Book picks similar to
Compelled to Crime: The Gender Entrapment of Battered, Black Women by Beth E. Richie
race
mhp-black-feminism-syllabus
nonfiction
mhp-s-black-feminism-syllabus
Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice
Rupa Marya - 2021
The surge in inflammatory illnesses such as gastrointestinal disorders and asthma. Mass uprisings around the world in response to systemic racism and violence. Rising numbers of climate refugees. Our bodies, societies, and planet are inflamed.Boldly original, Inflamed takes us on a medical tour through the human body--our digestive, endocrine, circulatory, respiratory, reproductive, immune, and nervous systems. Unlike a traditional anatomy book, this groundbreaking work illuminates the hidden relationships between our biological systems and the profound injustices of our political and economic systems. Inflammation is connected to the food we eat, the air we breathe, and the diversity of the microbes living inside us, which regulate everything from our brain's development to our immune system's functioning. It's connected to the number of traumatic events we experienced as children and to the traumas endured by our ancestors. It's connected not only to access to health care but to the very models of health that physicians practice.Raj Patel, the renowned political economist and New York Times bestselling author of The Value of Nothing, teams up with the physician Rupa Marya to offer a radical new cure: the deep medicine of decolonization. Decolonizing heals what has been divided, reestablishing our relationships with the Earth and one another. Combining the latest scientific research and scholarship on globalization with the stories of Marya's work with patients in marginalized communities, activist passion, and the wisdom of Indigenous groups, Inflamed points the way toward a deep medicine that has the potential to heal not only our bodies, but the world.
Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance
Edgar Villanueva - 2018
Award-winning philanthropy executive Edgar Villanueva draws from the traditions from the Native way to prescribe the medicine for restoring balance and healing our divides.Though it seems counterintuitive, the philanthropic industry has evolved to mirror colonial structures and reproduces hierarchy, ultimately doing more harm than good. After 14 years in philanthropy, Edgar Villanueva has seen past the field's glamorous, altruistic facade, and into its shadows: the old boy networks, the savior complexes, and the internalized oppression among the "house slaves," and those select few people of color who gain access.All these funders reflect and perpetuate the same underlying dynamics that divide Us from Them and the haves from have-nots. In equal measure, he denounces the reproduction of systems of oppression while also advocating for an orientation towards justice to open the floodgates for a rising tide that lifts all boats. In the third and final section, Villanueva offers radical provocations to funders and outlines his Seven Steps for Healing.With great compassion--because the Native way is to bring the oppressor into the circle of healing--Villanueva is able to both diagnose the fatal flaws in philanthropy and provide thoughtful solutions to these systemic imbalances. Decolonizing Wealth is a timely and critical book that preaches for mutually assured liberation in which we are all inter-connected.
Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter
Jordan T. Camp - 2016
Now a star-studded, wide-ranging collection of writers and activists offers a global response, describing ongoing struggles over policing from New York to Ferguson to Los Angeles, as well as London, Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg, and Mexico City. This book, combining first-hand accounts from organizers with the research of eminent scholars and contributions by leading artists, traces the global rise of the "broken-windows" style of policing, first established in New York City under Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, a doctrine that has vastly increased and broadened police power and contributed to the contemporary crisis of policing that has been sparked by notorious incidents of police brutality and killings. With contributions from Black Lives Matter cofounder Patrisse Cullors, Ferguson activist and St. Louis University law professor Justin Hansford, scholars Vijay Prashad and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Pakistani writer and politician Hamid Khan, and many more.
Burn It Down!: Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution
Breanne Fahs - 2020
Organized thematically and with substantial introductions, this is a book for the activist, the student, the too-angry and the not-angry-enough.You'll find:"Dyke Manifesto" by the Lesbian Avengers"Mini-Manual of Individualist Anarchism" by Emile Armand"Intercourse" by Andrea Dworkin"Manifesto of the Erased" by Crystal ZaragozaThe "Ax Tampax Poem Feministo" from the Bloodsisters Project"Cyborg Manifesto" by Donna Haraway"TRASHGiRRRRLLLZZZ" by Elizabeth Broeder"The Manifesto of Apocalyptic Witchcraft" by Peter GreyThe manifesto, feminist scholar Breanne Fahs notes, is always "on unsteady ground," raging and wanting, desiring and disdaining, promoting solidarity or individual pain, all at once. As she notes, we need manifestos in all their urgent rawness and their insistence that we have to act now, that we must face this, that the bleeding edge of rage and defiance is where new ideas are born.
