Racial Justice
Showing 1–32 of 38 results
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King of the North
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South$30.99A Ms. Magazine Most Anticipated Book
From the New York Times bestselling author, a radical reframing of the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr.
“Theoharis shows us through penetrating research and sensitive, scholarly insight that Dr. King not only was keenly aware of the history of antiblack racism in the North, but battled it from the very beginning of his career.” —Henry Louis Gates Jr.The Martin Luther King Jr. of popular memory vanquished Jim Crow in the South. But in this myth-shattering book, award-winning and New York Times bestselling historian Jeanne Theoharis argues that King’s time in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—outside Dixie—was at the heart of his campaign for racial justice. King of the North follows King as he crisscrosses the country from the Northeast to the West Coast, challenging school segregation, police brutality, housing segregation, and job discrimination. For these efforts, he was relentlessly attacked by white liberals, the media, and the federal government.
In this bold retelling, King emerges as a someone who not only led a movement but who showed up for other people’s struggles; a charismatic speaker who also listened and learned; a Black man who experienced police brutality; a minister who lived with and organized alongside the poor; and a husband who—despite his flaws—depended on Coretta Scott King as an intellectual and political guide in the national fight against racism, poverty, and war.
King of the North speaks directly to our struggles over racial inequality today. Just as she restored Rosa Parks’s central place in modern American history, so Theoharis radically expands our understanding of King’s life and work—a vision of justice unfulfilled in the present.
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The Miracle of the Black Leg
Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law$29.99Brilliant essays from the renowned Nation columnist—aka the Mad Law Professor—tackling questions of identity, bioethics, race, surveillance, and more
Beginning with a jaw-dropping rumination on a centuries-old painting featuring a white man with a Black man’s leg surgically attached (with the expired Black leg-donor in the foreground), contracts law scholar and celebrated journalist Patricia J. Williams uses the lens of the law to take on core questions of identity, ethics, and race.
With her trademark elegant prose and critical legal studies wisdom, Williams brings to bear a keen analytic eye and a lawyer’s training to chapters exploring the ways we have legislated the ownership of everything from body parts to gene sequences—and the particular ways in which our laws in these areas isolate nonnormative looks, minority cultures, and out-of-the-box thinkers.
At the heart of “Wrongful Birth” is a lawsuit in which a white couple who use a sperm bank sue when their child “comes out Black”; “Bodies in Law” explores the service of genetic ancestry testing companies to answer the question of who owns DNA. And “Hot Cheeto Girl” examines the way that algorithms give rise to new predictive categories of human assortment, layered with market-inflected cages of assigned destiny.
In the spirit of Dorothy Roberts, Rebecca Skloot, and Anne Fadiman, The Miracle of the Black Leg offers a brilliant meditation on the tricky place where law, science, ethics, and cultural slippage collide.
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An End to Inequality
Breaking Down the Walls of Apartheid Education in America$25.99An eloquent and passionate call for educational reparations, from the New York Times bestselling author
When Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age appeared in 1967, it rocked the education world. Based on the Rhodes Scholar’s first year of teaching in Boston’s Black community, the book described the abuse and neglect of children for no reason but the color of their skin. Since that National Book Award–winning volume, Kozol has spent more than fifty years visiting with children and working with their teachers in other deeply troubled and unequal public schools.
Now, in the culminating work of his career, Kozol goes back into the urban schools, where racial isolation is at the highest level since he became a teacher and is now compounded by a new regime of punitive instruction and coercive uniformity that is deemed to be appropriate for children who are said to be incapable of learning in more democratic ways, like children in more privileged communities.
Kozol believes it’s well past time to batter down the walls between two separate worlds of education and to make good, at long last, on the “promissory note” that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. Sure to resonate with current-day arguments for reparations in a broad array of areas, this is a book that points us to a future in which children learn together, across the lines of class and race, in schools where every child is accorded a full and equal share of the riches in this wealthiest of nations.
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How We Win the Civil War
Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good$19.99 – $28.99The bestselling author pulls no punches on what America needs to defeat white supremacy
National political commentator Steve Phillips’s “politically charged and thoughtfully reasoned” (Kirkus Reviews) How We Win the Civil War helped chart the way forward for progressives and people of color, arguing that Democrats must recognize the nature of the fight we’re in, which is a contest between democracy and white supremacy left unresolved after the Civil War. Combining a powerful grasp of history with Phillips’s trademark, no-nonsense political critique, this “spirited and persuasive . . . rousing call for change” (Publishers Weekly) argues that we will not overcome until we govern as though we are under attack—until we finally recognize that the time has come to finish the conquest of the Confederacy and all that it represents.
With a new preface laying out what is at stake in the 2024 general election, Phillips delivers razor-sharp prescriptions for the new political season, including specific guidance for politicians, policymakers, and ordinary citizens alike. “A foundational contribution to the emerging field of multiracial democracy” (Spencer Overton), How We Win the Civil War is the essential political book for 2024 and beyond—showing us how to rid our politics of white supremacy, once and for all.
