Best of
Social-Justice

2011

The Cross and the Lynching Tree


James H. Cone - 2011
    In this powerful new work, theologian James H. Cone explores these symbols and their interconnection in the history and souls of black folk. Both the cross and the lynching tree represent the worst in human beings and at the same time a thirst for life that refuses to let the worst determine our final meaning. While the lynching tree symbolized white power and black death, the cross symbolizes divine power and black life, God overcoming the power of sin and death. For African Americans, the image of Jesus, hung on a tree to die, powerfully grounded their faith that God was with them, even in the suffering of the lynching era.In a work that spans social history, theology, and cultural studies, Cone explores the message of the spirituals and the power of the blues; the passion and the engaged vision of Martin Luther King, Jr.; he invokes the spirits of Billie Holiday and Langston Hughes, Fannie Lou Hamer and Ida B. Wells, and the witness of black artists, writers, preachers, and fighters for justice. And he remembers the victims, especially the 5,000 who perished during the lynching period. Through their witness he contemplates the greatest challenge of any Christian theology to explain how life can be made meaningful in the face of death and injustice.

Girls Like Us


Rachel Lloyd - 2011
    Vulnerable yet tough, she eventually ended up a victim of commercial sexual exploitation. It took time and incredible resilience, but finally, with the help of a local church community, she broke free of her pimp and her past. Three years later, Lloyd arrived in the United States to work with adult women in the sex industry and soon founded her own nonprofit— GEMS, Girls Educational and Mentoring Services—to meet the needs of other girls with her history. She also earned her GED and won full scholarships to college and a graduate program. Today Lloyd is executive director of GEMS in New York City and has turned it into one of the nation's most groundbreaking nonprofit organizations. In Girls Like Us, Lloyd reveals the dark, secretive world of her past in stunning cinematic detail. And, with great humanity, she lovingly shares the stories of the girls whose lives she has helped—; small victories that have healed her wounds and made her whole. Revelatory, authentic, and brave, Girls Like Us is an unforgettable memoir.

Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex


Eric A. Stanley - 2011
    The first collection of its kind, Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith bring together current and former prisoners, activists, and academics to offer new ways for understanding how race, gender, ability, and sexuality are lived under the crushing weight of captivity. Through a politic of gender self-determination, this collection argues that trans/queer liberation and prison abolition must be grown together. From rioting against police violence and critiquing hate crimes legislation to prisoners demanding access to HIV medications, and far beyond, Captive Genders is a challenge for us all to join the struggle."An exciting assemblage of writings—analyses, manifestos, stories, interviews—that traverse the complicated entanglements of surveillance, policing, imprisonment, and the production of gender normativity.... [T]he contributors to this volume create new frameworks and new vocabularies that surely will have a transformative impact on the theories and practices of twenty-first century abolition."—Angela Y. Davis, professor emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz"The purpose of prison abolition is to discover and promote the countless ways freedom and difference are mutually dependent. The contributors to Captive Genders brilliantly shatter the assumption that the antidote to danger is human sacrifice."—Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California"Captive Genders is at once a scathing and necessary analysis of the prison industrial complex and a history of queer resistance to state tyranny. By queering a prison abolition analysis, Captive Genders moves us to imagine the impossible dream of liberation."—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of So Many Ways to Sleep BadlyEric A. Stanley is a radical queer activist, outlaw academic, and experimental filmmaker.Nat Smith is a member of Trans/gender Variant in Prison Committee and is an organizer with Critical Resistance.

Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law


Dean Spade - 2011
    This approach assumes that the state and its legal, policing, and social services apparatus—even its policies and documents of belonging and non-belonging—are neutral and benevolent. While we all have to comply with the gender binaries set forth by regulatory bodies of law and administration, many trans people, especially the most marginalized, are even more at risk for poverty, violence, and premature death by virtue of those same "neutral" legal structures.Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law raises revelatory critiques of the current strategies pivoting solely on a "legal rights framework," but also points to examples of an organized grassroots trans movement that is demanding the most essential of legal reforms in addition to making more comprehensive interventions into dangerous systems of repression—and the administrative violence that ultimately determines our life chances. Setting forth a politic that goes beyond the quest for mere legal inclusion, Normal Life is an urgent call for justice and trans liberation, and the radical transformations it will require.An attorney, educator, and trans activist, Dean Spade has taught classes on sexual orientation, gender identity, poverty and law at the City University of New York (CUNY), Seattle University, Columbia University, and Harvard. In 2002 he founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a collective that provides free legal services and works to build trans resistance rooted in racial and economic justice.

The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities


Ching-In ChenBran Fenner - 2011
    We wanted to hear about folks’ experiences confronting abusers, both with cops and courts and with methods outside the criminal justice system."—The Revolution Starts at Home collectiveLong demanded and urgently needed, The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities finally breaks the dangerous silence surrounding the “secret” of intimate violence within social justice circles. This watershed collection of stories and strategies tackles the multiple forms of violence encountered right where we live, love, and work for social change—and delves into the nitty-gritty on how we might create safety from abuse without relying on the state. Drawing on over a decade of community accountability work, along with its many hard lessons and unanswered questions, The Revolution Starts at Home offers potentially life-saving alternatives for creating survivor safety while building a movement where no one is left behind. Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart's Traffic. Kundiman Fellow Jai Dulani is an interdisciplinary storyteller and activist/educator. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is the author of Consensual Genocide. Andrea Smith is the author of Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide.

The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century


Grace Lee Boggs - 2011
    In this powerful, deeply humanistic book, Grace Lee Boggs, a legendary figure in the struggle for justice in America, shrewdly assesses the current crisis—political, economical, and environmental—and shows how to create the radical social change we need to confront new realities. A vibrant, inspirational force, Boggs has participated in all of the twentieth century’s major social movements—for civil rights, women’s rights, workers’ rights, and more. She draws from seven decades of activist experience, and a rigorous commitment to critical thinking, to redefine “revolution” for our times. From her home in Detroit, she reveals how hope and creativity are overcoming despair and decay within the most devastated urban communities. Her book is a manifesto for creating alternative modes of work, politics, and human interaction that will collectively constitute the next American Revolution.

Dancing on Our Turtle's Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence


Leanne Betasamosake Simpson - 2011
    In Dancing on Our Turtle's Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence activist, editor, and educator Leanne Simpson asserts reconciliation must be grounded in political resurgence and must support the regeneration of Indigenous languages, oral cultures, and traditions of governance.Simpson explores philosophies and pathways of regeneration, resurgence, and a new emergence through the Nishnaabeg language, Creation Stories, walks with Elders and children, celebrations and protests, and meditations on these experiences. She stresses the importance of illuminating Indigenous intellectual traditions to transform their relationship to the Canadian state.Challenging and original, Dancing on Our Turtle's Back provides a valuable new perspective on the struggles of Indigenous Peoples.

Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century


Dorothy Roberts - 2011
    In this provocative analysis, leading legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts argues that America is once again at the brink of a virulent outbreak of classifying population by race. By searching for differences at the molecular level, a new race-based science is obscuring racism in our society and legitimizing state brutality against communities of color at a time when America claims to be post-racial.Moving from an account of the evolution of race—proving that it has always been a mutable and socially defined political division supported by mainstream science—Roberts delves deep into the current debates, interrogating the newest science and biotechnology, interviewing its researchers, and exposing the political consequences obscured by the focus on genetic difference. Fatal Invention is a provocative call for us to affirm our common humanity.

Ask Me Why I Hurt: The Kids Nobody Wants and the Doctor Who Heals Them


Randy Christensen - 2011
    Randy Christensen. Trained as a pediatrician, he works not in a typical hospital setting but, rather, in a 38-foot Winnebago that has been refitted as a doctor’s office on wheels. His patients are the city’s homeless adolescents and children. In the shadow of one affluent American city, Dr. Christensen has dedicated his life to caring for society's throwaway kids—the often-abused, unloved children who live on the streets without access to proper health care, all the while fending off constant threats from thugs, gangs, pimps, and other predators. With the Winnebago as his moveable medical center, Christensen and his team travel around the outskirts of Phoenix, attending to the children and teens who need him most. With tenderness and humor, Dr. Christensen chronicles everything from the struggles of the van’s early beginnings, to the support system it became for the kids, and the ultimate recognition it has achieved over the years. Along with his immense professional challenges, he also describes the trials and joys he faces while raising a growing family with his wife Amy. By turns poignant, heartbreaking, and charming, Dr. Christensen's story is a gripping and rich memoir of his work and family, one of those rare books that stays with you long after you’ve turned the last page.

Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America


Melissa V. Harris-Perry - 2011
    Hurtful and dishonest, such representations force African American women to navigate a virtual crooked room that shames them and shapes their experiences as citizens. Many respond by assuming a mantle of strength that may convince others, and even themselves, that they do not need help. But as a result, the unique political issues of black women are often ignored and marginalized.In this groundbreaking book, Melissa V. Harris-Perry uses multiple methods of inquiry, including literary analysis, political theory, focus groups, surveys, and experimental research, to understand more deeply black women's political and emotional responses to pervasive negative race and gender images. Not a traditional political science work concerned with office-seeking, voting, or ideology, Sister Citizen instead explores how African American women understand themselves as citizens and what they expect from political organizing. Harris-Perry shows that the shared struggle to preserve an authentic self and secure recognition as a citizen links together black women in America, from the anonymous survivors of Hurricane Katrina to the current First Lady of the United States.

Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women's Prisons


Robin Levi - 2011
    prisons are routinely subjected to physical, sexual, and mental abuse. While this has been documented in male prisons, women in prison often suffer in relative anonymity. Women Inside addresses this critical social justice issue, empowering incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women to share the stories that have previously been silenced. Among the narrators:•Irma Rodriguez, in prison on drug charges. While in prison in 1990, Irma was diagnosed HIV positive, but after a decade and a half of aggressive and toxic treatment, Irma learned that she never had HIV.•Sheri Dwight, a domestic violence survivor who was sent to prison for attempting to kill her batterer. While in prison, she underwent surgery for abdominal pain and learned more than four years later that she had been sterilized without her consent.