The Beast Side: Living (and Dying) While Black in America
D. Watkins - 2015
And then seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot by a wannabe cop in Florida; and then eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; and then Baltimore blew up; and then gunfire shattered a prayer meeting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Suddenly the entire country awakened to a stark fact: African Americans—particularly young black men—are an endangered species.Now the country’s urban war zone is brought powerfully to life by a rising young literary talent, D. Watkins. The author fought his way up on the east side (the “beast side”) of Baltimore, Maryland—or “Bodymore, Murderland,” as his friends call it—surviving murderous business rivals in the drug trade and equally predatory lawmen. Throughout it all, he pursued his education, earning a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University, while staying rooted in his community.When black residents of Baltimore finally decided they had had enough—after the brutal killing of twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray while in police custody—Watkins was on the streets when the city erupted. He writes about his bleeding hometown with the razor-sharp insights of someone who bleeds along with it. Here are true dispatches from the other side of America.
Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century
Barbara Ransby - 2018
. . how to make social change.”—Publishers Weekly The breadth and impact of Black Lives Matter in the United States has been extraordinary. Between 2012 and 2016, thousands of people marched, rallied, held vigils, and engaged in direct actions to protest and draw attention to state and vigilante violence against Black people. What began as outrage over the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin and the exoneration of his killer, and accelerated during the Ferguson uprising of 2014, has evolved into a resurgent Black Freedom Movement, which includes a network of more than fifty organizations working together under the rubric of the Movement for Black Lives coalition. Employing a range of creative tactics and embracing group-centered leadership models, these visionary young organizers, many of them women, and many of them queer, are not only calling for an end to police violence, but demanding racial justice, gender justice, and systemic change. In Making All Black Lives Matter, award-winning historian and longtime activist Barbara Ransby outlines the scope and genealogy of this movement, documenting its roots in Black feminist politics and situating it squarely in a Black radical tradition, one that is anticapitalist, internationalist, and focused on some of the most marginalized members of the Black community. From the perspective of a participant-observer, Ransby maps the movement, profiles many of its lesser-known leaders, measures its impact, outlines its challenges, and looks toward its future.
Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements
Charlene Carruthers - 2018
Her debut book upends mainstream ideas about race, class and gender and sets forth a radically inclusive path to collective liberation. Her inclusive story about Black struggle draws on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions including the Haitian Revolution, U.S. Civil Rights, and Black and LGBTQ Feminist Movements. Bold and honest, Unapologetic is an inside look from an on-the-ground activist and movement leader about how to move people from the margins to the center of political strategy and practice.
Feminist, Queer, Crip
Alison Kafer - 2013
Challenging the ways in which ideas about the future and time have been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, Kafer rejects the idea of disability as a pre-determined limit. She juxtaposes theories, movements, and identities such as environmental justice, reproductive justice, cyborg theory, transgender politics, and disability that are typically discussed in isolation and envisions new possibilities for crip futures and feminist/queer/crip alliances. This bold book goes against the grain of normalization and promotes a political framework for a more just world.
The Riot Grrrl Collection
Lisa Darms - 2013
Against the backdrop of the culture wars and before the rise of the Internet or desktop publishing, the zine and music culture of the Riot Grrrl movement empowered young women across the country to speak out against sexism and oppression, creating a powerful new force of liberation and unity within and outside of the women's movement. While feminist bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile fought for their place in a male-dominated punk scene, their members and fans developed an extensive DIY network of activism and support."The Riot Grrrl Collection" reproduces a sampling of the original zines, posters, and printed matter for the first time since their initial distribution in the 1980s and '90s, and includes an original essay by Johanna Fateman and an introduction by Lisa Darms.Lisa Darms is senior archivist at the Fales Library & Special Collections at New York University, where she has created the Fales Riot Grrrl Collection.Johanna Fateman is a writer, musician, record producer, and member of the post-punk band Le Tigre. She, along with Kathleen Hanna and several other key Riot Grrrls, recently donated her zines and early writings to the Fales.