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No More Police
A Case for Abolition$18.99 – $29.99An instant national best seller
A persuasive primer on police abolition from two veteran organizers
“One of the world’s most prominent advocates, organizers and political educators of the [abolitionist] framework.” —NBCNews.com on Mariame Kaba
In this powerful call to action, New York Times bestselling author Mariame Kaba and attorney and organizer Andrea J. Ritchie detail why policing doesn’t stop violence, instead perpetuating widespread harm; outline the many failures of contemporary police reforms; and explore demands to defund police, divest from policing, and invest in community resources to create greater safety through a Black feminist lens.
Centering survivors of state, interpersonal, and community-based violence, and highlighting uprisings, campaigns, and community-based projects, No More Police makes a compelling case for a world where the tools required to prevent, interrupt, and transform violence in all its forms are abundant. Part handbook, part road map, No More Police calls on us to turn away from systems that perpetrate violence in the name of ending it toward a world where violence is the exception, and safe, well-resourced and thriving communities are the rule.
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Unreasonable
Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment$27.99How the Supreme Court’s decision to treat unreasonable policing as reasonable under the Fourth Amendment has shortened the distance between life and death for Black people
The summer of 2020 will be remembered as an unprecedented, watershed moment in the struggle for racial equality. Published on the second anniversary of the global protests over the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Unreasonable is a groundbreaking investigation of the role that the law—and the U.S. Constitution—play in the epidemic of police violence against Black people.
In this crucially timely book, celebrated legal scholar Devon W. Carbado explains how the Fourth Amendment became ground zero for regulating police conduct—more important than Miranda warnings, the right to counsel, equal protection and due process. Fourth Amendment law determines when and how the police can make arrests, and it determines the precarious line between stopping Black people and killing Black people.
A leading light in the critical race studies movement, Carbado looks at how that text, in the last four decades, has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to protect police officers, not African Americans; how it sanctions search and seizure as well as profiling; and how it has become, ultimately, an amendment of life and death.
Accessible, radical, and essential reading, Unreasonable sheds light on a rarely understood dimension of today’s most pressing issue.
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Allow Me to Retort
A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution$18.99 – $26.99Finalist, ABA Silver Gavel Award for Books
The New York Times bestseller that has cemented Elie Mystal’s reputation as one of our sharpest and most acerbic legal minds
“After reading Allow Me to Retort, I want Elie Mystal to explain everything I don’t understand—quantum astrophysics, the infield fly rule, why people think Bob Dylan is a good singer . . .” —Michael Harriot, The RootAllow Me to Retort is an easily digestible argument about what rights we have, what rights Republicans are trying to take away, and how to stop them. Mystal explains how to protect the rights of women and people of color instead of cowering to the absolutism of gun owners and bigots. He explains the legal way to stop everything from police brutality to political gerrymandering, just by changing a few judges and justices. He strips out all of the fancy jargon conservatives like to hide behind and lays bare the truth of their project to keep America forever tethered to its slaveholding past.
Mystal brings his trademark humor, expertise, and rhetorical flair to explain concepts like substantive due process and the right for the LGBTQ community to buy a cake, and to arm readers with the knowledge to defend themselves against conservatives who want everybody to live under the yoke of eighteenth-century white men. The same tactics Mystal uses to defend the idea of a fair and equal society on MSNBC and CNN are in this book, for anybody who wants to deploy them on social media.
You don’t need to be a legal scholar to understand your own rights. You don’t need to accept the “whites only” theory of equality pushed by conservative judges. You can read this book to understand that the Constitution is trash, but doesn’t have to be.
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The Kaepernick Effect
Taking a Knee, Changing the World$17.99 – $25.99Riveting and inspiring first-person stories of how “taking a knee” triggered an awakening in sports, from the celebrated sportswriter
“The Kaepernick Effect reveals that Colin Kaepernick’s story is bigger than one athlete. With profiles of courage that leap off the page, Zirin uncovers a whole national movement of citizen-athletes fighting for racial justice.” —Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award–winning author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist
In 2016, amid an epidemic of police shootings of African Americans, the celebrated NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick began a series of quiet protests on the field, refusing to stand during the U.S. national anthem. By “taking a knee,” Kaepernick bravely joined a long tradition of American athletes making powerful political statements. This time, however, Kaepernick’s simple act spread like wildfire throughout American society, becoming the preeminent symbol of resistance to America’s persistent racial inequality.
Critically acclaimed sports journalist and author of A People’s History of Sports in the United States, Dave Zirin chronicles “the Kaepernick effect” for the first time, through interviews with a broad cross-section of professional athletes across many different sports, college stars and high-powered athletic directors, and high school athletes and coaches. In each case, he uncovers the fascinating explanations and motivations behind a mass political movement in sports, through deeply personal and inspiring accounts of risk-taking, activism, and courage both on and off the field.
A book about the politics of sport, and the impact of sports on politics, The Kaepernick Effect is for anyone seeking to understand an essential dimension of the new movement for racial justice in America.