With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful


Glenn Greenwald - 2011
    But over the past four decades, the principle of equality before the law has been effectively abolished. Instead, a two-tiered system of justice ensures that the country's political and financial class is virtually immune from prosecution, licensed to act without restraint, while the politically powerless are imprisoned with greater ease and in greater numbers than in any other country in the world.Starting with Watergate, continuing on through the Iran-Contra scandal, and culminating with Obama's shielding of Bush-era officials from prosecution, Glenn Greenwald lays bare the mechanisms that have come to shield the elite from accountability. He shows how the media, both political parties, and the courts have abetted a process that has produced torture, war crimes, domestic spying, and financial fraud. Cogent, sharp, and urgent, this is a no-holds-barred indictment of a profoundly un-American system that sanctions immunity at the top and mercilessness for everyone else.

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition


Charles Eisenstein - 2011
    Today, these trends have reached their extreme—but in the wake of their collapse, we may find great opportunity to transition to a more connected, ecological, and sustainable way of being.   This book is about how the money system will have to change—and is already changing—to embody this transition. A broadly integrated synthesis of theory, policy, and practice, Sacred Economics explores avant-garde concepts of the New Economics, including negative-interest currencies, local currencies, resource-based economics, gift economies, and the restoration of the commons. Author Charles Eisenstein also considers the personal dimensions of this transition, speaking to those concerned with "right livelihood" and how to live according to their ideals in a world seemingly ruled by money. Tapping into a rich lineage of conventional and unconventional economic thought, Sacred Economics presents a vision that is original yet commonsense, radical yet gentle, and increasingly relevant as the crises of our civilization deepen.Sacred Economics official website: http://sacred-economics.com/About the Imprint: EVOLVER EDITIONS promotes a new counterculture that recognizes humanity's visionary potential and takes tangible, pragmatic steps to realize it. EVOLVER EDITIONS explores the dynamics of personal, collective, and global change from a wide range of perspectives. EVOLVER EDITIONS is an imprint of North Atlantic Books and is produced in collaboration with Evolver, LLC.

Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys


Victor M. Rios - 2011
    A former gang member and juvenile delinquent, Rios managed to escape the bleak outcome of many of his friends and earned a PhD at Berkeley and returned to his hometown to study how inner city young Latino and African American boys develop their sense of self in the midst of crime and intense policing. Punished examines the difficult lives of these young men, who now face punitive policies in their schools, communities, and a world where they are constantly policed and stigmatized.Rios followed a group of forty delinquent Black and Latino boys for three years. These boys found themselves in a vicious cycle, caught in a spiral of punishment and incarceration as they were harassed, profiled, watched, and disciplined at young ages, even before they had committed any crimes, eventually leading many of them to fulfill the destiny expected of them. But beyond a fatalistic account of these marginalized young men, Rios finds that the very system that criminalizes them and limits their opportunities, sparks resistance and a raised consciousness that motivates some to transform their lives and become productive citizens. Ultimately, he argues that by understanding the lives of the young men who are criminalized and pipelined through the criminal justice system, we can begin to develop empathic solutions which support these young men in their development and to eliminate the culture of punishment that has become an overbearing part of their everyday lives.

Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination


Alondra Nelson - 2011
    The Black Panthers are most often remembered for their revolutionary rhetoric and militant action. Here Alondra Nelson deftly recovers an indispensable but lesser-known aspect of the organization’s broader struggle for social justice: health care. The Black Panther Party’s health activism—its network of free health clinics, its campaign to raise awareness about genetic disease, and its challenges to medical discrimination—was an expression of its founding political philosophy and also a recognition that poor blacks were both underserved by mainstream medicine and overexposed to its harms.Drawing on extensive historical research as well as interviews with former members of the Black Panther Party, Nelson argues that the Party’s focus on health care was both practical and ideological. Building on a long tradition of medical self-sufficiency among African Americans, the Panthers’ People’s Free Medical Clinics administered basic preventive care, tested for lead poisoning and hypertension, and helped with housing, employment, and social services. In 1971, the party launched a campaign to address sickle-cell anemia. In addition to establishing screening programs and educational outreach efforts, it exposed the racial biases of the medical system that had largely ignored sickle-cell anemia, a disease that predominantly affected people of African descent.The Black Panther Party’s understanding of health as a basic human right and its engagement with the social implications of genetics anticipated current debates about the politics of health and race. That legacy—and that struggle—continues today in the commitment of health activists and the fight for universal health care.

Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States


Joey L. Mogul - 2011
    The authors unpack queer criminal archetypes--like "gleeful gay killers," "lethal lesbians," "disease spreaders," and "deceptive gender benders"--to illustrate the punishment of queer expression, regardless of whether a crime was ever committed. Tracing stories from the streets to the bench to behind prison bars, the authors prove that the policing of sex and gender both bolsters and reinforces racial and gender inequalities. A groundbreaking work that turns a "queer eye" on the criminal legal system, Queer (In)Justice illuminates and challenges the many ways in which queer lives are criminalized, policed, and punished.

Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513-2008


Henry Louis Gates Jr. - 2011
    Informed by the latest, sometimes provocative scholarship and including more than seven hundred images—ancient maps, fine art, documents, photographs, cartoons, posters—Life Upon These Shores focuses on defining events, debates, and controversies, as well as the signal achievements of people famous and obscure. Gates takes us from the sixteenth century through the ordeal of slavery, from the Civil War and Reconstruction through the Jim Crow era and the Great Migration; from the civil rights and black nationalist movements through the age of hip-hop to the Joshua generation. By documenting and illuminating the sheer diversity of African American involvement in American history, society, politics, and culture, Gates bracingly disabuses us of the presumption of a single “black experience.”Life Upon These Shores is a book of major importance, a breathtaking tour de force of the historical imagination.

"Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children


Lisa D. Delpit - 2011
    In her long-awaited second book, Delpit presents a striking picture of the elements of contemporary public education that conspire against the prospects for poor children of color, creating a persistent gap in achievement during the school years that has eluded several decades of reform.Delpit's bestselling and paradigm-shifting first book, Other People's Children, focused on cultural slippage in the classroom between white teachers and students of color. Now, in "Multiplication is for White People", Delpit reflects on two decades of reform efforts—including No Child Left Behind, standardized testing, the creation of alternative teacher certification paths, and the charter school movement—that have still left a generation of poor children of color feeling that higher educational achievement isn't for them.In chapters covering primary, middle, and high school, as well as college, Delpit concludes that it's not that difficult to explain the persistence of the achievement gap. In her wonderful trademark style, punctuated with telling classroom anecdotes and informed by time spent at dozens of schools across the country, Delpit outlines an inspiring and uplifting blueprint for raising expectations for other people's children, based on the simple premise that multiplication—and every aspect of advanced education—is for everyone.

Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times


Amy Sonnie - 2011
    Poor and working-class whites have tended to be painted as spectators, reactionaries, and, even, racists. Most Americans, the story goes, just watched the political movements of the sixties go by. James Tracy and Amy Sonnie, who have been interviewing activists from the era for nearly ten years, reject this old narrative. They show that poor and working-class radicals, inspired by the Civil Rights movement, the Black Panthers, and progressive populism, started to organize significant political struggles against racism and inequality during the 1960s and 1970s. Among these groups: +  JOIN Community Union brought together southern migrants, student radicals, and welfare recipients in Chicago to fight for housing, health, and welfare . . .  +  The Young Patriots Organization and Rising Up Angry organized self-identified hillbillies, Chicago greasers, Vietnam vets, and young feminists into a legendary “Rainbow Coalition” with Black and Puerto Rican activists . . .   +  In Philadelphia, the October 4th Organization united residents of industrial Kensington against big business, war, and a repressive police force . . .  + In the Bronx, White Lightning occupied hospitals and built coalitions with doctors to fight for the rights of drug addicts and the poor. Exploring an untold history of the New Left, the book shows how these groups helped to redefine community organizing—and transforms the way we think about a pivotal moment in U.S. history.

I Have the Right to Be a Child


Alain Serres - 2011
    The book emphasizes that these rights belong to every child on the planet, whether they are "black or white, small or big, rich or poor, born here or somewhere else." It also makes evident that knowing and talking about these rights are the first steps toward making sure that they are respected.A brief afterword explains that the rights outlined in the book come from the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1989. The treaty sets out the basic human rights that belong to children all over the world, recognizing that children need special protection since they are more vulnerable than adults. It has been ratified by 193 states, with the exception of Somalia, the United States and the new country of South Sudan. Once a state has ratified the document, they are legally bound to comply with it and to report on their efforts to do so. As a result, some progress has been made, not only in awareness of children's rights, but also in their implementation. But there are still many countries, wealthy and poor, where children's basic needs are not being met.

Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature


Qwo-Li Driskill - 2011
    This book is not so much a manifesto as it is a dialogue—a “writing in conversation”—among a luminous group of scholar-activists revisiting the history of gay and lesbian studies in Indigenous communities while forging a path for Indigenouscentered theories and methodologies. The bold opening to Queer Indigenous Studies invites new dialogues in Native American and Indigenous studies about the directions and implications of queer Indigenous studies. The collection notably engages Indigenous GLBTQ2 movements as alliances that also call for allies beyond their bounds, which the co-editors and contributors model by crossing their varied identities, including Native, trans, straight, non-Native, feminist, Two-Spirit, mixed blood, and queer, to name just a few. Rooted in the Indigenous Americas and the Pacific, and drawing on disciplines ranging from literature to anthropology, contributors to Queer Indigenous Studies call Indigenous GLBTQ2 movements and allies to center an analysis that critiques the relationship between colonialism and heteropatriarchy. By answering critical turns in Indigenous scholarship that center Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies, contributors join in reshaping Native studies, queer studies, transgender studies, and Indigenous feminisms. Based on the reality that queer Indigenous people “experience multilayered oppression that profoundly impacts our safety, health, and survival,” this book is at once an imagining and an invitation to the reader to join in the discussion of decolonizing queer Indigenous research and theory and, by doing so, to partake in allied resistance working toward positive change.

