assimilationist policy was one focus of Métis playwright Marie Clements’s research when she was commissioned to create a new play for the tenth anniversary of the Native Voices series at the Autry National Center, Los Angeles.Clements dramatizes the emotional, psychological, and social repercussions of this, and subsequent, bureaucratic incursions into the girls’ lives. Their arrival in California takes a tragic turn when their mother is suddenly killed, and the girls are arbitrarily placed in different foster homes, never to see each other again.We follow Janey, Miranda, and Jessie as they lead very disparate adult lives: Janey, a troubled vagrant; Miranda, a burgeoning actress fighting typecasting in Hollywood; Jessie, an idealist physician who’s married to a medical colleague. As it was bureaucratic policy that had dismantled their secure family unit and sent each girl into the unknown, so too did a government paper ultimately bring them together, if only symbolically. Clements casts the sisters’ narrative against the backdrop of another historical injustice: the forced sterilization of thousands of Native women in the 1970s, a practice that was only abolished in 1981.Clements’s play is a compelling, and poetic, investigation of the coldly bureaucratic machinations that have, throughout history, attempted to facilitate the disappearance of Native people. Though Tombs of the Vanishing Indian focuses on specific policies and locations, it speaks eloquently to broader themes of Aboriginal displacement. There are, indeed, echoes of Canadian policy aimed at the dissolution of First Nations families and culture: the potlatch ban, residential schools, and the ban on Native language, whose profoundly damaging ramifications are our shared legacy.Cast of 4 women and 3 men.

Distant Thunder


T.D. Griggs - 2012
    A vow of revenge. And an empire on the brink of war.Set at the end of the nineteenth century, this sweeping, epic love story traces the doomed relationship of two young people against the backdrop of a British Empire bracing itself against political opposition.As a boy, Frank had to leave his beloved India when his mother was assaulted by a British officer and accidentally shot when Frank tried to intervene. After his father dies of shame and a broken heart, Frank must make his way to England, sustained only by the determination to revenge himself on the man responsible for destroying his family as soon as he's old enough to become a soldier himself.Grace is the privileged daughter of an industrial magnate, but following her heart and her head makes her a champion of those oppressed by masters of the empire like her father, and so she too finds she has lost her family.As the pair fall in love, there is only one thing standing in the way of true happiness - Frank's vow of revenge.

We Have Not Been Moved: Resisting Racism and Militarism in 21st Century America


Elizabeth Betita Martinez - 2012
    Among the historic texts included are rarely seen writings by antiracist icons such as Anne Braden, Barbara Deming, and Audre Lorde as well as a dialogue between Dr. King, revolutionary nationalist Robert F. Williams, Dave Dellinger, and Dorothy Day. Never-before-published pieces appear from civil rights and gay rights organizer Bayard Rustin and from celebrated U.S. pacifist supporter of Puerto Rican sovereignty Ruth Reynolds. Additional articles, essays, interviews, and poems from numerous contributors examine the strategic and tactical possibilities of radical transformation for lasting social change through revolutionary nonviolence.

The Invention of the White Race: Racial Oppression and Social Control / The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America


Theodore W. Allen - 2012
    In his seminal two-volume work, The Invention of the White Race, Allen details the creation of the "white race" by the ruling class as a method of social control, in response to labor unrest precipitated by Bacon's Rebellion. Distinguishing European Americans from African Americans within the laboring class, white privileges enforced the myth of the white race through the years and has been central to maintaining ruling-class domination over the entire working class.Since publication in the mid-nineties, Invention has become indispensable in debates on the origins of racial oppression in America. Volume One utilizes Irish history to show the relativity of race and racial oppression as a form of social control. Volume Two details the development of racial oppression and racial slavery in colonial Virginia and, more broadly, Anglo-America. A new introduction by Jeffrey B. Perry discusses Allen's contributions, critical reception and continuing importance.

If You Love It, It Will Grow: A Guide To Healthy, Beautiful Natural Hair


Phoenyx Austin - 2012
    Phoenyx Austin, a physician and natural hair guru, we now have a fabulous book that explains how to grow and maintain healthy and longer afro-textured hair. And with a head of gorgeous natural hair herself, Dr. Phoenyx proves that she's not only talking the talk, she's walking the walk!In this book, you will learn:• How afro-textured hair grows and why it's unique from other hair types • How to stop hair breakage and hair loss that plagues many women with afro-textured hair • How to best use nutrition and other health-based principles to maximize hair growth potential • How to develop a life-long and flexible hair regimen based in holistic hair care • How to leverage the power of Ayurveda, an ancient form of alternative medicine that has helped women grow beautiful hair for thousands of years In truth, If You Love It, It Will Grow is more than a book, it's a philosophy! There is a great interconnectedness between how women feel about their hair and how they feel about themselves. Growing healthy, longer and beautiful natural hair is absolutely within your reach. It's all about giving your hair what it needs- that extra bit of TLC. If You Love It, It Will Grow! Praise for Dr. Phoenyx Austin "If You Love It, It Will Grow isn't simply a clever title...it's the truth! I hope that you enjoy If You Love It, It Will Grow as much as I have and that Dr. Phoenyx's expert advice is as good to your afro-textured hair as it has been to mine!" - Jamilah Lemieux. Editor, EBONY.com “A wonderful addition to natural hair and I highly recommend that you check it out!” Natural Chica (aka Mae)

Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara


Toni Cade Bambara - 2012
    The intimacy of these collaborations or conversations between Bambara (1939-1995) and her interviewers provides an excellent and necessary resource for those interested in scholarly approaches to her fiction, especially her novels The Salt Eaters and the posthumously published Those Bones Are Not My Child, and her acclaimed short story collection Gorilla, My Love. The collection reveals the passion, humor, and real-life experiences of the woman who through her editing of the groundbreaking anthology of black women's writing The Black Woman and contributions to the documentary W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices changed perceptions of African American culture in the modern era.The interviews present a woman who saw herself as -a teacher who writes, a social worker who writes, a youth worker who writes, a mother who writes.- Bambara viewed herself as a cultural worker for oppressed people whose job as an artist was making, in her words, -revolution irresistible.- Indeed, her fiction champions the working class and -average folk, - both of whom she felt were made invisible by mainstream American society.The volume also displays Bambara's passionate criticism of radicalism and revolutionary philosophies that were structured by patriarchal, sexist, and heterosexual-centric paradigms. Her willingness to challenge her own ideals, as well as those that conflicted with them, marks her as one of the most forceful black writers of her era.

Freedom Now! Struggles for the Human Right to Housing in LA and Beyond


Jordan T. Camp - 2012
    It documents the dynamic social movements emerging around struggles for housing as a human right. Produced with the grassroots housing and social justice organization LA CAN (the Los Angeles Community Action Network), this reader considers the struggles against eviction, gentrification, homelessness and the privatization of public housing. Drawing on the legacy of the Freedom Movement, Freedom Now! argues that these human rights struggles have been and continue to be constitutive of a struggle for a new society. Contributors include organizers such as Deborah Burton from LA CAN, J.R. Fleming of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign, S'bu Zikode with Abahlali baseMjondolo a movement of South African Shack dwellers, artists like Chuck D from Public Enemy, as well as scholar-activists such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mike Davis, Rhonda Williams, George Lipsitz, Gaye Theresa Johnson, and Daniel Martinez HoSang.

When Half Is Whole: Multiethnic Asian American Identities


Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu - 2012
    Then I write them down in a way that I hope will communicate something to others, so that seeing these stories will give readers something of value. I tell myself that this isn't going to be done unless I do it, just because of who I am. It's a way of making my mark, leaving something behind . . . not that I'm planning on going anywhere right now."So explains Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu in this touching, introspective, and insightful examination of mixed race Asian American experiences. The son of an Irish American father and Japanese mother, Murphy-Shigematsu uses his personal journey of identity exploration and discovery of his diverse roots to illuminate the journeys of others. Throughout the book, his reflections are interspersed among portraits of persons of biracial and mixed ethnicity and accounts of their efforts to answer a seemingly simple question: Who am I?Here we meet Norma, raised in postwar Japan, the daughter of a Japanese woman and an American serviceman, who struggled to make sense of her ethnic heritage and national belonging. Wei Ming, born in Australia and raised in the San Francisco of the 1970s and 1980s, grapples as well with issues of identity, in her case both ethnic and sexual. We also encounter Rudy, a "Mexipino"; Marshall, a "Jewish, adopted Korean"; Mitzi, a "Blackinawan"; and other extraordinary people who find how connecting to all parts of themselves also connects them to others.With its attention on people who have been regarded as "half" this or "half" that throughout their lives, these stories make vivid the process of becoming whole.

Shattering the Illusion: How African American Churches of Christ Moved from Segregation to Independence


Wes Crawford - 2012
    

Occupying Privilege: Conversations on Love, Race, & Liberation


JLove Calderón - 2012
    Good news is, there’s a lot we can do, together, to undo the power dynamics and racism which keep us from embracing freedom for all. Imagine if we could all agree that racism does exist, without the feelings of blame, shame, and guilt, then we could be in the business of changing it. This book will help you get there. A book for the people by the people, told through stories, conversations, letters, and essays, readers will learn about white supremacy, media’s spin control, (mis)education, the criminal IN-justice system, cultural appropriation, and racism’s continued impact on people of color and white people.When you Occupy Privilege you’ll discover:* The difference (and there are many!) between white privilege, white supremacy, racism, discrimination and more–knowledge is power!* The stories and struggles of people of all color, their own relation to privilege, and how they are undoing it one poem, flow, rhyme, letter, beat, and day at a time. Here, the personal is political.* How not to drown in the guilt of the history of whiteness in America. You are not alone in this work!