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Carving Out a Humanity
Race, Rights, and Redemption$29.99Leading law professors weigh in on key issues in race and the law—collected in honor of one of the originators of critical race theory, Derrick Bell
When Derrick Bell, one of the originators of critical race theory, turned sixty-five, his wife set up a lecture series of the leading critical race theorists, many of them Bell’s former students. Now, these lectures, given over the course of twenty-five years, are collected for the first time in Carving Out a Humanity, a volume that Library Journal calls “potent” and Kirkus Reviews, in a starred review, says “powerfully acknowledge[s] the persistence of structural racism.”
“To what extent does equal protection protect?” asks Ian Haney López in a penetrating analysis of the gaps that remain in our civil rights legal codes. Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, describes the hypersegregation of our cities and the limits of the law’s ability to change deep-seated attitudes about race. Patricia J. Williams explores the legacy of slavery in the law’s current constructions of sanity. Anita Allen discusses competing privacy and accountability interests in the lives of African American celebrities. Chuck Lawrence interrogates the judicial backlash against affirmative action. And Michelle Alexander describes what caused her to break ranks with the civil rights community and take up the cause of those our legal system has labeled unworthy.
Carving Out a Humanity gathers some of our country’s brightest progressive legal stars in a volume that illuminates facets of the law that have continued to perpetuate racial inequality and to confound our nation at the start of a new millennium. According to Library Journal, “Scholars and lay readers alike will be enlightened and spurred to thought and discussion.”
Contributors:
Charles Ogletree
Charles Lawrence
Patricia J. Williams
Richard Delgado
Lani Guinier
Anita Allen
Mari Matsuda
Cheryl L. Harris
Kendall Thomas
Derrick Bell
John Calmore
Robert A. Williams
Paul Butler
Emma Coleman Jordan
Devon W. Carbado
Ian Haney Lopez
Annette Gordon-Reed
William Carter Jr.
Stephen Bright
Sherrilyn Ifill
Michelle Alexander
Theodore M. Shaw
Angela Onwuachi-Willig
Kenneth W. Mack -
Inventing Latinos
A New Story of American Racism$17.99 – $40.00Named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR
An NPR Best Book of the Year, exploring the impact of Latinos’ new collective racial identity on the way Americans understand race, with a new afterword by the authorWho are Latinos and where do they fit in America’s racial order? In this “timely and important examination of Latinx identity” (Ms.), Laura E. Gómez, a leading critical race scholar, argues that it is only recently that Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Central Americans, and others are seeing themselves (and being seen by others) under the banner of a cohesive racial identity. And the catalyst for this emergent identity, she argues, has been the ferocity of anti-Latino racism.
In what Booklist calls “an incisive study of history, complex interrogation of racial construction, and sophisticated legal argument,” Gómez “packs a knockout punch” (Publishers Weekly), illuminating for readers the fascinating race-making, unmaking, and re-making processes that Latinos have undergone over time, indelibly changing the way race functions in this country.
Building on the “insightful and well-researched” (Kirkus Reviews) material of the original, the paperback features a new afterword in which the author analyzes results of the 2020 Census, providing brilliant, timely insight about how Latinos have come to self-identify.
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Blood on the River
A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast$19.99 – $27.99Winner of the Cundill History Prize
Winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize
Named One of the Best Books of the Year by NPRA breathtakingly original work of history that uncovers a massive enslaved persons’ revolt that almost changed the face of the Americas
Named one of the best books of the year by NPR, Blood on the River also won two of the highest honors for works of history, capturing both the Frederick Douglass Prize and the Cundill History Prize in 2021. A book with profound relevance for our own time, Blood on the River “fundamentally alters what we know about revolutionary change” according to Cundill Prize juror and NYU history professor Jennifer Morgan.
On Sunday, February 27, 1763, thousands of slaves in the Dutch colony of Berbice—in present-day Guyana—launched a rebellion that came amazingly close to succeeding. Blood on the River is the explosive story of this little-known revolution, one that almost changed the face of the Americas. Michael Ignatieff, chair of the Cundill Prize jury, declared that Blood on the River “tells a story so dramatic, so compelling that no reader will be able to put the book down.”
Drawing on nine hundred interrogation transcripts collected by the Dutch when the rebellion collapsed, and which were subsequently buried in Dutch archives, historian Marjoleine Kars has constructed what Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Eric Foner calls “a gripping narrative that brings to life a forgotten world.”
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Administrations of Lunacy
Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum$37.00 – $40.00A scathing and original look at the racist origins of psychiatry, through the story of the largest mental institution in the world
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.
In December 1841, the Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum was founded. A hundred years later, it had become the largest insane asylum in the world with over ten thousand patients. Administrations of Lunacy tells the story of this iconic and infamous southern institution, a history that was all but erased from popular memory and within the psychiatric profession.
Through riveting accounts of historical characters, Segrest reveals how modern psychiatric practice was forged in the traumas of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. Deftly connecting this history to the modern era, Segrest then shows how a single asylum helped set the stage for the eugenics theories of the twentieth century and the persistent racial ideologies of our own times. She also traces the connections to today’s dissident psychiatric practices that offer sanity and create justice.