Migrant: The Journey of a Mexican Worker


Jose Manuel Mateo - 2011
    with his family. They must face many dangers to cross the border, only to experience the uncertainty felt by all illegal immigrants. The narrative is accompanied by one long, beautifully vivid illustration reminis­cent of pre-Hispanic codices, packaged as an accordion-style foldout frieze. Praise for Migrant STARRED REVIEW"Content and design coalesce in a handsome presentation that invites readers to decode intriguing images in a pastoral setting suggestive of folklore—and in the process, arouses empathy for the all-too-real risks surrounding migrants... Breathtaking."--Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Howard Zinn on Race


Howard Zinn - 2011
    As chairman of the history department at all black women’s Spelman College, Zinn was an outspoken supporter of student activists in the nascent civil rights movement. In "The Southern Mystique," he tells of how he was asked to leave Spelman in 1963 after teaching there for seven years. "Behind every one of the national government’s moves toward racial equality," writes Zinn in one 1965 essay, "lies the sweat and effort of boycotts, picketing, beatings, sit-ins, and mass demonstrations." He firmly believed that bringing people of different races and nationalities together would create a more compassionate world, where equality is a given and not merely a dream. These writings, which span decades, express Zinn’s steadfast belief that the people have the power to change the status quo, if they only work together and embrace the nearly forgotten American tradition of civil disobedience and revolution. In clear, compassionate, and present prose, Zinn gives us his thoughts on the Abolitionists, the march from Selma to Montgomery, John F. Kennedy, picketing, sit-ins, and, finally, the message he wanted to send to New York University students about race in a speech he delivered during the last week of his life.

Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights


Robin Bernstein - 2011
    As the idea of childhood innocence took hold, it became racialized: popular culture constructed white children as innocent and vulnerable while excluding black youth from these qualities. Actors, writers, and visual artists then began pairing white children with African American adults and children, thus transferring the quality of innocence to a variety of racial-political projects—a dynamic that Robin Bernstein calls “racial innocence.” This phenomenon informed racial formation from the mid-19th century through the early 20th century.Racial Innocence takes up a rich archive including books, toys, theatrical props, and domestic knickknacks which Bernstein analyzes as “scriptive things” that invite or prompt historically located practices while allowing for resistance and social improvisation. Integrating performance studies with literary and visual analysis, Bernstein offers singular readings of theatrical productions, from blackface minstrelsy to Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; literary works by Joel Chandler Harris, Harriet Wilson, and Frances Hodgson Burnett; material culture including Topsy pincushions, Uncle Tom and Little Eva handkerchiefs, and Raggedy Ann dolls; and visual texts ranging from fine portraiture to advertisements for lard substitute. Throughout, Bernstein shows how “innocence” gradually became the exclusive province of white children—until the Civil Rights Movement succeeded not only in legally desegregating public spaces, but in culturally desegregating the concept of childhood itself.Writing in Children’s Literature, Philip Nel notes that Racial Innocence is “one of those rare books that shifts the paradigm—a book that, in years to come, will be recognized as a landmark in children’s literature and childhood studies.” In the journal Cultural Studies, reviewer Aaron C. Thomas says that Bernstein’s “theory of the scriptive thing asks us to see children as active participants in culture, and, in fact, as expert agents of the culture of childhood into which they have been interpellated. In this way, Bernstein is able not only to describe the effects of 19th-century radicalization on 21st century US culture, but also to illuminate the radicalized residues of our own childhoods in our everyday adult lives.” Racial Innocence was awarded the 2012 Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and the award committee noted that the book “is a historiographic tour de force that traces a genealogy of the invention of the innocent (white) child and its racialized roots in 19th and 20th century U.S. popular culture.”

The Practice of Prophetic Imagination: Preaching an Emancipating Word


Walter Brueggemann - 2011
    Prophetic preaching takes its stand in a world claimed by a God who is gracious, uncompromisingand real. Brueggemann writes here for leaders in faith communities who bear the responsibility of preaching. He describes the discipline of a prophetic imagination, in an unflinchingly realistic, unwaveringly candid manner.

Fat Ladies in Spaaaaace: A Body-Positive Coloring Book


Nicole Lorenz - 2011
    This coloring book features eighteen fat scifi heroines doing what they do best: trekking across the time and space, blasting off into adventure, and saving the day.

Passport through Darkness: A True Story of Danger and Second Chances


Kimberly L. Smith - 2011
    Smith offers hope for readers who wonder if God is calling them to greater things. Passport through Darkness takes readers on Smith's journey to the deserts of Africa and the deserts of her own soul as she tries to live well as an imperfect American mom, crusade for justice for orphans around the world, and embrace God's extraordinary dreams for her. When Kimberly and her husband risk everything to answer God's call, they see God change and restore them even amid exhaustion, marital struggles, and physical limitations. This heartbreaking, heart lifting book is for anyone who longs to see God's redemptive power heal broken hearts, fill empty bellies, and shelter uncovered heads. It is a call to readers to take one more step on their journey to know God's heart. It is a guide from one ordinary person to another to finding a life that matters.

Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars


Sikivu Hutchinson - 2011
    They view atheism as "amoral," heresy, and race betrayal. Historically, the Black Church was a leading force in the fight for racial justice. Today, many black religious leaders have aligned themselves with the Religious Right. While black communities suffer economically, the Black Church is socially conservative on women's rights, abortion, same sex marriage, and church/state separation. These religious "values wars" have further solidified institutional sexism and homophobia in black communities. Yet, drawing on a rich tradition of African American free thought, a growing number of progressive African American non-believers are openly questioning black religious and social orthodoxies. Moral Combat provides a provocative analysis of the political and religious battle for America's soul. It examines the hijacking of civil rights by Christian fascism; the humanist imperative of feminism and social justice; the connection between K-12 education and humanism; and the insidious backlash of Tea Party-style religious fundamentalism against progressive social welfare public policy. Moral Combat also reveals how atheists of color are challenging the whiteness of "New Atheism" and its singular emphasis on science at the expense of social and economic justice. In Moral Combat, Sikivu Hutchinson highlights the cultural influence of African American humanist and atheist social thought in America. She places this tradition within the broader context of public morality and offers a far-reaching vision for critically conscious humanism

Black in Latin America


Henry Louis Gates Jr. - 2011
    While just over 11.0 million survived the arduous journey, only about 450,000 of them arrived in the United States. The rest--over ten and a half million--were taken to the Caribbean and Latin America. This astonishing fact changes our entire picture of the history of slavery in the Western hemisphere, and of its lasting cultural impact. These millions of Africans created new and vibrant cultures, magnificently compelling syntheses of various African, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish influences. Despite their great numbers, the cultural and social worlds that they created remain largely unknown to most Americans, except for certain popular, cross-over musical forms. So Henry Louis Gates, Jr. set out on a quest to discover how Latin Americans of African descent live now, and how the countries of their acknowledge-or deny--their African past; how the fact of race and African ancestry play themselves out in the multicultural worlds of the Caribbean and Latin America. Starting with the slave experience and extending to the present, Gates unveils the history of the African presence in six Latin American countries--Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, and Peru--through art, music, cuisine, dance, politics, and religion, but also the very palpable presence of anti-black racism that has sometimes sought to keep the black cultural presence from view.In Brazil, he delves behind the facade of Carnaval to discover how this "rainbow nation" is waking up to its legacy as the world's largest slave economy.In Cuba, he finds out how the culture, religion, politics and music of this island is inextricably linked to the huge amount of slave labor imported to produce its enormously profitable 19th century sugar industry, and how race and racism have fared since Fidel Castro's Communist revolution in 1959.In Haiti, he tells the story of the birth of the first-ever black republic, and finds out how the slaves's hard fought liberation over Napoleon Bonaparte's French Empire became a double-edged sword.In Mexico and Peru, he explores the almost unknown history of the significant numbers of black people--far greater than the number brought to the United States--brought to these countries as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the worlds of culture that their descendants have created in Vera Cruz on the Gulf of Mexico, the Costa Chica region on the Pacific, and in and around Lima, Peru.Professor Gates' journey becomes ours as we are introduced to the faces and voices of the descendants of the Africans who created these worlds. He shows both the similarities and distinctions between these cultures, and how the New World manifestations are rooted in, but distinct from, their African antecedents. Black in Latin America is the third installment of Gates's documentary trilogy on the Black Experience in Africa, the United States, and in Latin America. In America Behind the Color Line, Professor Gates examined the fortunes of the black population of modern-day America. In Wonders of the African World, he embarked upon a series of journeys to reveal the history of African culture. Now, he brings that quest full-circle in an effort to discover how Africa and Europe combined to create the vibrant cultures of Latin America, with a rich legacy of thoughtful, articulate subjects whose stories are astonishingly moving and irresistibly compelling.-from http://nyupress.org/books/9780814738184/

Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War


Leymah Gbowee - 2011
    As a young woman, Gbowee was broken by the Liberian civil war, a brutal conflict that tore apart her life and claimed the lives of countless relatives and friends. As a young mother trapped in a nightmare of domestic abuse, she found the courage to turn her bitterness into action, propelled by her realization that it is women who suffer most during conflicts--and that the power of women working together can create an unstoppable force. In 2003, the passionate and charismatic Gbowee helped organize and then led the Liberian Mass Action for Peace, a coalition of Christian and Muslim women who sat in public protest, confronting Liberia's ruthless president and rebel warlords, and even held a sex strike. With an army of women, Gbowee helped lead her nation to peace.--From publisher description.

Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice


Alia Malek - 2011
    by post-9/11 policies and actions. Among the narrators:Young men of Arab, Muslim, South Asian, and Middle Eastern descent, who were arrested and detained or singled out for voluntary interviews because of their national origin or religion.Scholars who have been blacklisted or subjected to interrogation for their research or writings on Islam and related topics.Muslim women who have suffered from job discrimination, harassment, and assault for wearing a veil or similar head covering.

The Trouble Ball


Martín Espada - 2011
    The loudspeakers boomed: Satchel Paige pitching for the Brujos      of Guayama. From the Negro Leagues he brought the gifts of Baltasar the King;      from a bench on the plaza he told the secrets of a thousand pitches: The Trouble Ball,      The Triple Curve, The Bat Dodger, The Midnight Creeper, The Slow Gin Fizz,      The Thoughtful Stuff. Pancho Coímbre hit rainmakers for the Leones of Ponce;      Satchel sat the outfielders in the grass to play poker, windmilled three pitches      to the plate, and Pancho spun around three times. He couldn't hit The Trouble Ball.

