Binding these essays together is Hong's theory of "minor feelings." As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity.Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and artmaking, and to family and female friendship in a search to both uncover and speak the truth.

    Systems of oppression thrive off our inability to make peace with difference and injure the relationship we have with our own bodies.The Body Is Not an Apology offers radical self-love as the balm to heal the wounds inflicted by these violent systems. World-renowned activist and poet Sonya Renee Taylor invites us to reconnect with the radical origins of our minds and bodies and celebrate our collective, enduring strength. As we awaken to our own indoctrinated body shame, we feel inspired to awaken others and to interrupt the systems that perpetuate body shame and oppression against all bodies. When we act from this truth on a global scale, we usher in the transformative opportunity of radical self-love, which is the opportunity for a more just, equitable, and compassionate world--for us all.

    Thus, she coined Trap Feminism, a contemporary framework that interrogates where feminism and hip-hop intersect.Notes from a Trap Feminist offers a new, inclusive feminism for the modern world. Weaving together searing personal essay and cultural commentary, Bowen interrogates sexism, fatphobia, and capitalism all within the context of race and hip-hop. In the process, she continues a Black feminist legacy of unmatched sheer determination and creative resilience.Bad bitches: this one’s for you.

    Yet she spent much of her life disassociated from her own body—a disconnection brought on by her father’s sexual abuse and her mother’s remoteness. “Because I did not, could not inhabit my body or the Earth,” she writes, “I could not feel or know their pain.”But Ensler is shocked out of her distance. While working in the Congo, she is shattered to encounter the horrific rape and violence inflicted on the women there. Soon after, she is diagnosed with uterine cancer, and through months of harrowing treatment, she is forced to become first and foremost a body—pricked, punctured, cut, scanned. It is then that all distance is erased. As she connects her own illness to the devastation of the earth, her life force to the resilience of humanity, she is finally, fully—and gratefully—joined to the body of the world.Unflinching, generous, and inspiring, Ensler calls on us all to embody our connection to and responsibility for the world.http://us.macmillan.com/inthebodyofth...

    Taking from their own experiences as a gender-nonconforming artist, they show us that gender is a malleable and creative form of expression. The only limit is your imagination.

    At an increasingly fraught time for immigrants and their families, Good Talk delves into the difficult conversations about race, sex, love, and family that seem to be unavoidable these days.Inspired by her popular BuzzFeed piece "37 Difficult Questions from My Mixed-Raced Son," here are Jacob's responses to her six-year-old, Zakir, who asks if the new president hates brown boys like him; uncomfortable relationship advice from her parents, who came to the United States from India one month into their arranged marriage; and the imaginary therapy sessions she has with celebrities from Bill Murray to Madonna. Jacob also investigates her own past, from her memories of being the only non-white fifth grader to win a Daughters of the American Revolution essay contest to how it felt to be a brown-skinned New Yorker on 9/11. As earnest and moving as they are sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, these are the stories that have formed one American life.

    Mumbai was rocked by a series of bomb blasts. Unknown to most, Dawood Ibrahim, the mastermind behind the terror attack, had made several calls to the CBI. The don was desperate to prove his ‘innocence’ by giving himself up, but with conditions. October 1999. The world’s very first case of cricket match-fixing led to the banning of six top Indian cricketers, including the then team captain. It was only in 2013, after the then commissioner of police revived the case, that a charge sheet was filed in a court of law. January 2002. Aftab Ansari-a notorious Dubai-based don responsible for kidnapping a shoe baron in 2001 with the help of Jihadi groups in Pakistan-was arrested just as he was about to escape Dubai on a forged passport to Pakistan.All these cases of life-threatening moments and unbelievable relief, involved the sharp investigative skills of an Indian Police Service officer then serving in the CBI. In his thirty-seven years of service, Neeraj Kumar neutralized several terror modules and decimated insidious organized crime syndicates spanning continents, working closely with Interpol, FBI, Scotland Yard and several national and international agencies. Much decorated and feted, he hung up his boots in 2013, after his last calling as Delhi’s police commissioner. He has now decided that the inside details of what have been some of the most fascinating crime stories of our times must not go unheard and untold.The book covers several high-profile cases cracked by him in recent years, including the arrest and deportation of Aftab Ansari, the main accused in the shooting at the American Center in Kolkata, the nabbing of Jagtar Singh Tara, the man behind Punjab CM Beant Singh’s assassination, and the arrest of Romesh Sharma, a Dawood henchman masquerading as a politician based in Delhi.

    And now, when it’s become undeniable that our societal norms are not merely unjust but, for too many Americans, deadly, when public anger is at an all-time high, who better than Yuknavitch to help us acknowledge this moment—in all its horror, absurdity, and pain? She does so here in a direct address to her rage.Letter to My Rage opens in a clinic where the author is waiting to be tested for COVID-19 antibodies. A sighting of the unmasked face of the president on the clinic TV makes her travel “beyond anger” to seethe at an administration ill-prepared to battle a pandemic or confront the racial and economic disparities that ensure vulnerability not just to disease but to a host of human brutalities. And she doesn’t stop there—she can’t. Throughout her life, rage, rather than destroying her, has transformed and compelled her. It was rage that forced her to claim her body: its blood, heat, and power; that ushered her into a world of ideas; and that would show her that where the political and the personal intersect, art flourishes, community and solidarity are found, and change begins. With the murder of George Floyd, her rage reaches an apotheosis. She joins the protests and asks that if men’s anger is frequently used to reinforce an unequal system—as in the grotesque spectacle of a white man’s knee on a Black man’s neck—how can women’s be used? How can her own? Can it be as constructive as it is destructive? Can it create something that was not there before and not just for her? As she sits in that waiting room, she knows the answer is in the body that’s contained her rage for so long, in her very blood; it can offer protection, fuel for others’ activism, a chance for a cure.This incendiary, cathartic account from one of our most fearless writers urges us to reassess and reclaim one of our most intense emotions during unrelentingly intense and troubling times.