A landmark of scholarship, Administrations of Lunacy restores a vital thread between past and present, revealing the tangled racial roots of psychiatry in America.
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Memoir of a Race Traitor
Fighting Racism in the American South$17.99Back in print after more than a decade, the singular chronicle of life at the forefront of antiracist activism, with a new introduction and afterword by the author
“Mab Segrest’s book is extraordinary. It is a ‘political memoir’ but its language is poetic and its tone passionate. I started it with caution and finished it with awe and pleasure.” —Howard Zinn
In 1994, Mab Segrest first explained how she “had become a woman haunted by the dead.” Against a backdrop of nine generations of her family’s history, Segrest explored her experiences in the 1980s as a white lesbian organizing against a virulent far-right movement in North Carolina.
Memoir of a Race Traitor became a classic text of white antiracist practice. bell hooks called it a “courageous and daring [example of] the reality that political solidarity, forged in struggle, can exist across differences.” Adrienne Rich wrote that it was “a unique document and thoroughly fascinating.” Juxtaposing childhood memories with contemporary events, Segrest described her journey into the heart of her culture, finally veering from its trajectory of violence toward hope and renewal. Now, amid our current national crisis driven by an increasingly apocalyptic white supremacist movement, Segrest returns with an updated edition of her classic book. With a new introduction and afterword that explore what has transpired with the far right since its publication, the book brings us into the age of Trump—and to what can and must be done.
Called “a true delight” and a “must-read” (Minnesota Review), Memoir of a Race Traitor is an inspiring and politically potent book. With brand-new power and relevance in 2019, this is a book that far transcends its genre.
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The Lines Between Us
Two Families and a Quest to Cross Baltimore’s Racial Divide$28.99Winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize
A masterful narrative—with echoes of Evicted and The Color of Law—that brings to life the structures, policies, and beliefs that divide us
Mark Lange and Nicole Smith have never met, but if they make the moves they are contemplating—Mark, a white suburbanite, to West Baltimore, and Nicole, a black woman from a poor city neighborhood, to a prosperous suburb—it will defy the way the Baltimore region has been programmed for a century. It is one region, but separate worlds. And it was designed to be that way.
In this deeply reported, revelatory story, duPont Award–winning journalist Lawrence Lanahan chronicles how the region became so highly segregated and why its fault lines persist today. Mark and Nicole personify the enormous disparities in access to safe housing, educational opportunities, and decent jobs. As they eventually pack up their lives and change places, bold advocates and activists—in the courts and in the streets—struggle to figure out what it will take to save our cities and communities: Put money into poor, segregated neighborhoods? Make it possible for families to move into areas with more opportunity?
The Lines Between Us is a riveting narrative that compels reflection on America’s entrenched inequality—and on where the rubber meets the road not in the abstract, but in our own backyards. Taking readers from church sermons to community meetings to public hearings to protests to the Supreme Court to the death of Freddie Gray, Lanahan deftly exposes the intricacy of Baltimore’s hypersegregation through the stories of ordinary people living it, shaping it, and fighting it, day in and day out.
This eye-opening account of how a city creates its black and white places, its rich and poor spaces, reveals that these problems are not intractable; but they are designed to endure until each of us—despite living in separate worlds—understands we have something at stake.
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Sundown Towns
A Hidden Dimension of American Racism$22.99 – $49.00“Powerful and important . . . an instant classic.”
—The Washington Post Book WorldThe award-winning look at an ugly aspect of American racism by the bestselling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, reissued with a new preface by the author
In this groundbreaking work, sociologist James W. Loewen, author of the classic bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, brings to light decades of hidden racial exclusion in America. In a provocative, sweeping analysis of American residential patterns, Loewen uncovers the thousands of “sundown towns”—almost exclusively white towns where it was an unspoken rule that blacks weren’t welcome—that cropped up throughout the twentieth century, most of them located outside of the South.
Written with Loewen’s trademark honesty and thoroughness, Sundown Towns won the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist, and launched a nationwide online effort to track down and catalog sundown towns across America.
In a new preface, Loewen puts this history in the context of current controversies around white supremacy and the Black Lives Matter movement. He revisits sundown towns and finds the number way down, but with notable exceptions in exclusive all-white suburbs such as Kenilworth, Illinois, which as of 2010 had not a single black household. And, although many former sundown towns are now integrated, they often face “second-generation sundown town issues,” such as in Ferguson, Missouri, a former sundown town that is now majority black, but with a majority-white police force.
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Enemies in Love
A German POW, a Black Nurse, and an Unlikely Romance$25.99 – $28.99A “New & Noteworthy” selection of The New York Times Book Review
“Alexis Clark illuminates a whole corner of unknown World War II history.”
—Walter Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci
“[A]n irresistible human story. . . . Clark’s voice is engaging, and her tale universal.”
—Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power and American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House
A true and deeply moving narrative of forbidden love during World War II and a shocking, hidden history of race on the home frontThis is a love story like no other: Elinor Powell was an African American nurse in the U.S. military during World War II; Frederick Albert was a soldier in Hitler’s army, captured by the Allies and shipped to a prisoner-of-war camp in the Arizona desert. Like most other black nurses, Elinor pulled a second-class assignment, in a dusty, sun-baked—and segregated—Western town. The army figured that the risk of fraternization between black nurses and white German POWs was almost nil.
Brought together by unlikely circumstances in a racist world, Elinor and Frederick should have been bitter enemies; but instead, at the height of World War II, they fell in love. Their dramatic story was unearthed by journalist Alexis Clark, who through years of interviews and historical research has pieced together an astounding narrative of race and true love in the cauldron of war.
Based on a New York Times story by Clark that drew national attention, Enemies in Love paints a tableau of dreams deferred and of love struggling to survive, twenty-five years before the Supreme Court’s Loving decision legalizing mixed-race marriage—revealing the surprising possibilities for human connection during one of history’s most violent conflicts.
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A Perilous Path
Talking Race, Inequality, and the Law$14.99 – $15.99A frank and enlightening discussion on race and the law in America today, from some of our leading legal minds—including the bestselling author of Just Mercy
This blisteringly candid discussion of the American racial dilemma in the age of Black Lives Matter brings together the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the former attorney general of the United States, a bestselling author and death penalty lawyer, and a star professor for an honest conversation the country desperately needs to hear.
Drawing on their collective decades of work on civil rights issues as well as personal histories of rising from poverty and oppression, these titans of the legal profession discuss the importance of working for justice in an unjust time.
Covering topics as varied as “the commonality of pain,” “when ‘public’ became a dirty word,” and the concept of an “equality dividend” that is due to people of color for helping America brand itself internationally as a country of diversity and acceptance, Sherrilyn Ifill, Loretta Lynch, Bryan Stevenson, and Anthony C. Thompson engage in a deeply thought-provoking discussion on the law’s role in both creating and solving our most pressing racial quandaries. A Perilous Path will speak loudly and clearly to everyone concerned about America’s perpetual fault line.
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El color de la justicia
La nueva segregación racial en Estados Unidos$19.99 – $21.99En este revolucionario trabajo que ha permanecido por más de dos años en la lista de los libros más vendidos del New York Times, Michelle Alexander argumenta que “no hemos erradicado las castas raciales en Estados Unidos; las hemos meramente rediseñado”. Al apuntar a hombres negros por medio de la Guerra contra las Drogas y diezmando las comunidades de gente de color, el sistema de justicia criminal de Estados Unidos funciona como un sistema contemporáneo de control racial—al relegar a millones de personas a un estatus de segunda clase—incluso mientras éste se adhiere al principio de ceguera para los colores.
Los hispanoamericanos están ampliamente representados en este sistema de encarcelamiento masivo que Alexander describe: 15 por ciento de todos los latinos en Estados Unidos dicen que ellos o alguien de su familia inmediata ha sido arrestado dentro de los últimos cinco años; y que cerca del 25 por ciento de los latinos de entre 18 y 29 años comparten esta experiencia. Los latinos representan cerca de la mitad de todos los convictos en las prisiones federales, y en California (uno de los pocos estados que cuenta con información sobre esto), los latinos componen un 40 por ciento de todos los arrestos.
Catedráticos tales como Tom Romero han sugerido que The New Jim Crow provee de los fundamentos esenciales para comprender el “nuevo sistema Jim Crow” de inmigración y detención en los Estados Unidos al día de hoy. Millones de familias de habla hispana afectadas por este sistema apreciarán contar con una edición en español de este libro que ha sido considerado como “invaluable” por el Daily Kos y “explosivo” por Kirkus Reviews. -
Wolf Whistle Politics
The New Misogyny in America Today$15.95The 2016 election year may be remembered as a year to forget, but for American women in politics and feminists alike it was unforgettably distressing—a flash point illuminating both the true state of play for women in public life and feminist politics in the early twenty-first century.
Wolf Whistle Politics is a book that tries to account for, contextualize, and even make some sense out of this trying political chapter in American history. With an introduction by Naomi Wolf and pieces by leading journalists and essayists ranging from Lindy West’s “Donald and Billy on the Bus,” to Amy Davidson’s “What Wendy Davis Stood For,” and Rhon Manigault-Bryant’s “Open Letter to White, Liberal Feminists,” this collection comprises the best political reporting and socio-historical analysis on everything from the contentious meaning of a potential first female president to the misogynist overtones of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s electoral defeat by Donald Trump; from rape culture to reproductive rights; Pantsuit Nation to poor women of color; media double standards to hashtag activism.
Together these pieces form a constellation aptly symbolized by the lascivious “wolf whistle,” a demeaning, sexually loaded catcall which, unlike the racial “dog whistle,” has nothing subtle or covert about it. Wolf Whistle Politics shines a bright light on the complex relationship between women and politics today, reflecting on what we lost, what we won, and what we can do to move forward.