Who Is My Enemy?: Questions American Christians Must Face about Islam--And Themselves


Lee C. Camp - 2011
    On one hand is the notion that Christianity is superior to Islam and that Muslims are warmongers. On the other is the notion that all religions basically say the same thing and are peaceable. Theologian and critically acclaimed author Lee Camp argues that both these extremes are wrong. He introduces Christian and Islamic views on war and peacemaking and examines Christian and non-Christian terrorism to help readers confront their own prejudices. Camp shatters misconceptions about religious violence, arguing that American Christians often opt for an ethic that has more in common with the story of Muhammad than with the story of Jesus. This book shows readers how to respond faithfully and intelligently to Muslims in today's world as well as to the New Atheists who suppose that all religion is inherently violent. It provides balanced teaching on war and peacemaking, offering hope for reconciliation in a post-9/11 world.

Richmond's Unhealed History


Benjamin Campbell - 2011
    Campbell argues that the community of metropolitan Richmond is engaged in a decisive spiritual battle in the coming decade. He believes the city, more than any in the nation, has the potential for an unprecedented and historic achievement. Its citizens can redeem and fulfill the ideals of their ancestors, proving to the world that race and class can be conquered by the deliberate and prayerful intention of honest and dedicated citizens.

The Empowerment Manual: A Guide for Collaborative Groups


Starhawk - 2011
    These collaborative organizations have the unique potential to harness their members' ideals, passions, skills, and knowledge—if they can succeed in getting along together.The Empowerment Manual is a comprehensive manual for groups seeking to organize with shared power and bottom-up leadership to foster vision, trust, accountability, and responsibility. This desperately needed toolkit provides keys to:Understanding group dynamics Facilitating communication and collective decision-making Dealing effectively with difficult people.Drawing on four decades of experience, Starhawk shows how collaborative groups can generate the cooperation, efficacy, and commitment critical to success. Her extensive exploration of group process is woven together with the story of RootBound—a fictional ecovillage mired in conflict—and rounded out with a series of real-life case studies. The included exercises and facilitator toolbox show how to establish the necessary structures, ground rules, and healthy norms. The Empowerment Manual is required reading for anyone who wants to help their group avoid disagreement and disillusionment and become a wellspring of creativity and innovation.Starhawk is the author of eleven previous books including the award-winning Webs of Power. A highly influential voice for global justice and the environment, she is deeply committed to bringing the creative power of spirituality to political activism.

The Indispensable Zinn: The Essential Writings of the "People's Historian"


Howard Zinn - 2011
    Noted historian and activist Timothy Patrick McCarthy provides essential historical and biographical context for each selection.With an introduction from Zinn’s former Spellman College student and longtime friend Alice Walker and an afterword by Zinn’s friend and colleague Noam Chomsky, The Indispensable Zinn is both a fitting tribute to the legacy of a man whose “work changed the way millions of people saw the past” (Noam Chomsky) and a powerful and accessible introduction for anyone discovering Zinn for the first time.

African Sexualities: A Reader


Sylvia Tamale - 2011
    It uses research, life stories, and artistic expression—including essays, case studies, poetry, news clips, songs, fiction, memoirs, letters, interviews, short film scripts, and photographs—to examine dominant and deviant sexualities and investigate the intersections between sex, power, masculinities, and femininities. It also opens a space, particularly for young people, to think about African sexualities in different ways.

The Transition Companion: Making Your Community More Resilient in Uncertain Times


Rob Hopkins - 2011
    Since then, the Transition idea has gone viral across the globe, from Italian villages and Brazilian favelas to universities and London neighborhoods. In contrast to the ever-worsening stream of information about climate change, the economy, and resource depletion, Transition focuses on solutions, on community-scale responses, on meeting new people, and on having fun.The Transition Companion picks up the story today, drawing on the experience of one of the most fascinating experiments under way in the world. It tells inspiring tales of communities working for a future where local economies are valued and nurtured; where lower energy use is seen as a benefit; and where enterprise, creativity, and the building of resilience have become cornerstones of a new economy.The first part discusses where we are now in terms of resilience and vulnerability in the face of rising oil prices, climate change, and economic challenge. It presents a vision of the future if we do not address these issues, and how things might change if we start to do so. The book then looks in detail at the process a community in transition goes through, calling on the experience of those who have already embarked on this journey. These examples show how much can be achieved when people harness energy and imagination to create projects that will make their communities more resilient. The Transition Companion combines practical advice--the tools needed to start and maintain a Transition initiative--with numerous inspiring stories from local groups worldwide.

Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country


Cristina Rivera Garza - 2011
    Drawing together horror theory and historical analysis, she outlines how neoliberalism, corruption, and drug trafficking—culminating in the misnamed “war on drugs”—has shaped the political landscape on both sides of the border. Working from and against this context, Rivera Garza posits that collective grief is an act of resistance against state violence, and that writing is a powerful mode of seeking social justice and embodying resilience.She states: “As we write, as we work with language—the humblest and most powerful force available to us—we activate the potential of words, phrases, sentences. Writing as we grieve, grieving as we write: a practice able to create refuge from the open. Writing with others. Grieving like someone who takes refuge from the open. Grieving, which is always a radically different mode of writing.”

Blood on the Tracks: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson


S. Brian Willson - 2011
    Brian Willson became a radical, nonviolent peace protester and pacifist, and this memoir details the drastic governmental and social change he has spent his life fighting for. Chronicling his personal struggle with a government he believes to be unjust, Willson sheds light on the various incarnations of his protests of the U.S. government, including the refusal to pay taxes, public fasting, and, most famously, public obstruction. On September 1, 1987, Willson was run over by a U.S. government munitions train during a nonviolent blocking action in which he expected to be removed from the tracks. Providing a full look into the tragic event, Willson, who lost his legs in the incident, discusses how the subsequent publicity propelled his cause toward the national consciousness. Now, 23 years later, Willson tells his story of social injustice, nonviolent struggle, and the so-called American way of life.

Barefoot Church: Serving the Least in a Consumer Culture


Brandon Hatmaker - 2011
    Yet most don't know where to start.Drawing from his own journey, Brandon Hatmaker reminds us that serving the least is not a trendy act of benevolence but a lifestyle of authentic community and spiritual transformation. In Barefoot Church, he explains:Practical ideas for creating service-based, missional communitiesHow the organizational structure of a church can be created or restructured for mission in any contextHow any church can truly be a catalyst for individual, collective, and social renewalWhether you are a leader or a layperson, this book is meant to renew your passion for the church and inspire you to take your affections off yourself, place them on people who have nothing to offer you, and lead others to do the same.

Feminism FOR REAL: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism


Krysta WilliamsAshling Ligate - 2011
    actually being anti-racist). Confronting the sometimes uncomfortable questions feminism has made us ask about what’s going on FOR REAL paved the many paths that brought the contributors of this book together to share their sometimes uncomfortable truths, not just about feminism, but about who they are and where they are coming from.Against a backdrop exposing a 500+ year legacy of colonization and oppression, Feminism FOR REAL explores what has led us to the existence of “feminism”, who gets to decide what it is, and why. With stories that make the walls of academia come tumbling down, it deals head-on with the conflicts of what feminism means in theory as opposed to real life, the frustrations of trying to relate to definitions of feminism that never fit no matter how much you try to change yourself to fit them, and the anger of changing a system while being in the system yourself.

No Easy Choice: A Story of Disability, Parenthood, and Faith in an Age of Advanced Reproduction


Ellen Painter Dollar - 2011
    Her story brings to light the ethical dilemmas surrounding advanced reproductive technologies. What do procedures such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) say about how we define human worth? If we avoid such procedures, are we permitting the suffering of our children? How do we identify a good life in a consumer society that values appearance, success, health, and perfection?Dollar considers multiple sides of the debate, refusing to accept the matter as simply black and white. Her book will help parents who want to understand and make good decisions about assisted reproduction, as well as those who support and counsel them, including pastors and medical professionals.

NPR American Chronicles: Civil Rights


National Public Radio - 2011
    In this stirring collection, NPR tells stories large and small: of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and the March on Washington; of Pullman porters, an invaluable green book, and women who baked pies to support the Montgomery bus boycott. Personal recollections and historical accounts paint vivid pictures of individuals and events that transformed a nation.

Power, Resistance and Liberation in Therapy with Survivors of Trauma: To Have Our Hearts Broken


Taiwo Afuape - 2011
    It explores how power and resistance might be most effectively and ethically understood and utilised in clinical practice with survivors of trauma.Power, Resistance and Liberation in Therapy with Survivors of Trauma draws together narrative therapy, Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) and liberation psychology approaches. It critically reviews each approach and demonstrates what each contributes to the other as well as how to draw them together in a coherent way. The book presents:an original take on CMM through the lenses of power and resistance a new way of thinking about resistance in life and therapy, using the metaphor of creativity numerous case examples to support strong theory-practice links.Through the exploration of power, resistance and liberation in therapy, this book presents innovative ways of conceptualising these issues. As such it will be of interest to anyone in the mental health fields of therapy, counselling, social work or critical psychology, regardless of their preferred model. It will also appeal to those interested in a socio-political contextual analysis of complex human experience.

Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability


Jennifer Bartlett - 2011
    Crip Poetry. Disability Poetry. Poems with Disabilities. This is where poetry and disability intersect, overlap, collide and make peace."[BEAUTY IS A VERB] is going to be one of the defining collections of the 21st century...the discourse between ability, identity & poetry will never be the same." —Ron Silliman, author of In The American Tree"This powerful anthology succeeds at intimately showing...disability through the lenses of poetry. What emerges from the book as a whole is a stunningly diverse array of conceptions of self and other.”—Publishers Weekly, starred reviewFrom "Beauty and Variations" by Kenny Fries:How else can I quench this thirst? My lipstravel down your spine, drink the smoothnessof your skin. I am searching for the core:What is beautiful? Who decides? Can the lawsof nature be defied? Your body tells me: comeclose. But beauty distances even as it drawsme near. What does my body want from yours?My twisted legs around your neck. You bendme back. Even though you can't give the bonesat birth I wasn't given, I let you deep inside.You give me—what? Peeling back my skin, youexpose my missing bones. And my heart, longbefore you came, just as broken. I don't know whoto blame. So each night, naked on the bed, my bodydoesn't want repair, but longs for innocence. Ifinnocent, despite the flaws I wear, I am beautiful.Sheila Black is a poet and children's book writer. In 2012, Poet Laureate Philip Levine chose her as a recipient of the Witter Bynner Fellowship.Disability activist Jennifer Bartlett is a poet and critic with roots in the Language school.Michael Northen is a poet and the editor of Wordgathering: A Journal of Poetics and Disability.

