The Racial Contract


Charles W. Mills - 1997
    Mills demonstrates how this peculiar and unacknowledged "contract" has shaped a system of global European domination: how it brings into existence "whites" and "non-whites," full persons and sub-persons, how it influences white moral theory and moral psychology; and how this system is imposed on non-whites through ideological conditioning and violence.The Racial Contract argues that the society we live in is a continuing white supremacist state. Holding up a mirror to mainstream philosophy, this provocative book explains the evolving outline of the racial contract from the time of the New World conquest and subsequent colonialism to the written slavery contract, to the "separate but equal" system of segregation in the United States. According to Mills, the contract has provided the theoretical architecture justifying an entire history of European atrocity against non-whites, from David Hume's and Immanuel Kant's claims that blacks had inferior cognitive power, to the Holocaust, to the kind of imperialism in Asia that was demonstrated by the Vietnam War. Mills suggests that the ghettoization of philosophical work on race is no accident. This work challenges the assumption that mainstream theory is itself raceless. Just as feminist theory has revealed orthodox political philosophy's invisible white male bias, Mills's explication of the racial contract exposes its racial underpinnings.

Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock In White Advantage


Daria Roithmayr - 2014
    Long after the passage of civil rights laws and now the inauguration of our first black president, blacks and Latinos possess barely a nickel of wealth for every dollar that whites have. Why have we made so little progress? Legal scholar Daria Roithmayr provocatively argues that racial inequality lives on because white advantage functions as a powerful self-reinforcing monopoly, reproducing itself automatically from generation to generation even in the absence of intentional discrimination. Drawing on work in antitrust law and a range of other disciplines, Roithmayr brilliantly compares the dynamics of white advantage to the unfair tactics of giants like AT&T and Microsoft. With penetrating insight, Roithmayr locates the engine of white monopoly in positive feedback loops that connect the dramatic disparity of Jim Crow to modern racial gaps in jobs, housing and education. Wealthy white neighborhoods fund public schools that then turn out wealthy white neighbors. Whites with lucrative jobs informally refer their friends, who refer their friends, and so on. Roithmayr concludes that racial inequality might now be locked in place, unless policymakers immediately take drastic steps to dismantle this oppressive system. Daria Roithmayr is the George T. and Harriet E. Pfleger Professor of Law at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. An internationally acclaimed legal scholar and activist, she is one of the country’s leading voices on the legal analysis of structural racial inequality. Prior to joining USC, Professor Roithmayr advised Senator Edward Kennedy on the nominations of Clarence Thomas and David Souter, and taught law at the University of Illinois.

Legacy: Trauma, Story and Indigenous Healing


Suzanne Methot - 2019
    According to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, these are a result of intergenerational trauma: the unresolved terror, anger, fear, and grief created in Indigenous communities by the painful experiences of colonialism, passed down from generation to generation.How are we to turn this desperate tide? With passionate argumentation and chillingly clear prose, author and educator Suzanne Methot uses her own and others' stories to trace the roots of colonial trauma and the mechanisms by which trauma has become intergenerational, and she explores the Indigenous ways of knowing that can lead us toward change.

Killing Rage: Ending Racism


bell hooks - 1995
    But whereas many women have been recognized for their writing on gender politics, the female voice has been all but locked out of the public discourse on race.Killing Rage speaks to this imbalance. These twenty-three essays are written from a black and feminist perspective, and they tackle the bitter difficulties of racism by envisioning a world without it. They address a spectrum of topics having to do with race and racism in the United States: psychological trauma among African Americans; friendship between black women and white women; anti-Semitism and racism; and internalized racism in movies and the media. And in the title essay, hooks writes about the "killing rage"—the fierce anger of black people stung by repeated instances of everyday racism—finding in that rage a healing source of love and strength and a catalyst for positive change.bell hooks is Distinguished Professor of English at City College of New York. She is the author of the memoir Bone Black as well as eleven other books. She lives in New York City.

Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression


Robin D.G. Kelley - 1990
    Hammer and Hoe documents the efforts of the Alabama Communist Party and its allies to secure racial, economic, and political reforms. Sensitive to the complexities of gender, race, culture and class without compromising the political narrative, Robin Kelley illustrates one of the most unique and least understood radical movements in American history.The Alabama Communist Party was built from scratch by working people who had no Euro-American radical political tradition. It was composed largely of poor blacks, most of whom were semiliterate and devoutly religious, but it also attracted a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, iconoclastic youth, and renegade liberals. Kelley shows that the cultural identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the development of the Party. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals.In the South race pervaded virtually every aspect of Communist activity. And because the Party's call for voting rights, racial equality, equal wages for women, and land for landless farmers represented a fundamental challenge to the society and economy of the South, it is not surprising that Party organizers faced a constant wave of violence.Kelley's analysis ranges broadly, examining such topics as the Party's challenge to black middle-class leadership; the social, ideological, and cultural roots of black working-class radicalism; Communist efforts to build alliances with Southern liberals; and the emergence of a left-wing, interracial youth movement. He closes with a discussion of the Alabama Communist Party's demise and its legacy for future civil rights activism.

Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party & the American Indian Movement


Ward Churchill - 1988
    Agents of Repression includes an incisive historical account of the FBI siege of Wounded Knee, and reveals the viciousness of COINTELPRO campaigns targeting the Black Liberation movement. The authors' new introduction examines the legacies of the Panthers and AIM, and shows how the FBI still presents a threat to those committed to fundamental social change.Ward Churchill is author of From a Native Son. Jim Vander Wall is co-author of The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States, with Ward Churchill.

Futures of Black Radicalism


Gaye Theresa Johnson - 2017
    Here, key scholarly voices from a wide array of disciplines recalls the powerful tradition of Black radicalism as it developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries while defining new directions for Black radical thought. In a time when activists in Ferguson, Palestine, Baltimore, and Hong Kong immediately make connections between their movements, this book makes clear that new Black radical politics are thoroughly internationalist and redraws the links between Black resistance and anti-capitalism. Featuring the key voices in the new intellectual wave of Black radical thinking, this collection outlines one of the most vibrant areas of thought today. With contributions from Cedric Robinson, Elizabeth Robinson, Steven Osuna, Nikhil Pal Singh, Damien Sojoyner, Francoise Verges, Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, Jordan T. Camp, Christina Heatherton, George Lipsitz, Greg Burris, Paul Ortiz, Darryl C. Thomas, Thulani Davis, Avery Gordon, Shana L. Redmond, Kwame M. Phillips, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, and Robin D. G. Kelley.

Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin


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

Five Days: The Fiery Reckoning of an American City


Wes Moore - 2020
    By the end of his trip in the police van, Gray was in a coma he would never recover from. In the wake of a long history of police abuse in Baltimore, this killing felt like a final straw--it lead to a week of protests and then five days described alternately as a riot or an uprising that set the entire city on edge, and caught the nation's attention.Wes Moore is one of Baltimore's most famous sons--a Rhodes Scholar, bestselling author, decorated combat veteran, White House fellow, and current President of the Robin Hood Foundation. While attending Gray's funeral, he saw every strata of the city come together: grieving mothers; members of the city's wealthy elite; activists; and the long-suffering citizens of Baltimore--all looking to comfort each other, but also looking for answers. Knowing that when they left the church, these factions would spread out to their own corners, but that the answers they were all looking for could only be found in the city as a whole, Moore--along with Pulitzer-winning coauthor Erica Green--is telling the multi-narrative story of the Baltimore uprising. Through both his own observations, and through the eyes of other Baltimoreans: Partee, a conflicted black captain of the Baltimore Police Department; Jenny, a young white public defender who's drawn into the violent center of the uprising herself; Tawanda, a young black woman who'd spent a lonely year protesting the killing of her own brother by police; and John DeAngelo, scion of the city's most powerful family and owner of the Baltimore Orioles, who has to make choices of conscience he'd never before confronted.Each shifting point of view contributes to an engrossing, cacophonous account of one of the most consequential moments in our recent history--but also an essential cri de coeur about the deeper causes of the violence and the small seeds of hope planted in its aftermath.

The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar


Paul Laurence Dunbar - 2008
    Illustrated with 10 unique illustrations.

12 Angry Men: True Stories of Being a Black Man in America Today


Gregory S. Parks - 2010
    From a Harvard law school student tackled by a security guard on the streets of Manhattan, a federal prosecutor detained while walking in his own neighborhood in Washington, DC, and a high school student in Colorado arrested for "loitering" in the subway station as he waits for the train home, to a bike rider in Austin, Texas, a professor at a Big Ten university in Iowa, and the head of the ACLU's racial profiling initiative (who was pursued by national guardsmen after arriving on the red-eye in Boston's Logan airport), here are true stories of law-abiding Americans who also happen to be black men (Publishers Weekly).Cumulatively, the effect is staggering, and will open the eyes of anyone who thinks we live in a "post-racial" or "colorblind" America."Powerful." --Jet"This is raw testimony intended to vividly capture the invasions of privacy and the assaults on dignity that always accompany unreasonable government intrusion." --Kirkus Reviews

Black Liberation and Socialism


Ahmed Shawki - 2005
    and much more—with essential lessons for today’s struggles.In the 40 years since the civil rights movement, many gains have been made—but there is still far to go to win genuine change. Here is a badly needed primer on the history and future of the struggle against racism.Ahmed Shawki is the editor of the International Socialist Review. A member of the National Writers Union, he is also a contributor to The Struggle for Palestine (Haymarket). He lives in Chicago, Illinois.