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The Ferguson Report
Department of Justice Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department$9.99 – $10.00On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an unarmed African American high school senior, was shot by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. For months afterward, protestors took to the streets demanding justice, testifying to the racist and exploitative police department and court system, and connecting the shooting of Brown with the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and other young black men at the hands of police across the country.
In the wake of these protests, the Department of Justice launched a six-month investigation, resulting in a report that Colorlines characterizes as “so caustic it reads like an Onion article” and laying bare what the Huffington Post calls “a totalizing police regime beyond any of Kafka’s ghastliest nightmares.” Among the report’s findings are that the Ferguson Police Department “Engages in a Pattern of Unconstitutional Stops and Arrests in Violation of the Fourth Amendment,” “Detain[s] People Without Reasonable Suspicion and Arrest[s] People Without Probable Cause,” “Engages in a Pattern of First Amendment Violations,” “Engages in a Pattern of Excessive Force,” and “Erode[s] Community Trust, Especially Among Ferguson’s African-American Residents.”
Contextualized here in a substantial introduction by renowned legal scholar and former NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund president Theodore M. Shaw, The Ferguson Report is a sad, sobering, and important document, providing a snapshot of American law enforcement at the start of the twenty-first century, with resonance far beyond one small town in Missouri. -
The New Black
What Has Changed--and What Has Not--with Race in America$18.99 – $21.95The election and reelection of Barack Obama ushered in a litany of controversial perspectives about the contemporary state of American race relations. In this incisive volume, some of the country’s most celebrated and original thinkers on race—historians, sociologists, writers, scholars, and cultural critics—reexamine the familiar framework of the civil rights movement with an eye to redirecting our understanding of the politics of race.
Through provocative and insightful essays, The New Black challenges contemporary images of black families, offers a contentious critique of the relevance of presidential politics, transforms ideas about real and perceived political power, defies commonly accepted notions of “blackness,” and generally attempts to sketch the new boundaries of debates over race in America.
Bringing a wealth of novel ideas and fresh perspectives to the public discourse, The New Black represents a major effort to address both persistent inequalities and the changing landscape of race in the new century.
With contributions by:
Elizabeth Alexander
Jeannine Bell
Paul Butler
Luis Fuentes-Rohwer
Lani Guinier
Jonathan Scott Holloway
Taeku Lee
Glenn C. Loury
Angela Onwuachi-Willig
Orlando Patterson
Cristina M. Rodríguez
Gerald Torres
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Fatal Invention
How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century$19.99 – $25.00An incisive, groundbreaking book that examines how a biological concept of race is a myth that promotes inequality in a supposedly “post-racial” era.
Though the Human Genome Project proved that human beings are not naturally divided by race, the emerging fields of personalized medicine, reproductive technologies, genetic genealogy, and DNA databanks are attempting to resuscitate race as a biological category written in our genes.
This groundbreaking book by legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts examines how the myth of race as a biological concept—revived by purportedly cutting-edge science, race-specific drugs, genetic testing, and DNA databases—continues to undermine a just society and promote inequality in a supposedly “post-racial” era. Named one of the ten best black nonfiction books 2011 by AFRO.com, Fatal Invention offers a timely and “provocative analysis” (Nature) of race, science, and politics that “is consistently lucid . . . alarming but not alarmist, controversial but evidential, impassioned but rational” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
“Everyone concerned about social justice in America should read this powerful book.” —Anthony D. Romero, executive director, American Civil Liberties Union
“A terribly important book on how the ‘fatal invention’ has terrifying effects in the post-genomic, ‘post-racial’ era.” —Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, professor of sociology, Duke University, and author of Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States
“Fatal Invention is a triumph! Race has always been an ill-defined amalgam of medical and cultural bias, thinly overlaid with the trappings of contemporary scientific thought. And no one has peeled back the layers of assumption and deception as lucidly as Dorothy Roberts.” —Harriet A. Washington, author of and Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself
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“Multiplication Is for White People”
Raising Expectations for Other People's Children$17.95 – $26.95From the MacArthur Award–winning education reformer and author of the bestselling Other People’s Children, a long-awaited new book on how to fix the persistent black/white achievement gap in America’s public schools
As MacArthur Award–winning educator Lisa Delpit reminds us—and as all research shows—there is no achievement gap at birth. In her long-awaited second book, Delpit presents a striking picture of the elements of contemporary public education that conspire against the prospects for poor children of color, creating a persistent gap in achievement during the school years that has eluded several decades of reform.
Delpit’s bestselling and paradigm-shifting first book, Other People’s Children, focused on cultural slippage in the classroom between white teachers and students of color. Now, in “Multiplication Is for White People”, Delpit reflects on two decades of reform efforts—including No Child Left Behind, standardized testing, the creation of alternative teacher certification paths, and the charter school movement—that have still left a generation of poor children of color feeling that higher educational achievement isn’t for them.
In chapters covering primary, middle, and high school, as well as college, Delpit concludes that it’s not that difficult to explain the persistence of the achievement gap. In her wonderful trademark style, punctuated with telling classroom anecdotes and informed by time spent at dozens of schools across the country, Delpit outlines an inspiring and uplifting blueprint for raising expectations for other people’s children, based on the simple premise that multiplication—and every aspect of advanced education—is for everyone.