Scapegoat: Why We Are Failing Disabled People


Katharine Quarmby - 2011
    Every few months there’s a shocking news story about the sustained, and often fatal, abuse of a disabled person. It’s easy to write off such cases as bullying that got out of hand, terrible criminal anomalies, or regrettable failures of the care system, but in fact they point to a more uncomfortable and fundamental truth about how our society treats its most unequal citizens. In Scapegoat, Katharine Quarmby looks behind the headlines to trace the history of disability and our discomfort with disabled people. She also charts the modern disability rights movement from the veterans of WW2 and Vietnam in the U.S. and UK to those who have fought for independent living and the end of segregation, as well as equal rights, for the last 20 years. Combining fascinating examples from history with tenacious investigation and powerful first person interviews, Scapegoat will change the way we think about disability—and about the changes we must make as a society to ensure that disabled people are seen as equal citizens, worthy of respect, not targets for taunting, torture, and attack.

Literacy and Justice Through Photography: A Classroom Guide


Wendy Ewald - 2011
    These field-tested projects invite students to create images representing their understanding of themselves and the world around them. The text includes classroom vignettes, project descriptions and lesson plans, and reflections and resources to help teachers explore important social and political topics with their students while also addressing standards across various disciplines and grade levels.Book features: Photography projects related to race, language, history, and body image. A framework for engaging students in essential social justice issues. A versatile model of arts integration in the social studies and literacy curriculum. Many examples of students' writings, photographs, and drawings. Step-by-step instructions to help teachers implement the projects.

UNFAIR: Why the "Christian" View of Gays Doesn't Work


John Shore - 2011
    Its concluding essay, "Taking God at His Word: The Bible and Homosexuality," is an original, comprehensive, and masterful argument for why using the Bible as the basis for condemning "unrepentant" gay people is not only untenable and unscriptural, it's immoral. If you read only one book on the subject of gay people and Christianity, make it UNFAIR.

More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States


Imani Perry - 2011
    One of two explanations is often given for this persistent phenomenon: On the one hand, we might be hypocritical saying one thing, and doing or believing another; on the other, it might have little to do with us individually but rather be inherent to the structure of American society.More Beautiful and More Terrible compels us to think beyond this insufficient dichotomy in order to see how racial inequality is perpetuated. Imani Perry asserts that the U.S. is in a new and distinct phase of racism that is post-intentional: neither based on the intentional discrimination of the past, nor drawing upon biological concepts of race. Drawing upon the insights and tools of critical race theory, social policy, law, sociology and cultural studies, she demonstrates how post-intentional racism works and maintains that it cannot be addressed solely through the kinds of structural solutions of the Left or the values arguments of the Right. Rather, the author identifies a place in the middle a space of righteous hope and articulates a notion of ethics and human agency that will allow us to expand and amplify that hope.To paraphrase James Baldwin, when talking about race, it is both more terrible than most think, but also more beautiful than most can imagine, with limitless and open-ended possibility. Perry leads readers down the path of imagining the possible and points to the way forward."

Disability in the Christian Tradition: A Reader


Brian Brock - 2011
    But never has one volume collected the most significant Christian writings on disability. This book fills that gap. Brian Brock and John Swinton's Disability in the Christian Tradition brings together for the first time key writings by thinkers from all periods of Christian history - including Augustine, Aquinas, Julian of Norwich, Luther, Calvin, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, Barth, Hauerwas, and more. Fourteen contemporary experts in theology and disability studies guide readers through each era or group of thinkers, offering clear commentary and highlighting important themes.

Down We Go: Living Into the Wild Ways of Jesus


Kathy Escobar - 2011
    It's based on the idea of living into the Beatitudes, and explores what it means to follow Jesus into the hard places of suffering, inequality, and injustice in order to cultivate, hope, beauty, justice, equality, generosity and healing. The dream of living out the upside-down ways of Jesus is in our hearts, but many don't know how to make "what could be" really be. We need practical, tangible ideas to make dreams reality. We need to hear how it can work, from people on the margins and practitioners living in the trenches. We need real stories of practice that will fan our hopes and dreams for justice, mercy, equality, and healing in the kingdom of God into flame. Down We Go fleshes out practicing the ways of Jesus in action, personally and through life in community. Endorsements "Page after page in Down We Go, I feel the crazy sanity of the kingdom of God seeping back into me. I'm so thankful for Kathy Escobar, the Refuge, the TransForm Network, and everyone who dares to switch directions and become more profane - in the holiest sense of the word." - Brian D. McLaren, author of Naked Spirituality and A New Kind of Christianity. "Kathy Escobar explores how to move from 'doing' ministry for others into creating sacred spaces where all can be a part of the Kingdom of God. Those desiring something beyond "comfy church" will find inspiration in Kathy's downwardly mobile journey" - Becky Garrison, author of Jesus Died For This? "Kathy Escobar leads us on a guided tour of the wild ways of Jesus. She is one of my favorite leaders. I hope to continue to learn from her example for years to come" - Jim Henderson, D. Min, Author of Jim and Casper Go To Church and The Resignation of Eve. "Kathy takes us down into the trenches where ordinary hurting people live and where we too need to live out our faith. Her personal faith journey from mega-church pastor to ministry with the destitute and marginalized is a compelling and convicting read." - Christine Sine, Author and Executive Director of Mustard Seed Associates.

Eco Amazons: 20 Women Who Are Transforming the World


Dorka Keehn - 2011
     Eco Amazons brings together the women leading the charge to create a sustainable future. They are individuals at the forefront of the global preservation movement, making a noticeable difference in all of our lives. Through intimate interviews conducted by journalist Dorka Keehn and arresting images by award-winning photographer Colin Finlay, Eco Amazons chronicles and illuminates the critical environmental issues of our time and shows how concern leads to passion, and how passion leads to action that can be emulated by all. While many of the leaders of the modern environmental movement have consistently been women, most of their names, struggles, and successes have yet to achieve national recognition. A generation ago, conservation held the spotlight; but because of these women, the beam is now shining equally on health and urban issues like clean air and safe drinking water. As the movement has expanded, women continue to spearhead change in new areas of environmental focus such as art, design, economics, and food production. With a forward by Julia Butterfly Hill—the internationally known activist who lived in a redwood tree affectionately know as “Luna” for 738 days—this seminal book brings to light the stories and lives of 20 American women making a difference. These eco-warriors include Majora Carter, who founded the environmental justice organization Sustainable South Bronx, which includes one of the nation’s first urban-farm training programs; Agnes Denes, a pioneer of the ecological art movement; Julia Bonds, a coal miner’s daughter and the director of Coal River Mountain Watch in the Appalachian Mountains who is fighting the highly destructive mining practice known as “mountaintop removal”; and Alice Waters, the chef and owner of the award-wining restaurant Chez Panisse, who has championed farmer’s markets and organic products.

News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media


Juan González - 2011
    From the earliest colonial newspapers to the Internet age, America s racial divisions have played a central role in the creation of the country s media system, just as the media has contributed to and every so often, combated racial oppression. News for All the People reveals how racial segregation distorted the information Americans received from the mainstream media. It unearths numerous examples of how publishers and broadcasters actually fomented racial violence and discrimination through their coverage. And it chronicles the influence federal media policies exerted in such conflicts. It depicts the struggle of Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American journalists who fought to create a vibrant yet little-known alternative, democratic press, and then, beginning in the 1970s, forced open the doors of the major media companies.The writing is fast-paced, story-driven, and replete with memorable portraits of individual journalists and media executives, both famous and obscure, heroes and villains. It weaves back and forth between the corporate and government leaders who built our segregated media system such as Herbert Hoover, whose Federal Radio Commission eagerly awarded a license to a notorious Ku Klux Klan organization in the nation s capital and those who rebelled against that system, like Pittsburgh Courier publisher Robert L. Vann, who led a remarkable national campaign to get the black-face comedy Amos n Andy off the air.Based on years of original archival research and up-to-the-minute reporting and written by two veteran journalists and leading advocates for a more inclusive and democratic media system, News for All the People should become the standard history of American media.

Parenting For Social Change Transform Childhood, Transform The World


Teresa Graham Brett - 2011
    In this compelling call for change, Teresa Graham Brett addresses the work parents must do to free themselves, the children who share their lives, and the world from these harmful messages. Using current research, she debunks the myth that controlling children is necessary to ensure that they grow into healthy and responsible adults. She also shares her own parenting journey away from controlling and dominating children and provides strategies for letting go of harmful control. Through her experiences as a social justice educator, she demonstrates how changing our parent-child relationships plays a critical role in creating social change.

My Uncle Martin's Words for America: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Niece Tells How He Made a Difference


Angela Farris Watkins - 2011
    Focusing on important words and phrases from his speeches, such as justice, freedom, and equality, Watkins uses King’s language to expose young readers to important events during the civil rights era. The simple yet striking text, along with a timeline and glossary, makes this book an accessible tool for helping a young audience learn about the importance of Martin Luther King Jr.’s message of nonviolence and his contributions to American history.

Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader


Katie Geneva Cannon - 2011
    With some classic essays and some contributions published here for the first time, each chapter in this new volume in the Library of Theological Ethics series presents analytical strategies for understanding the story of womanist scholarship in the service of the black community.The Library of Theological Ethics series focuses on what it means to think theologically and ethically. It presents a selection of important and otherwise unavailable texts in easily accessible form. Volumes in this series will enable sustained dialogue with predecessors though reflection on classic works in the field.

