Antagonists, Advocates and Allies: The Wake-Up Call Guide for White Women Who Want to Become Allies With Black Women


Catrice M. Jackson - 2015
    This is your WAKE UP CALL; a dramatically sobering reality check to wake you up from the detrimental denial of your White Privilege. Antagonists, Advocates and Allies delivers uncomfortable truths and painful realities about the conscious and unintentional pain you have inflicted on Black women, women of color and shares how you must use your power to eliminate racism and stop the hypocrisy within the feminine movement. The “American Feminist” movement is exclusive; it was created by White women, for White women and it caters to White women. Racism and White Privilege, the bedrock of American feminism; must be aggressively broken down and rebuilt with deliberate inclusion and conscious honoring of Black women, women of color.Antagonists, Advocates and Allies boldly beckons White women to come from behind their White Picket Fence, enter the classroom of “Living While Black and Brown 101”, take a seat, don’t talk, listen and finally hear what you’ve failed to hear for centuries. The elimination of racism starts and ends with you. It’s time to roll up your sleeves and get to work.

Raising Our Hands


Jenna Arnold - 2020
    Yet, so many of us sit idly on the sidelines, opting out of raising our hands to do, learn, and engage in ways that could make a difference. Why?White American women are no monolith. Yet, as Women’s March national organizer Jenna Arnold has learned over the past few years criss-crossing the US in conversations with white women about their identity and role in the country, we do possess common characteristics—ones that get in the way of us becoming more engaged as citizens. We're so focused on checking off our to-do lists, or so afraid of getting it wrong, or so busy trying to avoid conflict, that we are actively avoiding the urgent conversations we need to have. We are confused about how we got here and unsure how to do better. Raising Our Hands is the reckoning cry for white women. It asks us to step up and join the new frontlines of the fight against complacency—in our homes, in our behaviors, and in our own minds.Consider Raising Our Hands your starting place, your “Intro to Being a White Woman in Today’s World” freshman-year class. In these pages, Arnold peels back the history that’s been kept out of textbooks and the cultural norms that are holding us back, so we can finally start really listening to marginalized voices and doing our part to promote progress.The American white woman is a powerful force—an essential participant—to mobilize alongside the rest of humanity on behalf of the world, and we can no longer make excuses for why we don’t have time or don’t know enough. Raising Our Hands provides the tools we need to be the full, productive participant the world has been waiting for.

Repeal the 8th


Una Mullally - 2018
    This anthology, a national bestseller, is the definitive collection of the writing and art inspired by the most pressing debate in contemporary Ireland, and beyond.· Between 1980 and 2015, at least 165,438 Irish women and girls accessed UK abortion services. In 2016, the figure was 3,265. · Any woman or girl who procures an abortion, or anyone who assists a woman to procure an abortion in Ireland can be criminalised and imprisoned for up to fourteen years. · A woman may not procure an abortion in Ireland if she is pregnant due to incest or rape, or to prevent inevitable miscarriage and fatal foetal abnormality.The movement to repeal the Eighth Amendment and make abortion legal in Ireland has grown massively over the last few years. This book shares the literature, personal stories, opinions, photography, art and design produced by the movement that catalysed 2018’s momentous referendum: it features prize-winning novelists, critically acclaimed poets, cutting-edge artists and journalists on the front line.Contributors include Lisa McInerney, Anne Enright, Louise O’Neill, Caitlin Moran, Tara Flynn, Aisling Bea, Sinead Gleeson and Emmet Kiran.

You're the Only One I've Told: The Stories Behind Abortion


Meera Shah - 2020
    Meera Shah, Chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood Hudson Peconic, what she did, she would tell them she was a doctor and leave it at that. But when she started to be direct about her work as an abortion provider an interesting thing started to happen: one by one, people would confide that they'd had an abortion themselves. The refrain was often the same: You're the only one I've told.  This book collects these stories as they've been told to Shah to humanize abortion and to combat myths that persist in the discourse that surrounds it. A wide range of ages, races, socioeconomic factors, and experiences shows that abortion always occurs in a unique context.   Today, a healthcare issue that's so precious and foundational to reproductive, social, and economic freedom for millions of people is exploited by politicians who lack understanding or compassion about the context in which abortion occurs. Stories have the power to break down stigmas and help us to empathize with those whose experiences are unlike our own.  A portion of proceeds will be donated to promote reproductive health access.

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.

Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980


Kimberly Springer - 2005
    Through original oral history interviews with key activists and analysis of previously unexamined organizational records, Kimberly Springer traces the emergence, life, and decline of several black feminist organizations: the Third World Women’s Alliance, Black Women Organized for Action, the National Black Feminist Organization, the National Alliance of Black Feminists, and the Combahee River Collective. The first of these to form was founded in 1968; all five were defunct by 1980. Springer demonstrates that these organizations led the way in articulating an activist vision formed by the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality.The organizations that Springer examines were the first to explicitly use feminist theory to further the work of previous black women’s organizations. As she describes, they emerged in response to marginalization in the civil rights and women’s movements, stereotyping in popular culture, and misrepresentation in public policy. Springer compares the organizations’ ideologies, goals, activities, memberships, leadership styles, finances, and communication strategies. Reflecting on the conflicts, lack of resources, and burnout that led to the demise of these groups, she considers the future of black feminist organizing, particularly at the national level. Living for the Revolution is an essential reference: it provides the history of a movement that influenced black feminist theory and civil rights activism for decades to come.

Period Power: A Manifesto for the Menstrual Movement


Nadya Okamoto - 2018
    They’re taboo. They’re embarrassing. They’re gross. And due to a crumbling or nonexistent national sex ed program, they are misunderstood. Because of these stigmas, a status quo has been established to exclude people who menstruate from the seat at the decision-making table, creating discriminations like the tampon tax, medicines that favor male biology, and more.Power to the Period aims to explain what menstruation is, shed light on the stigmas and resulting biases, and create a strategy to end the silence and prompt conversation about periods.

All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis


Ayana Elizabeth JohnsonCamille T Dungy - 2020
    While it's clear that women and girls are vital voices and agents of change for this planet, they are too often missing from the proverbial table. More than a problem of bias, it's a dynamic that sets us up for failure. To change everything, we need everyone.All We Can Save illuminates the expertise and insights of dozens of diverse women leading on climate in the United States--scientists, journalists, farmers, lawyers, teachers, activists, innovators, wonks, and designers, across generations, geographies, and race--and aims to advance a more representative, nuanced, and solution-oriented public conversation on the climate crisis. These women offer a spectrum of ideas and insights for how we can rapidly, radically reshape society.Intermixing essays with poetry and art, this book is both a balm and a guide for knowing and holding what has been done to the world, while bolstering our resolve never to give up on one another or our collective future. We must summon truth, courage, and solutions to turn away from the brink and toward life-giving possibility. Curated by two climate leaders, the book is a collection and celebration of visionaries who are leading us on a path toward all we can save. With essays and poems by: Emily Atkin • Xiye Bastida • Ellen Bass • Colette Pichon Battle • Jainey K. Bavishi • Janine Benyus • adrienne maree brown • Régine Clément • Abigail Dillen • Camille T. Dungy • Rhiana Gunn-Wright • Joy Harjo • Katharine Hayhoe • Mary Annaïse Heglar • Jane Hirshfield • Mary Anne Hitt • Ailish Hopper • Tara Houska, Zhaabowekwe • Emily N. Johnston • Joan Naviyuk Kane • Naomi Klein • Kate Knuth • Ada Limón • Louise Maher-Johnson • Kate Marvel • Gina McCarthy • Anne Haven McDonnell • Sarah Miller • Sherri Mitchell, Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset • Susanne C. Moser • Lynna Odel • Sharon Olds • Mary Oliver • Kate Orff • Jacqui Patterson • Leah Penniman • Catherine Pierce • Marge Piercy • Kendra Pierre-Louis • Varshini Prakash • Janisse Ray • Christine E. Nieves Rodriguez • Favianna Rodriguez • Cameron Russell • Ash Sanders • Judith D. Schwartz • Patricia Smith • Emily Stengel • Sarah Stillman • Leah Cardamore Stokes • Amanda Sturgeon • Maggie Thomas • Heather McTeer Toney • Alexandria Villaseñor • Alice Walker • Amy Westervelt • Jane Zelikova

Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women


Kate Manne - 2020
    Ranging widely across the culture, from Harvey Weinstein and the Brett Kavanaugh hearings to “Cat Person” and the political misfortunes of Elizabeth Warren, Manne’s book shows how privileged men’s sense of entitlement—to sex, yes, but more insidiously to admiration, care, bodily autonomy, knowledge, and power—is a pervasive social problem with often devastating consequences.In clear, lucid prose, Manne argues that male entitlement can explain a wide array of phenomena, from mansplaining and the undertreatment of women’s pain to mass shootings by incels and the seemingly intractable notion that women are “unelectable.” Moreover, Manne implicates each of us in toxic masculinity: It’s not just a product of a few bad actors; it’s something we all perpetuate, conditioned as we are by the social and cultural mores of our time. The only way to combat it, she says, is to expose the flaws in our default modes of thought while enabling women to take up space, say their piece, and muster resistance to the entitled attitudes of the men around them.With wit and intellectual fierceness, Manne sheds new light on gender and power and offers a vision of a world in which women are just as entitled as men to our collective care and concern.