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Race
How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession$17.95First published in 1992 at the height of the furor over the Rodney King incident, Studs Terkel’s Race was an immediate bestseller. Offering a rare and revealing look at how people in America truly feel about race, Terkel’s candid interviews depict a complexity of thoughts and emotions and uncover a fascinating narrative of changing opinions. Preachers and street punks, college students and Klansmen, pioneering interracial couples, the nephew of the founder of apartheid, and Emmett Till’s mother are among those whose voices appear in Race. In all, nearly one hundred Americans talk openly about what few are willing to admit in public: feelings about affirmative action, gentrification, secret prejudices, and dashed hopes.
This reissue of Race comes at a particularly dynamic time in the history of American race relations. Our first black president, rapidly shifting immigration and population patterns, and the rising force of multiracialism all necessitate a narrative around race that is more nuanced than ever before. Yet many of the issues we have grappled with over the past few decades remain to be solved. Gary Younge, a longtime columnist for The Guardian and The Nation, provides a new introduction to Race that serves to contextualize it, rendering it relevant to these contemporary frameworks, while paying homage to a keystone piece of oral history on a uniquely American subject.
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12 Angry Men
True Stories of Being a Black Man in America Today$16.95 – $24.95“Beautifully written, painfully honest” first-person accounts of racial profiling, as experienced by a dozen black men from all over America (Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow).
In an era of contentious debate about controversial police practices and, more broadly, the significance of implications of race throughout American life, 12 Angry Men is an urgent, moving, and timely book that exposes “a serious impediment to the collective American Dream of a colorblind society” (Pittsburgh Urban Media).
In this “extraordinarily compelling” book, a dozen eloquent authors tell their own personal stories of being racially profiled. 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 -
Let’s Get Free
A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice$16.95 – $25.95Radical ideas for changing the justice system, rooted in the real-life experiences of those in overpoliced communities, from the acclaimed former federal prosecutor and author of Chokehold
Paul Butler was an ambitious federal prosecutor, a Harvard Law grad who gave up his corporate law salary to fight the good fight—until one day he was arrested on the street and charged with a crime he didn’t commit.
In a book Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree calls “a must-read,” Butler looks at places where ordinary citizens meet the justice system—as jurors, witnesses, and in encounters with the police—and explores what “doing the right thing” means in a corrupt system. No matter how powerless those caught up in the web of the law may feel, there is a chance to regain agency, argues Butler. Through groundbreaking and sometimes controversial methods—jury nullification (voting “not guilty” in drug cases as a form of protest), just saying “no” when the police request your permission to search, and refusing to work inside the system as a snitch or a prosecutor—ordinary people can tip the system towards actual justice. Let’s Get Free is an evocative, compelling look at the steps we can collectively take to reform our broken system.
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Critical Race Realism
Intersections of Psychology, Race, and Law$39.95 – $60.00Building on the field of critical race theory, which took a theoretical approach to questions of race and the law, Critical Race Realism offers a practical look at the way racial bias plays out at every level of the legal system, from witness identification and jury selection to prosecutorial behavior, defense decisions, and the way expert witnesses are regarded.
Using cutting-edge research from across the social sciences and, in particular, new understandings from psychology of the way prejudice functions in the brain, this new book—the first overview of the topic—includes many of the seminal writings to date along with newly commissioned pieces filling in gaps in the literature. The authors are part of a rising generation of legal scholars and social scientists intent on using the latest insights from their respective fields to understand the racial biases built into our legal system and to offer concrete measures to overcome them.
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Everyday Antiracism
Getting Real About Race in School$24.95Winner, Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award
The groundbreaking book on race in schools that has become an essential handbook for teachers working to create antiracist classrooms
In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and nationwide protests against police brutality, it’s never been more important for educators and parents to ensure they’re cultivating antiracist learning environments. For years, teachers who recognized the importance of cultural responsiveness in the classroom have turned to Everyday Antiracism, the essential compendium of advice from some of America’s leading educators.
Pathbreaking contributors—among them Beverly Daniel Tatum, Sonia Nieto, and Pedro Noguera—describe concrete ways to analyze classroom interactions that may or may not be “racial,” deal with racial inequality and “diversity,” and teach to high standards across racial lines. Topics range from using racial incidents as teachable moments and responding to the “n-word” to valuing students’ home worlds, dealing daily with achievement gaps, and helping parents fight ethnic and racial misconceptions about their children. Questions following each essay prompt readers to examine and discuss everyday issues of race and opportunity in their own classrooms and schools.
Everyday Antiracism is an essential tool for all of the educators and parents who are determined to create not only more just classrooms, but also a more just world.
