Showing titles in Racism & Discrimination

The United States is becoming a nation of rich and poor, with few families in the middle. In this book, MIT economist Peter Temin offers an illuminating way to look at the vanishing middle class. Temin argues that American history and politics, particularly slavery and its aftermath, play an important part in the widening gap between rich and poor. Temin employs a well-known, simple model of a dual economy to examine the dynamics of the rich/poor divide in America.

In 1968, two young medical students, Steve Biko and Mamphela Ramphele, fell in love while dreaming of a life free from oppression and racial discrimination. Their love story is also the story of the founding of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) by a group of 15 principled and ambitious students at the University of Natal in Durban in the early 1970s.

Despite reform efforts that have grown in scope and intensity over the last two decades, the machine of American mass incarceration continues to flourish. In this powerful polemic, formerly incarcerated activist, essayist, and organizer Emile Suotonye DeWeaver argues that the root of the problem is white supremacy.

So what if it's true that Black women are mad as hell? They have the right to be. In the Black feminist tradition of Audre Lorde, Brittney Cooper reminds us that anger is a powerful source of energy that can give us the strength to keep on fighting. Far too often, Black women's anger has been caricatured into an ugly and destructive force that threatens the civility and social fabric of American democracy. But Cooper shows us that there is more to the story than that.

We need only scan the latest news headlines to see how bias and prejudice harm adults and children alike - every single day. Police shootings that give rise to the Black Lives Matter revolution, rampant sexual harassment of women and the subsequent #MeToo movement, and extreme violence toward trans men and women are just three examples.

First published in 1993, on the one-year anniversary of the Los Angeles riots, Race Matters became a national best seller that has gone on to sell more than half a million copies. This classic treatise on race contains Dr. West's most incisive essays on the issues relevant to black Americans, including the crisis in leadership in the Black community, Black conservatism, Black-Jewish relations, myths about Black sexuality, and the legacy of Malcolm X.

A prominent conservative scholar traces the post-1960s divisions between the Right and the Left, taking aim at liberals' victimization of African Americans and their failure to offer a viable way forward for American society. The United States today is hopelessly polarized; the political Right and Left have hardened into rigid and deeply antagonistic camps, preventing any sort of progress.

Habiburahman was born in 1979 and raised in a small village in western Burma. When he was three years old, the country’s military leader declared that his people, the Rohingya, were not a recognized ethnic group. Since 1982, millions of Rohingya have had to flee their homes as a result of extreme prejudice and persecution. Here, for the first time, a Rohingya speaks up to expose the truth behind this global humanitarian crisis. Through the eyes of a child, we learn about the historic persecution of the Rohingya people and witness the violence Habiburahman endured.

As a leader of the Black Lives Matter movement, Shaun King has become one of the most recognizable and powerful voices on the front lines of civil rights in our time. In Make Change, King offers an inspiring look at the moments that have shaped his life and considers the ways social movements can grow and evolve in this hyper-connected era. He shares stories from his efforts leading the Raise the Age campaign and his work fighting police brutality, while providing a road map for how to stay sane, safe, and motivated even in the worst of political climates.

A reckoning with the way we choose to see and define ourselves, Self-Portrait in Black and White is the searching story of one American family's multi-generational transformation from what is called black to what is assumed to be white. Thomas Chatterton Williams, the son of a 'black' father from the segregated South and a 'white' mother from the West, spent his whole life believing the dictum that a single drop of 'black blood' makes a person black.

It's about time we made motherhood more diverse.... When Candice fell pregnant and stepped into the motherhood playing field, she found her experience bore little resemblance to the glossy magazine photos of women in horizontal stripe tops and the pinned discussions on Mumsnet about what pushchair to buy. Leafing through the piles of prenatal paraphernalia, she found herself wondering: "Where are all the black mothers?".

Beginning with a sweetly funny, moving account of her arranged marriage, the author undercuts stereotypes and offers the refreshing view of an American life through Muslim eyes. In chapters leavened with humor, hope, and insight, she recounts an immigrant's daily struggles balancing assimilation with preserving heritage, overcoming religious barriers from within and distortions of Islam from without, and confronting issues of raising her children as Muslims - while they lobby for a Christmas tree!

In Making Monsters, David Livingstone Smith offers a poignant meditation on the philosophical and psychological roots of dehumanization. Drawing on harrowing accounts of lynchings, Smith establishes what dehumanization is and what it isn't. When we dehumanize our enemy, we hold two incongruous beliefs at the same time: We believe our enemy is at once subhuman and fully human.

In the midst of civil unrest in the summer of 2020 and following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, Elizabeth Alexander—one of the great literary voices of our time—turned a mother's eye to her sons’ and students’ generation and wrote a celebrated and moving reflection on the challenges facing young Black America.

In Revolutionary Power, Shalanda Baker arms those made most vulnerable by our current energy system with the tools they need to remake the system in the service of their humanity. She argues that people of color, poor people, and indigenous people must engage in the creation of the new energy system in order to upend the unequal power dynamics of the current system.

Abolitionism was the movement that strove to end slavery in the United States. The abolitionists saw slavery as a stain and an affliction on the United States and made it their goal to eradicate slave ownership. Abolitionists produced anti-slavery literature, sent petitions to Congress, and ran for political office.

But Where Are You Really From? is a thought-provoking book about identity from CEO of Christian Aid, Amanda Khozi Mukwashi. Through telling the story of her experience as a Christian black woman with Zambian heritage, born and living in the UK, she explores issues of race and culture and how it feels to be judged on skin colour when identity is made up of so many things.

Black Lives Matter began as a hashtag when Alicia Garza wrote what she calls 'a love letter to Black people' on Facebook. But hashtags don't build movements, she tells us. People do. Interwoven with Garza's experience of life as a Black woman, The Purpose of Power is the story of how she responded to the persistent message that Black lives are of less value than white lives by galvanising people to create change.

C. P. Ellis grew up in the poor white section of Durham, North Carolina, and as a young man joined the Ku Klux Klan. Ann Atwater, a single mother from the poor black part of town, quit her job as a household domestic to join the civil rights fight. During the 1960s, as the country struggled with the explosive issue of race, Atwater and Ellis met on opposite sides of the public school integration issue. Their encounters were charged with hatred and suspicion.

Today, 90 percent of psychiatric beds are located in jails and prisons across the United States, institutions that confine disproportionate numbers of African Americans. After more than a decade of research, the celebrated scholar and activist Mab Segrest locates the deep historical roots of this startling fact, turning her sights on a long-forgotten cauldron of racial ideology: the state mental asylum system in which psychiatry was born and whose influences extend into our troubled present.