White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America


Margaret A. Hagerman - 2018
    In this heated context, sociologist Margaret A. Hagerman zeroes in on affluent, white kids to observe how they make sense of privilege, unequal educational opportunities, and police violence. In fascinating detail, Hagerman considers the role that they and their families play in the reproduction of racism and racial inequality in America.White Kids, based on two years of research involving in-depth interviews with white kids and their families, is a clear-eyed and sometimes shocking account of how white kids learn about race. In doing so, this book explores questions such as, "How do white kids learn about race when they grow up in families that do not talk openly about race or acknowledge its impact?" and "What about children growing up in families with parents who consider themselves to be 'anti-racist'?"Featuring the actual voices of young, affluent white kids and what they think about race, racism, inequality, and privilege, White Kids illuminates how white racial socialization is much more dynamic, complex, and varied than previously recognized. It is a process that stretches beyond white parents' explicit conversations with their white children and includes not only the choices parents make about neighborhoods, schools, peer groups, extracurricular activities, and media, but also the choices made by the kids themselves.By interviewing kids who are growing up in different racial contexts--from racially segregated to meaningfully integrated and from politically progressive to conservative--this important book documents key differences in the outcomes of white racial socialization across families. And by observing families in their everyday lives, this book explores the extent to which white families, even those with anti-racist intentions, reproduce and reinforce the forms of inequality they say they reject.

Devils Walking: Klan Murders Along the Mississippi in the 1960s


Stanley Nelson - 2016
    Outside his home and shoe shop, standing behind the shattered window, Klansmen tossed a lit match inside the store, now doused in gasoline, and instantly set the building ablaze. A shotgun pointed to Morris s head blocked his escape from the flames. Four days later Morris died, though he managed in his last hours to describe his attackers to the FBI. Frank Morris s death was one of several Klan murders that terrorized residents of northeast Louisiana and Mississippi, as the perpetrators continued to elude prosecution during this brutal era in American history.In Devils Walking: Klan Murders along the Mississippi in the 1960s, Pulitzer Prize finalist and journalist Stanley Nelson details his investigation alongside renewed FBI attention into these cold cases, as he uncovers the names of the Klan s key members as well as systemized corruption and coordinated deception by those charged with protecting all citizens.Devils Walking recounts the little-known facts and haunting stories that came to light from Nelson s hundreds of interviews with both witnesses and suspects. His research points to the development of a particularly virulent local faction of the Klan who used terror and violence to stop integration and end the advancement of civil rights. Secretly led by the savage and cunning factory worker Red Glover, these Klansmen a handpicked group that included local police officers and sheriff s deputies discarded Klan robes for civilian clothes and formed the underground Silver Dollar Group, carrying a silver dollar as a sign of unity. Their eight known victims, mostly African American men, ranged in age from nineteen to sixty-seven and included one Klansman seeking redemption for his past actions.Following the 2007 FBI reopening of unsolved civil rights era cases, Nelson s articles in the Concordia Sentinel prompted the first grand jury hearing for these crimes. By unmasking those responsible for these atrocities and giving a voice to the victims families, Devils Walking demonstrates the importance of confronting and addressing the traumatic legacy of racism."

The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea


Christopher J. Lebron - 2017
    Started in the wake of George Zimmerman's 2013 acquittal in the death of Trayvon Martin, the #BlackLivesMatter movement has become a powerful and incendiary campaign demanding redress for the brutal and unjustified treatment of black bodies by law enforcement in the United States. The movement is only a few years old, but as Christopher J. Lebron argues in this book, the sentiment behind it is not; the plea and demand that "Black Lives Matter" comes out of a much older and richer tradition arguing for the equal dignity-and not just equal rights-of black people. The Making of Black Lives Matter presents a condensed and accessible intellectual history that traces the genesis of the ideas that have built into the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Drawing on the work of revolutionary black public intellectuals, including Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, Anna Julia Cooper, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, and Martin Luther King Jr., Lebron clarifies what it means to assert that "Black Lives Matter" when faced with contemporary instances of anti-black law enforcement. He also illuminates the crucial difference between the problem signaled by the social media hashtag and how we think that we ought to address the problem. As Lebron states, police body cameras, or even the exhortation for civil rights mean nothing in the absence of equality and dignity. To upset dominant practices of abuse, oppression and disregard, we must reach instead for radical sensibility. Radical sensibility requires that we become cognizant of the history of black thought and activism in order to make sense of the emotions, demands, and argument of present-day activists and public thinkers. Only in this way can we truly embrace and pursue the idea of racial progress in America.