Sharp's Dictionary of Power and Struggle: Language of Civil Resistance in Conflicts


Gene Sharp - 2011
    plebeians' march out of Rome to gain improved status, to Gandhi's nonviolent campaigns in India, to the liberation of Poland and the Baltic nations, and the revolutions in North Africa, nonviolent struggles have played pivotal roles in world events for centuries. Sharp'sDictionary of Power and Struggle is a groundbreaking reference work on this topic by the godfather of nonviolent resistance. In nearly 1,000 entries, the Dictionary defines those ideologies, political systems, strategies, methods, and concepts that form the core of nonviolent action as it hasoccurred throughout history and across the globe, providing much-needed clarification of language that is often mired in confusion. Entries discuss everything from militarization to censorship, guerrilla theater, pacifism, secret agents, and protest songs. In addition, the dictionary features aforeword by Sir Adam Roberts, President of the British Academy; an introduction by Gene Sharp; an essay on power and realism; case studies of conflicts in Serbia and Tunisia; and a guide for further reading. Sharp's Dictionary of Power and Struggle is an invaluable resource for activists, educatorsand anyone else curious about nonviolent alternatives to both passivity and violent conflict.Gene Sharp is perhaps the most influential proponent of nonviolent action alive.--The ProgressiveSharp has had broad influence on international events over the past two decades, helping to advance a global democratic awakening.--The Wall Street Journal[Sharp's] work has served as the template for taking on authoritarian regimes from Burma to Belgrade.--The Christian Science Monitor

Divine Rebels: American Christian Activists for Social Justice


Deena Guzder - 2011
    They believe in a community based on ethics, a world with infinite potential for improvement, and an inclusive God of love. These rabble-rousers are small in number, and their efficacy is best measured on the margins, but they are part and parcel of an American tradition that began with the nation’s earliest Quaker abolitionists.By profiling social justice activists on the frontlines of the “Christian Left” since the 1960s, Divine Rebels articulates a forward-thinking, faith-based alternative to both the conservative drone warping religion as well as the political left’s alienating cynicism.

Empanada: A Lesbiana Story en Probaditas


Anel Flores - 2011
    Each bite of Empanada will take you on a journey through the heart of Paloma, a young lesbiana learning to maneuver her loving heart through a culture of judgment. This collection of vignettes is divided into three macroscopic sections: Food, Religion and Sex where personal, cultural and gender identity are in constant flux, but finally birth a new geographic space in Latina, Chicana, Mexican and Lesbian literature and lesbianidad.

This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement


Leslie G. Kelen - 2011
    Unlike images produced by photojournalists, who covered breaking news events, these photographers lived within the movement-primarily within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) framework-and documented its activities by focusing on the student activists and local people who together made it happen.The core of the book is a selection of 150 black-and-white photographs, representing the work of photographers Bob Adelman, George Ballis, Bob Fitch, Bob Fletcher, Matt Herron, David Prince, Herbert Randall, Maria Varela, and Tamio Wakayama. Images are grouped around four movement themes and convey SNCC's organizing strategies, resolve in the face of violence, impact on local and national politics, and influence on the nation's consciousness. The photographs and texts of This Light of Ours remind us that the movement was a battleground, that the battle was successfully fought by thousands of -ordinary- Americans among whom were the nation's courageous youth, and that the movement's moral vision and impact continue to shape our lives.

A Troubled Marriage: Domestic Violence and the Legal System


Leigh Goodmark - 2011
    But, Leigh Goodmark argues, the resulting system is deeply flawed in ways that prevent it from assisting many women subjected to abuse. The current legal response to domestic violence is excessively focused on physical violence; this narrow definition of abuse fails to provide protection from behaviors that are profoundly damaging, including psychological, economic, and reproductive abuse. The system uses mandatory policies that deny women subjected to abuse autonomy and agency, substituting the state's priorities for women's goals.A Troubled Marriage is a provocative exploration of how the legal system's response to domestic violence developed, why that response is flawed, and what we should do to change it. Goodmark argues for an anti-essentialist system, which would define abuse and allocate power in a manner attentive to the experiences, goals, needs and priorities of individual women. Theoretically rich yet conversational, A Troubled Marriage imagines a legal system based on anti-essentialist principles and suggests ways to look beyond the system to help women find justice and economic stability, engage men in the struggle to end abuse, and develop community accountability for abuse.

Moving Diversity Forward: How to Go from Well-Meaning to Well-Doing


Vernā Myers - 2011
    It is an instructive read for all of those who wish to live and work in a multi-cultural world where everyone has a fair chance to succeed and contribute." -- Frank P. Barron, Chief Legal Officer, Morgan Stanley

Tribal Peoples for Tomorrow's World


Stephen Corry - 2011
    It shapes world history and raises profound questions about what it really means to be human. This book explains who these peoples are, how they live, why governments hate them, and why their disappearance is far from inevitable.

Nicaragua: Surviving the Legacy of U.S. Policy: Sobreviviendo el Legado de la Política de los EE.UU.


Paul Dix - 2011
    government, under the banner of peace, freedom, and democracy, sponsored wars that blocked local efforts for change. Two decades later, the poor of Central America continue to experience the effects of these wars and to struggle for basic subsistence with little hope that their children will have schools, health care, or even adequate nutrition. Many U.S. citizens still do not recognize the role the U.S. government played in stopping these movements towards democracy.From early 1985 through mid 1990, Paul Dix used his camera to document the effects of the U.S.-funded Contra War on the poor of Nicaragua. In 2002, from the thousands he had photographed, Paul selected approximately 100 Nicaraguans for follow-up. He and Pam Fitzpatrick had amazing luck when they returned to Nicaragua on four separate trips for a total of seventeen months, and located nearly all of these individuals. They were able to share the earlier photos with family members, take new photographs and record testimonies.Paul and Pam shared this material in colleges across the U.S. for two academic years and have put their material into book form. Their bilingual book includes photos and testimonies from approximately thirty of the nearly one hundred Nicaraguans they re-contacted.

Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability


Alison Hope Alkon - 2011
    But many low-income neighborhoods and communities of color have been systematically deprived of access to healthy and sustainable food. These communities have been actively prevented from producing their own food and often live in "food deserts" where fast food is more common than fresh food. Cultivating Food Justice describes their efforts to envision and create environmentally sustainable and socially just alternatives to the food system.Bringing together insights from studies of environmental justice, sustainable agriculture, critical race theory, and food studies, Cultivating Food Justice highlights the ways race and class inequalities permeate the food system, from production to distribution to consumption. The studies offered in the book explore a range of important issues, including agricultural and land use policies that systematically disadvantage Native American, African American, Latino/a, and Asian American farmers and farmworkers; access problems in both urban and rural areas; efforts to create sustainable local food systems in low-income communities of color; and future directions for the food justice movement. These diverse accounts of the relationships among food, environmentalism, justice, race, and identity will help guide efforts to achieve a just and sustainable agriculture.

No More Enemies


Deb Reich - 2011
    This book aims to remedy that... leavening the shock with humor.Eminently readable, highly entertaining and full of hope, No More Enemies is a vibrant combination of real-life stories and speculative theory.This is definitely not your ordinary, everyday nonfiction experience. The nearly 200 micro-chapters come with evocative headings like "Demonizing people may feel good, but it's dumb"; "Breastfeeding without borders"; "The Einstein-Goldstein Fallacy"; "From Isaiah to Thich Nhat Hanh"; "What mattresses say"; "Being Reem's shabbos goy"; "A good-looking suit"; "If I were Herzl, I'd be smarter than Herzl." You can read the book sequentially from cover to cover, or you can sample what interests you, almost like reading a cookbook. These recipes, however, are all about redesigning our world to get along without the enemies paradigm before it kills us.Author Deb Reich nudges us gently but firmly toward the emergent post-enemies era, when we will look very differently at the neighbors we have been taught to hate and fear, and see instead... partners. Deb has done it herself, in Israel/Palestine, for many years. What is holding us back in our quest for reconciliation and justice is not the people, she says now; it's the paradigm. And we can redesign it, together: No More Enemies.

God vs. Gay?: The Religious Case for Equality


Jay Michaelson - 2011
    But not only that: Michaelson also shows that the vast majority of our shared religious traditions support the full equality and dignity of LGBT people. In this accessible, passionate, and provocative book, Michaelson argues for equality, not despite religion but because of it.

Don't Shoot: One Man, A Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America


David M. Kennedy - 2011
    In some neighborhoods in America, one out of every two hundred young black men is shot to death every year, and few initiatives of government and law enforcement have made much difference. But when David Kennedy, a self-taught and then-unknown criminologist, engineered the "Boston Miracle" in the mid-1990s, he pointed the way toward what few had imagined: a solution. Don't Shoot tells the story of Kennedy's long journey. Riding with beat cops, hanging with gang members, and stoop-sitting with grandmothers, Kennedy found that all parties misunderstood each other, caught in a spiral of racialized anger and distrust. He envisioned an approach in which everyone-gang members, cops, and community members-comes together in what is essentially a huge intervention. Offenders are told that the violence must stop, that even the cops want them to stay alive and out of prison, and that even their families support swift law enforcement if the violence continues. In city after city, the same miracle has followed: violence plummets, drug markets dry up, and the relationship between the police and the community is reset. This is a landmark book, chronicling a paradigm shift in how we address one of America's most shameful social problems. A riveting, page-turning read, it combines the street vérité of The Wire, the social science of Gang Leader for a Day, and the moral urgency and personal journey of Fist Stick Knife Gun. But unlike anybody else, Kennedy shows that there could be an end in sight.

Ear to the Ground: Writings on Class and Caste


K. Balagopal - 2011
    Civil rights work provided Balagopal the cause and context to engage with history, the public sphere and political change. He wrote through nearly three tumultuous decades: on encounter deaths; struggles of agricultural labourers; the shifting dynamics of class and caste in the 1980s and thereafter in Andhra Pradesh; the venality and tyranny of the Indian state; on the importance of re-figuring the caste order as one that denied the right of civil existence to vast numbers of its constituents; the centrality one ought to grant patriarchy in considerations of social injustice; and on the destructive logic of development that emerged in the India of the 1990s, dishonouring its citizens’ right to life, liberty and livelihood. This volume comprises essays—largely drawn from the Economic & Political Weekly—that deal with representations and practices of class power as they exist in tandem with state authority and caste identities. Inspired by naxalism in the late 1970s, intellectually indebted to D.D. Kosambi’s writings on Indian history and society, and politically and ethically attentive to the politics of feminist and dalit assertion in the 1990s, Balagopal refused dogma and shrill polemics just as he refused theory that did not heed the mess of history and practice. Kandala Balagopal (1952–2009),a mathematician by training, was associated with the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee for two decades. In 1998, he became one of the founder-members of Human Rights Forum in which he was active till his death.

Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction


Deborah Bird Rose - 2011
    In Wild Dog Dreaming, Deborah Bird Rose explores what constitutes an ethical relationship with nonhuman others in this era of loss. She asks, Who are we, as a species? How do we fit into the Earth's systems? Amidst so much change, how do we find our way into new stories to guide us? Rose explores these questions in the form of a dialogue between science and the humanities. Drawing on her conversations with Aboriginal people, for whom questions of extinction are up-close and very personal, Rose develops a mode of exposition that is dialogical, philosophical, and open-ended.An inspiration for Rose--and a touchstone throughout her book--is the endangered dingo of Australia. The dingo is not the first animal to face extinction, but its story is particularly disturbing because the threat to its future is being actively engineered by humans. The brazenness with which the dingo is being wiped out sheds valuable, and chilling, light on the likely fate of countless other animal and plant species."People save what they love," observed Michael Soule, the great conservation biologist. We must ask whether we, as humans, are capable of loving--and therefore capable of caring for--the animals and plants that are disappearing in a cascade of extinctions. Wild Dog Dreaming engages this question, and the result is a bold account of the entangled ethics of love, contingency, and desire.

War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America


Beth Linker - 2011
    soldiers stationed around the world and engaged in multiple conflicts, Americans will be forced for the foreseeable future to come to terms with those permanently disabled in battle. At the moment, we accept rehabilitation as the proper social and cultural response to the wounded, swiftly returning injured combatants to their civilian lives. But this was not always the case, as Beth Linker reveals in her provocative new book, War’s Waste.   Linker explains how, before entering World War I, the United States sought a way to avoid the enormous cost of providing injured soldiers with pensions, which it had done since the Revolutionary War. Emboldened by their faith in the new social and medical sciences, reformers pushed rehabilitation as a means to “rebuild” disabled soldiers, relieving the nation of a monetary burden and easing the decision to enter the Great War. Linker’s narrative moves from the professional development of orthopedic surgeons and physical therapists to the curative workshops, or hospital spaces where disabled soldiers learned how to repair automobiles as well as their own artificial limbs. The story culminates in the postwar establishment of the Veterans Administration, one of the greatest legacies to come out of the First World War.

Pedagogy of the Poor: Building the Movement to End Poverty


Willie Baptist - 2011
    Closely linked to the Poverty Initiative at Union Theological Seminary, this unique book combines the oral history of a renowned antipoverty organizer with an accessible introduction to relevant social theories, case studies, in-class student debates, and pedagogical reflections. This multilayered approach makes the book useful to both social activists committed to eradicating poverty and educators looking for ways to teach about the struggles for economic and social justice. Pedagogy of the Poor is an essential tool of self-education and leadership development for a broad social movement led by the poor to end poverty.Featuring a 5-part series of interviews with Willie Baptist, this important book examines:Firsthand examples of the poor organizing the poor over the past 3 decades. The effect of neoliberalism, high-tech capitalism, and the economic crisis on poverty. Theoretical lessons drawn from the Watts Uprising, Martin Luther Kin, Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign, and the National Union of the Homeless. The role of religion and morality in the antipoverty movement. The relevance of hegemony theory and ideology theory for social movements. Resources, methods, and practices for teaching social justice.

Rethinking Popular Culture and Media


Elizabeth A. MarshallLarry Steele - 2011
    It begins with the idea that the "popular" in classrooms and in the everyday lives of teachers and students is fundamentally political. This anthology includes outstanding articles by elementary and secondary public school teachers, scholars, and activists who examine how and what popular toys, books, films, music and other media "teach." These thoughtful essays offer strong critiques and practical teaching strategies for educators at every level.

Sylvia Pankhurst: The Rebellious Suffragette


Shirley Harrison - 2011
    Sylvia was the daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst and younger sister of Christabel. She was also the rebel in the family and stood alongside her married lover, Keir Hardie, when he formed the Labour Party. When he died, she started travelling – in Moscow, she reprimanded Lenin about his view of Communism, became lovers with an Italian revolutionary and bore his son when she was 45. She fought for Ethiopian independence and was given a state funeral after her death in 1960, in recognition of her importance to the Ethiopian cause. Fifty-four years later, a member of the House of Lords is campaigning for a statue of Sylvia Pankhurst to be erected opposite the Houses of Parliament, a long-deserved recognition of the importance of this rebellious Suffragette. Update of Shirley Harrison’s definitive study of the famous Suffragette, first published in 2004 but now with a new, original foreword by Sylvia Pankhurst’s son, Richard, updated text, interviews and all new images. Quotes and comments about Sylvia Pankhurst: * Emmeline Pankhurst – ‘that Scarlet woman’ * George Bernard Shaw – ‘queerest idiot genius of this age’ * Hitler had her on an arrest list for when he invaded Britain * Mussolini was watching her activities * Lenin – ‘Comrade Sylvia Pankhurst’s... wrong’ * Headline Daily Express, 1920 – ‘Sylvia’s World Revolution’ * Foreign Officer papers – ‘Sylvia Pankhurst is a blister’

Health Justice: An Argument from the Capabilities Approach


Sridhar Venkatapuram - 2011
    Yet the social dimensions of health are often obscured in public discussions due to the overwhelming focus in health policy on medical care, individual-level risk factor research, and changing individual behaviours. Likewise, in philosophical approaches to health and social justice, the debates have largely focused on rationing problems in health care and on personal responsibility. However, a range of events over the past two decades such as the study of modern famines, the global experience of HIV/AIDS, the international women’s health movement, and the flourishing of social epidemiological research have drawn attention to the robust relationship between health and broad social arrangements.In Health Justice, Sridhar Venkatapuram takes up the problem of identifying what claims individuals have in regard to their health in modern societies and the globalized world. Recognizing the social bases of health and longevity, Venkatapuram extends the ‘Capabilities Approach’ of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum into the domain of health and health sciences. In so doing, he formulates an inter-disciplinary argument that draws on the natural and social sciences as well as debates around social justice to argue for every human being’s moral entitlement to a capability to be healthy.An ambitious integration of the health sciences and the Capabilities Approach, Health Justice aims to provide a concrete ethical grounding for the human right to health, while advancing the field of health policy and placing health at the centre of social justice theory.

No Fear: A Whistleblower's Triumph Over Corruption and Retaliation at the EPA


Marsha Coleman-Adebayo - 2011
    The account illustrates how the author attempted to convince the government to investigate allegations surrounding a multinational corporation, suspecting that they were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of South Africans who were mining vanadium--a vital strategic mineral. Documenting Coleman-Adebayo's shocking discovery that the EPA itself was the first line of defense for the corporation in question, this record depicts how the agency stonewalled, prompting the author to expose them. The agency's brutal retaliation is captured in detail, revealing their use of every racist and sexist trick in their playbook, costing the protagonist her career, endangering her family, and sacrificing more lives in the vanadium mines of South Africa.Finishing on a hopeful note, the recollection concludes with the upwelling of support the author received from others in the federal bureaucracy, detailing how her subsequent grassroots struggle to protect future whistleblowers ended in victory.

Peace and Conflict Studies: A Reader


Charles Webel - 2011
    The text is divided into six general sections:PART I: Peace Studies, Peace Education, and PeacePART II: Peace Theories and Peace MovementsPART III: The Meanings and Nature of ConflictPART IV: Conflict Analysis, Transformation, and PreventionPART V: Nonviolent Action and Political Change.PART VI: Building Institutions and Cultures of PeaceWith an extensive introduction, as well as recommendations for further reading and questions for the classroom, Peace and Conflict Studies: A Reader will be essential reading for students, teachers, and practitioners of peace and conflict studies, and conflict resolution. It is also highly recommended for students of peace operations, peacebuilding, sociology, international security and IR in general.

Social Justice In Ancient Israel And In The Ancient Near East


Moshe Weinfeld - 2011
    Various aspects of this ideal concept are taken into consideration: philological, historical, sociological and theological. Moshe Weinfeld surveys social reforms in the ancient Near East from the third millennium BCE to the Hellenistic period. The first chapters discuss semantics and center in terms that denote social justice, such as social reforms embodied in the terms justice and righteousness and their equivalents in cognate languages. A separate chapter discusses the institutions of Shemitta and Jubilee in ancient Israel. A special discussion is dedicated to justice and righteousness on the individual level. Just as the ruler is commanded to do justice and righteousness - to free his subjects from oppression, so every individual is asked to help the poor and the needy in their distress, which is to do justice and righteousness with others.

The Cost of Community: Jesus, St. Francis and Life in the Kingdom


Jamie Arpin-Ricci - 2011
    . .So begins the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus' great message to everyone with ears to hear. St. Francis of Assisi heard its message and challenged the church and empire of his day by ordering his life around it--giving up his power, wealth and privileges; claiming the poor and powerful alike as his brothers and sisters; and loving Islamic neighbors even as his church and state waged war on them.Centuries later, Jamie Arpin-Ricci and his friends and neighbors in the new monastic community of Little Flowers in urban Winnipeg likewise heard Jesus' message and ordered their lives around it. This book is Jamie's field report, offering surprising insights about what life together in the spirit of Jesus' teachings offers us, and what it demands of us.The sermon still rings out today, offering perplexing encouragement and at times daunting challenges to us and our neighbors. Will you hear what Jesus has to say?

Darkening the Doorways: Black Trailblazers and Missed Opportunities in Unitarian Universalism


Mark D. Morrison-Reed - 2011
    On the other hand, it is a tale of idealism, courage, intrepid allies, dogged determination and steadfast loyalty in the face of rejection. The life stories and achievements of the African Americans you will discover in these pages are remarkable. Mark Morrison-Reed's collection of profiles and essays, supplemented by archival documents, revives their memory while pointing toward the evolving multicultural future.

