Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s


Michael Omi - 1994
    This second edition builds upon and updates Omi and Winant's groundbreaking research. In addition to a preface to the new edition, the book provides a more detailed account of the theory of racial formation processes. It includes material on the historical development of race, the question of racism, race-class-gender interrelationships, and everyday life. A final chapter updates the developments in American racial politics up to the present, focusing on such key events as the 1992 Presidential election, the Los Angeles riots, and the Clinton administration's racial politics and policies."…required reading for scholars engaged in historical, sociological, and cultural studies of race. In the new edition, the authors further develop their provocative theory of 'racial formation' and extend their political analyses into the 1990s. They introduce the concept of 'racial project', linking race as representation with race as it is embedded in the social structure." -- Angela Y. Davis

The Authoritarian Personality


Theodor W. Adorno - 1950
    First published in 1951, it was greeted as a monumental study blazing new trails in the investigation of prejudice. As offshoots of ethnocentrism, anti-semitism and fascism cast new and dark shadows on the world, the topic again demands study and social action. The Authoritarian Personality remains an important document for our time.

You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience


Tarana Burke - 2021
    Brené Brown bring together a dynamic group of Black writers, organizers, artists, academics, and cultural figures to discuss the topics the two have dedicated their lives to understanding and teaching: vulnerability and shame resilience.Contributions by Kiese Laymon, Imani Perry, Laverne Cox, Jason Reynolds, Austin Channing Brown, and moreIt started as a text between two friends.Tarana Burke, founder of the 'me too.' Movement, texted researcher and writer Brené Brown to see if she was free to jump on a call. Brené assumed that Tarana wanted to talk about wallpaper. They had been trading home decorating inspiration boards in their last text conversation so Brené started scrolling to find her latest Pinterest pictures when the phone rang.But it was immediately clear to Brené that the conversation wasn't going to be about wallpaper. Tarana's hello was serious and she hesitated for a bit before saying, "Brené, you know your work affected me so deeply, but as a Black woman, I've sometimes had to feel like I have to contort myself to fit into some of your words. The core of it rings so true for me, but the application has been harder."Brené replied, "I'm so glad we're talking about this. It makes sense to me. Especially in terms of vulnerability. How do you take the armor off in a country where you're not physically or emotionally safe?"Long pause."That's why I'm calling," said Tarana. "What do you think about working together on a book about the Black experience with vulnerability and shame resilience?"There was no hesitation.Burke and Brown are the perfect pair to usher in this stark, potent collection of essays on Black shame and healing. Along with the anthology contributors, they create a space to recognize and process the trauma of white supremacy, a space to be vulnerable and affirm the fullness of Black love and Black life.

The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination


Sarah Schulman - 2012
    Schulman takes us back to her Lower East Side and brings it to life, filling these pages with vivid memories of her avant-garde queer friends and dramatically recreating the early years of the AIDS crisis as experienced by a political insider. Interweaving personal reminiscence with cogent analysis, Schulman details her experience as a witness to the loss of a generation’s imagination and the consequences of that loss.

White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America


Joan C. Williams - 2017
    Meanwhile, the professional elite—journalists, managers, and establishment politicians—is on the outside looking in, and left to argue over the reasons why. In White Working Class, Joan C. Williams, described as “something approaching rock star status” in her field by the New York Times, explains why so much of the elite’s analysis of the white working class is misguided, rooted in assumptions by what she has controversially coined “class cluelessness.”Williams explains how most analysts, and the corresponding media coverage, have conflated “working class” with “poor.” All too often, white working class motivations have been dismissed as simply racism or xenophobia. Williams explains how the term “working class” has been misapplied—it is, in fact, the elusive, purportedly disappearing middle class. This demographic often resents both the poor and the professionals. They don’t, however, tend to resent the truly rich, nor are they particularly bothered by income inequality. Their dream is not to join the upper middle class, with its different culture, but to stay true to their own values in their own communities—just with more money.White Working Class is a blunt, bracing narrative that sketches a nuanced portrait of millions of people throughout the world who have proven to be a potent political force. For anyone stunned by the rise in populist, nationalist movements, wondering why so many would seemingly vote against their own economic interests or simply feeling like a stranger in their own country, White Working Class will be a convincing primer on how to connect with a crucial set of workers—and voters.

The Political Determinants of Health


Daniel E. Dawes - 2020
    However, in a country of more than 325 million people, addressing everyone's issues is challenging. How can we effect beneficial change for everyone so we all can thrive? What is the great equalizer?In this book, Daniel E. Dawes argues that political determinants of health create the social drivers--including poor environmental conditions, inadequate transportation, unsafe neighborhoods, and lack of healthy food options--that affect all other dynamics of health. By understanding these determinants, their origins, and their impact on the equitable distribution of opportunities and resources, we will be better equipped to develop and implement actionable solutions to close the health gap.Dawes draws on his firsthand experience helping to shape major federal policies, including the Affordable Care Act, to describe the history of efforts to address the political determinants that have resulted in health inequities. Taking us further upstream to the underlying source of the causes of inequities, Dawes examines the political decisions that lead to our social conditions, makes the social determinants of health more accessible, and provides a playbook for how we can address them effectively. A thought-provoking and evocative account that considers both the policies we think of as health policy and those that we don't, The Political Determinants of Health provides a novel, multidisciplinary framework for addressing the systemic barriers preventing the United States from becoming the healthiest nation in the world.