Listen Up: Voices From the Next Feminist Generation


Barbara Findlen - 1995
    Exploring and revealing the lives of today's young feminists--the Third Wave--a collection of essays by thirty diverse members of the twenty-something generation covers a wide range of topics including racism, sex, identity, AIDS, revolution, and abortion.

Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness


Da’Shaun Harrison - 2021
    Foregrounding the state-sanctioned murder of Eric Garner in a historical analysis of the policing, disenfranchisement, and invisibilizing of fat Black men and trans and nonbinary AMAB people, Harrison discusses the pervasive, insidious ways that anti-fat anti-Blackness shows up in everyday life. Fat people can be legally fired in 49 states for being fat; they’re more likely to be houseless. Fat people die at higher rates from misdiagnosis or non-treatment; fat women are more likely to be sexually assaulted. And at the intersections of fatness, race, disability, and gender identity, these abuses are exacerbated.Taking on desirability politics, f*ckability, healthism, hyper-sexualization, invisibility, and the connections between anti-fatness and police violence, Harrison viscerally and vividly illustrates the myriad harms of anti-fat anti-Blackness–and offers strategies for dismantling denial, unlearning the cultural programming that says “fat is bad,” and moving beyond the world we have now toward one that makes space for the fat and Black.

What the Eyes Don't See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City


Mona Hanna-Attisha - 2018
    Mona Hanna-Attisha, alongside a team of researchers, parents, friends, and community leaders, discovered that the children of Flint, Michigan, were being exposed to lead in their tap water--and then battled her own government and a brutal backlash to expose that truth to the world. At the center of the story is Dr. Mona herself--an immigrant, doctor, scientist, and mother whose family's activist roots inspired her pursuit of justice.What the Eyes Don't See is a riveting account of a shameful disaster that became a tale of hope, the story of a city on the ropes that came together to fight for justice, self-determination, and the right to build a better world for their--and all of our--children.

Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History


Vron Ware - 1991
    A pioneering study of the political connections between black and white women which dissects the different meanings of femininity and womanhood and tries to overcome the moralism that so often infuses anti-racism.

Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America


Jennifer Harvey - 2018
    For white people who are committed to equity and justice, living in a nation that remains racially unjust and deeply segregated creates unique conundrums.These conundrums begin early in life and impact the racial development of white children in powerful ways. What can we do within our homes, communities and schools? Should we teach our children to be “colorblind”? Or, should we teach them to notice race? What roles do we want to equip them to play in addressing racism when they encounter it? What strategies will help our children learn to function well in a diverse nation?Talking about race means naming the reality of white privilege and hierarchy. How do we talk about race honestly, then, without making our children feel bad about being white? Most importantly, how do we do any of this in age-appropriate ways?While a great deal of public discussion exists in regard to the impact of race and racism on children of color, meaningful dialogue about and resources for understanding the impact of race on white children are woefully absent. Raising White Kids steps into that void.

Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls


Jessica McDiarmid - 2019
    The highway is known as the 'Highway of Tears', and it has come to symbolize a national crisis.Journalist, Jessica McDiarmid, investigates the devastating effect these tragedies have had on the families of the victims and their communities, and how systemic racism and indifference have created a climate where Indigenous women are over-policed, yet under-protected. Through interviews with those closest to the victims--mothers and fathers, siblings and friends--McDiarmid offers an intimate, first-hand account of their loss and relentless fight for justice. Examining the historically fraught social and cultural tensions between settlers and Indigenous peoples in the region, McDiarmid links these cases to others across Canada--now estimated to number up to 4,000--contextualizing them within a broader examination of the undervaluing of Indigenous lives in this country.Highway of Tears is a powerful story about our ongoing failure to provide justice for missing, and murdered, Indigenous women, and a testament to their families and communities' unwavering determination to find it.