    Laura Coates bleeds for justice on the page.” —Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award–winning author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an AntiracistWhen Laura Coates joined the Department of Justice as a prosecutor, she wanted to advocate for the most vulnerable among us. But she quickly realized that even with the best intentions, “the pursuit of justice creates injustice.” Through Coates’s experiences, we see that no matter how fair you try to fight, being Black, a woman, and a mother are identities often at odds in the justice system. She and her colleagues face seemingly impossible situations as they teeter between what is right and what is just. On the front lines of our legal system, Coates saw how Black communities are policed differently; Black cases are prosecuted differently; Black defendants are judged differently. How the court system seems to be the one place where minorities are overrepresented, an unrelenting parade of Black and Brown defendants in numbers that belie their percentage in the population and overfill American prisons. She also witnessed how others in the system either abused power or were abused by it—for example, when an undocumented witness was arrested by ICE, when a white colleague taught Coates how to unfairly interrogate a young Black defendant, or when a judge victim-blamed a young sexual assault survivor based on her courtroom attire. Through these revelatory and captivating scenes from the courtroom, Laura Coates explores the tension between the idealism of the law and the reality of working within the parameters of our flawed legal system, exposing the chasm between what is right and what is lawful.

    From a child to the National President of one the most notorious Motorcycle clubs in history. The best book of its genre.Once you start it you won't be able to put it down.

    One of the first black scholarship students recruited to Antioch College, a committed pacifist, and a civil rights activist, she was an avowed feminist—a graduate student determined to pursue her own career—when she met Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister insistent that his wife stay home with the children. But in love and devoted to shared Christian beliefs and racial justice goals, she married King, and events promptly thrust her into a maelstrom of history throughout which she was a strategic partner, a standard bearer, a marcher, a negotiator, and a crucial fundraiser in support of world-changing achievements.As a widow and single mother of four, while butting heads with the all-male African American leadership of the times, she championed gay rights and AIDS awareness, founded the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, lobbied for fifteen years to help pass a bill establishing the US national holiday in honor of her slain husband, and was a powerful international presence, serving as a UN ambassador and playing a key role in Nelson Mandela's election.Coretta’s is a love story, a family saga, and the memoir of an independent-minded black woman in twentieth-century America, a brave leader who stood committed, proud, forgiving, nonviolent, and hopeful in the face of terrorism and violent hatred every single day of her life.

    Bridging the world of spirit and activism, they urge a compassionate response to the systemic, state-sanctioned violence and oppression that has persisted against Black people since the slave era. With national attention focused on the recent killings of unarmed black citizens and the response of the Black-centered liberation groups such as Black Lives Matter, "Radical Dharma" demonstrates how social transformation and personal, spiritual liberation must be articulated and inextricably linked.Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens, and Jasmine Syedullah represent a new voice in American Buddhism. Offering their own histories and experiences as illustrations of the types of challenges facing dharma practitioners and teachers who are different from those of the past five decades, they ask how teachings that transcend color, class, and caste are hindered by discrimination and the dynamics of power, shame, and ignorance. Their illuminating argument goes beyond a demand for the equality and inclusion of diverse populations to advancing a new dharma that deconstructs rather than amplifies systems of suffering and prepares us to weigh the shortcomings not only of our own minds but also of our communities. They forge a path toward reconciliation and self-liberation that rests on radical honesty, a common ground where we can drop our need for perfection and propriety and speak as souls.In a society where profit rules, people's value is determined by the color of their skin, and many voices including queer voices are silenced, Radical Dharma recasts the concepts of engaged spirituality, social transformation, inclusiveness, and healing.

    But Cooper shows us that there is more to the story than that. Black women’s eloquent rage is what makes Serena Williams such a powerful tennis player. It’s what makes Beyoncé’s girl power anthems resonate so hard. It’s what makes Michelle Obama an icon.Eloquent rage keeps us all honest and accountable. It reminds women that they don’t have to settle for less. When Cooper learned of her grandmother's eloquent rage about love, sex, and marriage in an epic and hilarious front-porch confrontation, her life was changed. And it took another intervention, this time staged by one of her homegirls, to turn Brittney into the fierce feminist she is today. In Brittney Cooper’s world, neither mean girls nor fuckboys ever win. But homegirls emerge as heroes. This book argues that ultimately feminism, friendship, and faith in one's own superpowers are all we really need to turn things right side up again.

    Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage. Hartman narrates the story of this radical social transformation against the grain of the prevailing century-old argument about the crisis of the black family.In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship that were indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work.Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives recreates the experience of young urban black women who desired an existence qualitatively different than the one that had been scripted for them—domestic service, second-class citizenship, and respectable poverty—and whose intimate revolution was apprehended as crime and pathology. For the first time, young black women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives recovers their radical aspirations and insurgent desires.

    Drawing from this intimate knowledge of addiction and recovery, Mosley explores the deviances of contemporary America and describes a society in thrall to its own consumption. Although Americans live in the richest country on earth, many citizens exist on the brink of poverty, and from that profound economic inequality stems self-destructive behavior. In Twelve Steps to Political Revelation, Mosley outlines a guide to recovery from oppression. First we must identify the problems that surround us. Next we must actively work together to create a just, more holistic society. And finally, power must be returned to the embrace of the people. Challenging and original, Recovery confronts both self-understanding and how we define ourselves in relation to others.