False Justice: Eight Myths that Convict the Innocent


Jim Petro - 2011
    Now newly published in paperback with an extensive list of web links to wrongful conviction sources internationally, "False Justice "is ideal for use in a wide array of criminal justice and criminology courses.Myth 1: Everyone in prison claims innocence. In fact, guilt is usually clear and undisputed either because the criminal was caught in the act, left substantial evidence, or made the decision to take a plea. While taking a plea does not assure guilt, often a combination of the above reveals the soundness of the defendant s decision to plead rather than go to trial. Lauren McGarity, a mediator, conflict resolution expert, and educator who has worked with hundreds of Ohio inmates for ten years, dispelled this myth for us in "False Justice."Myth 2: Our system almost never convicts an innocent person. We mined and share the research and opinion of both conservatives and liberals, and we have concluded that the 311 persons exonerated of serious felonies to date, December 12, 2013, by DNA technology (which was first employed in criminal forensics in the U.S. in the late 1980s) must be the tip of the iceberg, a phrase commonly mentioned in our research. Following the Elkins experience, Nancy and I suspected a substantial number of innocent people in our prisons, but our research required that we frequently revise our thinking upward. Estimates have ranged from, conservatively, about one thousand to as many as tens of thousands of innocent people in American prisons today. We believe and research and logic suggest that our system convicts innocent persons far more frequently than most imagine and that most Americans, if more fully informed, would consider this a national travesty.Myth 3: Only the guilty confess. Stephen Boorn confessed to a murder in Manchester, Vermont, even though there was no trace of evidence, including a body. Boorn is not alone. "False Justice" explores what prompted Christopher Ochoa and others falsely accused of murder to incriminate themselves. We explore why the Miranda warning failed in these cases to provide intended protections.Myth 4: Wrongful conviction is the result of innocent human error. As chief legal officer of Ohio, I supervised a staff of 1,250, including 350 lawyers, who managed more than 35,000 active legal cases at a time. Yet I was totally unaware of the extent of wrongful criminal conviction, and was disappointed to learn that misconduct by police and prosecutors has contributed to many wrong verdicts. In the first edition of "False Justice" we noted that official misconduct was identified early as a contributor in DNA-proven wrongful convictions. Prosecutorial misconduct was a factor in thirty-three of the first seventy-four DNA exonerations (44.6 percent) and police misconduct was present in thirty-seven, or exactly half of those cases.3 Subsequent exonerations have supported the finding that official misconduct is a significant contributor to wrongful conviction. The National Registry of Exonerations reports at this writing (Dec. 14, 2013) 564 known cases of official misconduct both police and prosecutor and in some cases both in its universe of 1,262 exonerations, or in 44.6 percent of known exonerations since 1989.4 This book challenges thinking on what tactics should and should not be dismissed as "human error."Myth 5: An eyewitness is the best testimony. Mistaken eyewitness testimony, a contributor in 75 percent of wrongful convictions, was the prevailing contributor to wrongful conviction in the cases of Elkins, Green, Gillispie, and others included in the book. "False Justice" shares highlights of what we now know about memory and how this has shaped legislative and procedural reforms that will enable more accurate capture of eyewitness testimony.Myth 6: Conviction errors get corrected on appeal. The long, difficult, and expensive struggle to reverse a conviction is demonstrated in the Boorn, Elkins, Green, and Gillispie cases. Our appeals process addresses only certain errors that may have occurred in preparation of the case or in the courtroom. Post-conviction relief is difficult to attain in a system that properly seeks finality in the criminal process. The other route to correcting a conviction error is through new evidence, which, as indicated in Elkins and Gillispie, must meet specific requirements that are very difficult to achieve.Myth 7: It dishonors the victim to question a conviction. "False Justice" reveals that, contrary to a popular opinion, only a minority of convicted persons claim innocence and represent cases that are worthy of post-conviction DNA analysis. Prosecutors who oppose access to post-conviction DNA evidence, which could conclusively prove guilt or innocence, frequently claim that this would dishonor the victim. Public safety requires that we abandon this myth, or understand that by allowing the real perpetrators to escape justice, we contribute to an increase in crime and victims. How does "that" honor victims?Myth 8: If the justice system has problems, the pros will fix them. While most men and women who work in the criminal justice system are well meaning, committed, and deserving of our respect, they typically do not have the authority, resources, perspective, time, or inclination to change the system. "False Justice" recommends reforms achieved through legislation, policy, and court opinion. However, these will not occur with any urgency until conventional wisdom catches up with the truths revealed in this DNA age. Therefore, it will take us everyday American citizens not the pros, to accelerate this process. By abandoning myths and advocating reforms, we will not only reduce the destruction that comes with wrongful conviction but will also make the United States safer."

The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse


Marjorie Cohn - 2011
    Sleep deprivation. Sensory manipulation. Stress positions. Over the last several years, these and other methods of torture have become garden variety words for practically anyone who reads about current events in a newspaper or blog. We know exactly what they are, how to administer them, and, disturbingly, that they were secretly authorized by the Bush Administration in its efforts to extract information from people detained in its war on terror. What we lack, however, is a larger lens through which to view America's policy of torture -- one that dissects America's long relationship with interrogation and torture, which roots back to the 1950s and has been applied, mostly in secret, to "enemies," ever since. How did America come to embrace this practice so fully, and how was it justified from a moral, legal, and psychological perspective?The United States and Torture opens with a compelling preface by Sister Dianna Ortiz, who describes the unimaginable treatment she endured in Guatemala in 1987 at the hands of the the Guatemalan government, which was supported by the United States. Then a psychologist, a historian, a political scientist, a philosopher, a sociologist, two journalists, and eight lawyers offer one of the most comprehensive examinations of torture to date, beginning with the CIA during the Cold War era and ending with today's debate over accountability for torture.Ultimately, this gripping, interdisciplinary work details the complicity of the United States government in the torture and cruel treatment of prisoners both at home and abroad and discusses what can be done to hold those who set the torture policy accountable.Contributors: Marjorie Cohn, Richard Falk, Marc D. Falkoff, Terry Lynn Karl, John W. Lango, Jane Mayer, Alfred W. McCoy, Jeanne Mirer, Sister Dianna Ortiz, Jordan J. Paust, Bill Quigley, Michael Ratner, Thomas Ehrlich Reifer, Philippe Sands, Stephen Soldz, and Lance Tapley.

Adam's Gift: A Memoir of a Pastor's Calling to Defy the Church's Persecution of Lesbians and Gays


Jimmy Creech - 2011
    Adam said that he was gay, and that he was leaving The United Methodist Church, which had just pronounced that “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” could not be ordained. He would not be part of a community that excluded him. Creech found himself instinctively supporting Adam, telling him that he was sure that God loved and accepted him as he was. Adam’s Gift is Creech’s inspiring first-person account of how that conversation transformed his life and ministry.Adam’s visit prompted Creech to re-evaluate his belief that homosexuality was a sin, and to research the scriptural basis for the church’s position. He determined that the church was mistaken, that scriptural translations and interpretations had been botched and dangerously distorted. As a Christian, Creech came to believe that discriminating against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people was morally wrong. This understanding compelled him to perform same-gender commitment ceremonies, which conflicted with church directives. Creech was tried twice by The United Methodist Church, and, after the second trial, his ordination credentials were revoked. Adam’s Gift is a moving story and an important chapter in the unfinished struggle for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender civil and human rights.

Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding


Alexis Shotwell - 2011
    Similarly, one may know how to do certain things, like ride a bicycle, without being able to articulate in words what that knowledge is. These are examples of what Alexis Shotwell discusses in Knowing Otherwise as phenomena of "implicit understanding." Presenting a systematic analysis of this concept, she highlights how this kind of understanding may be used to ground positive political and social change, such as combating racism in its less overt and more deep-rooted forms.Shotwell begins by distinguishing four basic types of implicit understanding: nonpropositional, skill-based, or practical knowledge; embodied knowledge; potentially propositional knowledge; and affective knowledge. She then develops the notion of a racialized and gendered "common sense," drawing on Gramsci and critical race theorists, and clarifies the idea of embodied knowledge by showing how it operates in the realm of aesthetics. She also examines the role that both negative affects, like shame, and positive affects, like sympathy, can play in moving us away from racism and toward political solidarity and social justice. Finally, Shotwell looks at the politicized experience of one's body in feminist and transgender theories of liberation in order to elucidate the role of situated sensuous knowledge in bringing about social change and political transformation.

'They'll Cut Off Your Project': A Mingo County Chronicle


Huey Perry - 2011
    Huey Perry, a young, local history teacher was named the director of this program and soon he began to promote self-sufficiency among low-income and vulnerable populations. As the poor of Mingo County worked together to improve conditions, the local political infrastructure felt threatened by a shift in power. Bloody Mingo County, known for its violent labor movements, corrupt government, and the infamous Hatfield-McCoy rivalry, met Perry’s revolution with opposition and resistance.In They’ll Cut Off Your Project, Huey Perry reveals his efforts to help the poor of an Appalachian community challenge a local regime. He describes this community’s attempts to improve school programs and conditions, establish cooperative grocery stores to bypass inflated prices, and expose electoral fraud. Along the way, Perry unfolds the local authority’s hostile backlash to such change and the extreme measures that led to an eventual investigation by the FBI. They’ll Cut Off Your Project chronicles the triumphs and failures of the war on poverty, illustrating why and how a local government that purports to work for the public’s welfare cuts off a project for social reform.

The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964–1980


Annelise Orleck - 2011
    Conservatives deride the War on Poverty for corruption and the creation of “poverty pimps,” and even liberals carefully distance themselves from it. Examining the long War on Poverty from the 1960s onward, this book makes a controversial argument that the programs were in many ways a success, reducing poverty rates and weaving a social safety net that has proven as enduring as programs that came out of the New Deal.The War on Poverty also transformed American politics from the grass roots up, mobilizing poor people across the nation. Blacks in crumbling cities, rural whites in Appalachia, Cherokees in Oklahoma, Puerto Ricans in the Bronx, migrant Mexican farmworkers, and Chinese immigrants from New York to California built social programs based on Johnson’s vision of a greater, more just society. Contributors to this volume chronicle these vibrant and largely unknown histories while not shying away from the flaws and failings of the movement—including inadequate funding, co-optation by local political elites, and blindness to the reality that mothers and their children made up most of the poor.In the twenty-first century, when one in seven Americans receives food stamps and community health centers are the largest primary care system in the nation, the War on Poverty is as relevant as ever. This book helps us to understand the turbulent era out of which it emerged and why it remains so controversial to this day.

Shannen and the Dream for a School


Janet Wilson - 2011
    Nakogee Elementary are tired of attending class in portables that smell and don't keep out the cold winter air. They make a YouTube video describing the poor conditions, and their plea for a decent school attracts attention and support from community leaders and children across the country. Inspired, the students decide to turn their grade-eight class trip into a visit to Ottawa, to speak to the Canadian government. Once there, Shannen speaks passionately to the politicians about the need to give Native children the opportunity to succeed. The following summer, Shannen is nominated for the International Children's Peace Prize. Tragically, Shannen was killed in a car crash in 2010, and was not able to see the dream of her school fulfilled. Her family, friends and supporters continue to honor her memory as they work for equality for children in Native communities everywhere.