Contributors include:
- Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
- Prudence Carter
- Thea Abu El-Haj
- Ron Ferguson
- Patricia Gándara
- Ian Haney López
- Vivian Louie
- Maria Ong
- Paul Ongtooguk
- Christine Sleeter
- Angela Valenzuela
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All Things Being Equal
Instigating Opportunity in an Inequitable Time$24.95When we talk about uninsured kids, dozens to a classroom, being taught by teachers with no expertise in their field; about mass incarceration with no rehabilitation; about real estate brokers or employment firms that continue to discriminate into the twenty-first century; about housing programs that reinforce segregation and fail to connect willing workers with the employers who need them, we are mainly talking about failures of opportunity.
Contrary to popular belief, opportunity in America is in crisis. Class mobility is at an all-time low, the wage gap is through the roof, and Horatio Algers are few and far between. This and other critical ideas about the state of opportunity are documented in All Things Being Equal, a smart new book from a smart new outfit whose mission is to increase opportunity for all Americans.
Half critique, half all-important road map for the future, All Things Being Equal includes eight original essays by top-notch thinkers pointing to areas in American life where opportunity is missing and showing us how to instigate it.
Featuring:
- Jared Bernstein, “You Can Take It with You: Income and Wealth Across Generations”
- Linda Darling-Hammond, “Educational Quality and Equality: What It Will Take to Leave No Child Behind"
- Marc Mauer, “Reducing Incarceration to Expand Opportunity”
- Brian D. Smedley, “Why Health-Care Equity Is Essential to Opportunity—and How to Get There”
- Philip Tegeler, “Connecting Families to Opportunity: The Next Generation of Housing Mobility Policy”
- Edward E. Telles and Vilma Ortiz, “Finding America: Creating Educational Opportunity for our Newest Citizens”
- Margery Austin Turner and Carla Herbig, “Measuring the Extent and Forms of Discrimination in the Marketplace: Lessons from Paired-Testing Research”
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“Exterminate All the Brutes”
One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide$16.99 – $17.99Now part of the eponymous HBO docuseries written and directed by Raoul Peck, “Exterminate All the Brutes” is a brilliant intellectual history of Europe’s genocidal colonization of Africa—and the terrible myths and lies that it spawned
“A book of stunning range and near genius. . . . The catastrophic consequences of European imperialism are made palpable in the personal progress of the author, a late-twentieth-century pilgrim in Africa. Lindqvist’s astonishing connections across time and cultures, combined with a marvelous economy of prose, leave the reader appalled, reflective, and grateful.” —David Levering Lewis
“Exterminate All the Brutes,” Sven Lindqvist’s widely acclaimed masterpiece, is a searching examination of Europe’s dark history in Africa and the origins of genocide. Using Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as his point of departure, the award-winning Swedish author takes us on a haunting tour through the colonial past, interwoven with a modern-day travelogue. Retracing the steps of European explorers, missionaries, politicians, and historians in Africa from the late eighteenth century onward, “Exterminate All the Brutes” exposes the roots of genocide in Africa through Lindqvist’s own journey through the Saharan desert. As he shows, fantasies not merely of white superiority but of actual extermination—“cleansing” the earth of the so-called lesser races—deeply informed the colonialism and racist ideology that ultimately culminated in Europe’s own Holocaust.
Conquerors’ stories are the ones that inform the self-mythology of the West—whereas the lives and stories of those displaced, enslaved, or killed are too often ignored and forgotten. “Exterminate All the Brutes” forces a crucial reckoning with a past that still echoes in our collective psyche—a reckoning that compels us to acknowledge the exploitation and brutality at the heart of our modern, globalized society. As Adam Hochschild has written, “Lindqvist’s work leaves you changed.”
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After the Storm
Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina$22.95Available for the first time in paperback after selling out its hardcover print run and being frequently named among the best of the Katrina books, After the Storm offers “angry, learned, focused, readable, [and] essential” writing, according to Library Journal, in which contributors face what Ebony magazine calls “questions about poverty, housing, governmental decision-making, crime, community development and political participation, which were raised in the aftermath of the storm.”
Featuring the work of leading African American intellectuals, including Derrick Bell, Charles Ogletree, Michael Eric Dyson, Cheryl Harris, Devon Carbado, Adolph Reed, Sheryll Cashin, and Clement Alexander Price, After the Storm suggests “precisely what we must do if we are to both save the planet and create the great towns and cities that we can proudly bequeath to future generations” (Socialist Review).
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Racism Explained to My Daughter
$16.95 – $17.99The classic anti-racist book—written as a letter from the writer to his daughter—from the prizewinning authorWhen Tahar Ben Jelloun took his ten-year-old daughter to a street protest against anti-immigration laws in Paris, she asked question after question: “What is racism? What is an immigrant? What is discrimination?”
Out of their frank discussion comes this book, an international bestseller translated into twenty languages. Ben Jelloun has created a unique and compelling dialogue in which he explains difficult concepts from ghettos and genocide to slavery and anti-Semitism in language we can all understand, and adds an all-new chapter for this edition. Also included are personal essays from four prizewinning writers and educators who themselves are parents: Patricia Williams, David Mura, William Ayers, and Lisa D. Delpit.
Elegant and sensitive, and available now for the first time in paperback, Racism Explained to My Daughter is for all parents and educators who have struggled to engage their children in discussions of this complex issue.
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