A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America
Ernest Drucker - 2011
John Snow first traced an outbreak of cholera to a water pump in the Soho district of London in 1854, the field of epidemiology was born. Taking the same public health approaches and tools that have successfully tracked epidemics of flu, tuberculosis, and AIDS over the intervening one hundred and fifty years, Ernest Drucker makes the case that our current unprecedented level of imprisonment has become an epidemic—a plague upon our body politic.Drucker, an internationally recognized public health scholar and Soros Justice Fellow, spent twenty years treating drug addiction and another twenty studying AIDS in some of the poorest neighborhoods of the South Bronx and worldwide. Hecompares mass incarceration to other, well-recognized epidemics using basic public health concepts: “prevalence and incidence,” “outbreaks,” “contagion,” “transmission,” and “potential years of life lost.”He argues that imprisonment—originally conceived as a response to individuals’ crimes—has become mass incarceration: a destabilizing force that undermines the families and communities it targets, damaging the very social structures that prevent crime.Sure to provoke debate, this book shifts the paradigm of how we think about punishment by demonstrating that our unprecedented rates of incarceration have the contagious and self-perpetuating features of the plagues of previous centuries.
Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation
Kristin Kobes Du Mez - 2020
Challenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Donald Trump in fact represents the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values.Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping account of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, showing how American evangelicals have worked for decades to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism, or in the words of one modern chaplain, with “a spiritual badass.” As Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the role of culture in modern American evangelicalism. Many of today’s evangelicals may not be theologically astute, but they know their VeggieTales, they’ve read John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, and they learned about purity before they learned about sex—and they have a silver ring to prove it. Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions. And evangelical popular culture is teeming with muscular heroes—mythical warriors and rugged soldiers, men like Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, Mel Gibson, and the Duck Dynasty clan, who assert white masculine power in defense of “Christian America.” Chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done.Trump, in other words, is hardly the first flashy celebrity to capture evangelicals’ hearts and minds, nor is he the first strongman to promise evangelicals protection and power. Indeed, the values and viewpoints at the heart of white evangelicalism today—patriarchy, authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, fear of Islam, ambivalence toward #MeToo, and opposition to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community—are likely to persist long after Trump leaves office.A much-needed reexamination, Jesus and John Wayne explains why evangelicals have rallied behind the least-Christian president in American history and how they have transformed their faith in the process, with enduring consequences for all of us.
Cracking the Code: How to Win Hearts, Change Minds, and Restore America's Original Vision
Thom Hartmann - 2007
How did this happen? According to Air America radio host Thom Hartmann, the apologists of the Right have become masters of the subtle and largely subconscious aspects of political communication. It's not an escalation in Iraq, it's a surge; it's not the inheritance tax, it's the death tax; it's not drilling for oil, it's exploring for energy. Conservatives didn't intuit the path to persuasive messaging; they learned these techniques. There is no reason why progressives can't learn them too. In Cracking the Code, Hartmann shows you how. Drawing on his background as a psychotherapist and advertising executive as well as a national radio host, he breaks down the structure for effective communication, sharing exercises and examples for practical application.
Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism
Seyward Darby - 2020
Trump, journalist Seyward Darby went looking for the women of the so-called alt-right--really just white nationalism with a new label. The mainstream media depicted the alt-right as a bastion of angry white men, but was it? As women headlined resistance to the Trump administration's bigotry and sexism, most notably at the women's marches, Darby wanted to know why others were joining a movement espousing racism and anti-feminism. Who were these women, and what did their activism reveal about America's past, present, and future? Darby researched dozens of women across the country before settling on three: Corinna Olsen, Ayla Stewart, and Lana Lokteff. Each was born in 1979 and became a white nationalist in the post-9/11 era. Their respective stories of radicalization upend much of what we assume about women, politics, and political extremism.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Paulo Freire - 1968
The methodology of the late Paulo Freire has helped to empower countless impoverished and illiterate people throughout the world. Freire's work has taken on especial urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is increasingly accepted as the norm. With a substantive new introduction on Freire's life and the remarkable impact of this book by writer and Freire confidant and authority Donaldo Macedo, this anniversary edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed will inspire a new generation of educators, students, and general readers for years to come.
American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment
Shane Bauer - 2018
An award-winning investigative journalist, he used his real name; In American Prison, Bauer weaves a much deeper reckoning with his experiences together with a thoroughly researched history of for-profit prisons in America from their origins in the decades before the Civil War. For, as he soon realized, we can't understand the cruelty of our current system and its place in the larger story of mass incarceration without understanding where it came from. Private prisons became entrenched in the South as part of a systemic effort to keep the African-American labor force in place in the aftermath of slavery, and the echoes of these shameful origins are with us still.