Invisible Chains: Canada's Underground World of Human Trafficking


Benjamin Perrin - 2010
    A young woman was taken by slave traders from an African war zone to Edmonton to earn greater profits by exploiting her in prostitution. A gang called Wolfpack recruited teenagers in Quebec and sold them for sex to high-profile men in the community. The global problem of human trafficking is only beginning to be recognized in Canada, even though it has been hidden in plain sight. In Invisible Chains, Benjamin Perrin, an award-winning law professor and policy expert, exposes cases of human trafficking, recording in-depth interviews with people on the front lines—police officers, social workers, and the victims themselves—and bringing to light government records released under access-to-information laws.

The Tyranny of Metrics


Jerry Z. Muller - 2017
    But in our zeal to instill the evaluation process with scientific rigor, we've gone from measuring performance to fixating on measuring itself. The result is a tyranny of metrics that threatens the quality of our lives and most important institutions. In this timely and powerful book, Jerry Muller uncovers the damage our obsession with metrics is causing--and shows how we can begin to fix the problem.Filled with examples from education, medicine, business and finance, government, the police and military, and philanthropy and foreign aid, this brief and accessible book explains why the seemingly irresistible pressure to quantify performance distorts and distracts, whether by encouraging "gaming the stats" or "teaching to the test." That's because what can and does get measured is not always worth measuring, may not be what we really want to know, and may draw effort away from the things we care about. Along the way, we learn why paying for measured performance doesn't work, why surgical scorecards may increase deaths, and much more. But metrics can be good when used as a complement to--rather than a replacement for--judgment based on personal experience, and Muller also gives examples of when metrics have been beneficial.Complete with a checklist of when and how to use metrics, The Tyranny of Metrics is an essential corrective to a rarely questioned trend that increasingly affects us all.

A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life


Heather E. Heying - 2021
    They distill more than 20 years of research and first-hand accounts from the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth into straightforward principles and guidance for confronting our culture of hyper-novelty.For evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, the cause of our woes is clear: the modern world is out of sync with our ancient brains and bodies. We evolved to live in clans, but today most people don't even know their neighbors' names. Differences between the sexes once served a necessary evolutionary purpose, but today many dismiss the concept of biological sex as offensive. The cognitive dissonance spawned by trying to live in a society we're not built for is killing us.

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline


Darrell Bricker - 2019
    But a growing number of experts are sounding a different kind of alarm. Rather than growing exponentially, they argue, the global population is headed for a steep decline.Throughout history, depopulation was the product of catastrophe: ice ages, plagues, the collapse of civilizations. This time, however, we're thinning ourselves deliberately, by choosing to have fewer babies than we need to replace ourselves. In much of the developed and developing world, that decline is already underway, as urbanization, women's empowerment, and waning religiosity lead to smaller and smaller families. In Empty Planet, Ibbitson and Bricker travel from South Florida to Sao Paulo, Seoul to Nairobi, Brussels to Delhi to Beijing, drawing on a wealth of research and firsthand reporting to illustrate the dramatic consequences of this population decline--and to show us why the rest of the developing world will soon join in.They find that a smaller global population will bring with it a number of benefits: fewer workers will command higher wages; good jobs will prompt innovation; the environment will improve; the risk of famine will wane; and falling birthrates in the developing world will bring greater affluence and autonomy for women. But enormous disruption lies ahead, too. We can already see the effects in Europe and parts of Asia, as ageing populations and worker shortages weaken the economy and impose crippling demands on healthcare and social security. The United States is well-positioned to successfully navigate these coming demographic shifts--that is, unless growing isolationism and anti-immigrant backlash lead us to close ourselves off just as openness becomes more critical to our survival than ever before.Rigorously researched and deeply compelling, Empty Planet offers a vision of a future that we can no longer prevent--but one that we can shape, if we choose.

Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff


Fred Pearce - 2008
    Pearce deftly shows us the hidden worlds that sustain a Western lifestyle, and he does it by examining the sources of everything in his own life; as an ordinary citizen of the Western world, he, like all of us, is an "eco-sinner." In Confessions of an Eco-Sinner, Pearce surveys his home and then launches on a global tour to track down, among other things, the Tanzanians who grow and harvest his fair-trade coffee (which isn't as fair as one might hope), the Central American plantations that grow his daily banana (a treat that may disappear forever), the women in the Bangladeshi sweatshops who sew his jeans, the Chinese factory cities where the world's computers are made, and the African afterlife for old cell phones. It's a fascinating portrait, by turns sobering and hopeful, of the effects the world's more than 6 billion inhabitants-all eating, consuming, making-have on our planet, and of the working and living conditions of the people who produce most of these goods.

Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations


Amy Chua - 2018
    We need to belong to groups. In many parts of the world, the group identities that matter most - the ones that people will kill and die for - are ethnic, religious, sectarian, or clan-based. But because America tends to see the world in terms of nation-states engaged in great ideological battles - Capitalism vs. Communism, Democracy vs. Authoritarianism, the "Free World" vs. the "Axis of Evil" - we are often spectacularly blind to the power of tribal politics. Time and again this blindness has undermined American foreign policy.In the Vietnam War, viewing the conflict through Cold War blinders, we never saw that most of Vietnam's "capitalists" were members of the hated Chinese minority. Every pro-free-market move we made helped turn the Vietnamese people against us. In Iraq, we were stunningly dismissive of the hatred between that country's Sunnis and Shias. If we want to get our foreign policy right - so as to not be perpetually caught off guard and fighting unwinnable wars - the United States has to come to grips with political tribalism abroad.Just as Washington's foreign policy establishment has been blind to the power of tribal politics outside the country, so too have American political elites been oblivious to the group identities that matter most to ordinary Americans - and that are tearing the United States apart. As the stunning rise of Donald Trump laid bare, identity politics have seized both the American left and right in an especially dangerous, racially inflected way. In America today, every group feels threatened: whites and blacks, Latinos and Asians, men and women, liberals and conservatives, and so on. There is a pervasive sense of collective persecution and discrimination. On the left, this has given rise to increasingly radical and exclusionary rhetoric of privilege and cultural appropriation. On the right, it has fueled a disturbing rise in xenophobia and white nationalism.In characteristically persuasive style, Amy Chua argues that America must rediscover a national identity that transcends our political tribes. Enough false slogans of unity, which are just another form of divisiveness. It is time for a more difficult unity that acknowledges the reality of group differences and fights the deep inequities that divide us.

Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America


Saidiya Hartman - 1997
    Scenes of Subjection examines the forms of domination that usually go undetected; in particular, the encroachments of power that take place through notions of humanity, enjoyment, protection, rights, and consent. By looking at slave narratives, plantation diaries, popular theater, slave performance, freedmen's primers, and legal cases, Hartman investigates a wide variety of "scenes" ranging from the auction block and minstrel show to the staging of the self-possessed and rights-bearing individual of freedom.While attentive to the performance of power--the terrible spectacles of slaveholders' dominion and the innocent amusements designed to abase and pacify the enslaved--and the entanglements of pleasure and terror in these displays of mastery, Hartman also examines the possibilities for resistance, redress and transformation embodied in black performance and everyday practice.This important study contends that despite the legal abolition of slavery, emergent notions of individual will and responsibility revealed the tragic continuities between slavery and freedom. Bold and persuasively argued, Scenes of Subjection will engage readers in a broad range of historical, literary, and cultural studies.

Negroland


Margo Jefferson - 2015
      Born in upper-crust black Chicago—her father was for years head of pediatrics at Provident, at the time the nation’s oldest black hospital; her mother was a socialite—Margo Jefferson has spent most of her life among (call them what you will) the colored aristocracy, the colored elite, the blue-vein society. Since the nineteenth century they have stood apart, these inhabitants of Negroland, “a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty.”   Reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments—the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of postracial America—Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions. Aware as it is of heart-wrenching despair and depression, this book is a triumphant paean to the grace of perseverance.

Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era


Michael S. Kimmel - 2013
    On election night, after Obama was announced the winner, a distressed Bill O’Reilly lamented that he didn’t live in "a traditional America anymore.” He was joined by others who bellowed their grief on the talk radio airwaves, the traditional redoubt of angry white men. Why were they so angry? Sociologist Michael Kimmel, one of the leading writers on men and masculinity in the world today, has spent hundreds of hours in the company of America’s angry white men from white supremacists to men's rights activists to young students in pursuit of an answer. Angry White Men presents a comprehensive diagnosis of their fears, anxieties, and rage.Kimmel locates this increase in anger in the seismic economic, social and political shifts that have so transformed the American landscape. Downward mobility, increased racial and gender equality, and a tenacious clinging to an anachronistic ideology of masculinity has left many men feeling betrayed and bewildered. Raised to expect unparalleled social and economic privilege, white men are suffering today from what Kimmel calls "aggrieved entitlement": a sense that those benefits that white men believed were their due have been snatched away from them.Angry White Men discusses, among others, the sons of small town America, scarred by underemployment and wage stagnation. When America’s white men feel they’ve lived their lives the 'right' way, worked hard and stayed out of trouble, and still do not get economic rewards, then they have to blame somebody else. Even more terrifying is the phenomenon of angry young boys. School shootings in the United States are not just the work of "misguided youth" or "troubled teens"—they’re all committed by boys. These alienated young men are transformed into mass murderers by a sense that using violence against others is their right.The future of America is more inclusive and diverse. The choice for angry white men is not whether or not they can stem the tide of history: they cannot. Their choice is whether or not they will be dragged kicking and screaming into that inevitable future, or whether they will walk openly and honorably—far happier and healthier, incidentally—alongside those they’ve spent so long trying to exclude.