Book Selections

"Women of color in academia are suffering, but they are also overcoming obstacles in inspiring ways. Presumed Incompetent II comes when women of color in America are facing new threats and their ability to survive in academia as the country grapples with the rhetorics of white supremacy"--

Presumed Incompetentis a pathbreaking account of the intersecting roles of race, gender, and class in the working lives of women faculty of color. Through personal narratives and qualitative empirical studies, more than 40 authors expose the daunting challenges faced by academic women of color as they navigate the often hostile terrain of higher education, including hiring, promotion, tenure, and relations with students, colleagues, and administrators. The narratives are filled with wit, wisdom, and concrete recommendations, and provide a window into the struggles of professional women in a racially stratified but increasingly multicultural America.

Invisible No More is a timely examination of how Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color experience racial profiling, police brutality, and immigration enforcement. By placing the individual stories of Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, Dajerria Becton, Monica Jones, and Mya Hall in the broader context of the twin epidemics of police violence and mass incarceration, Andrea Ritchie documents the evolution of movements centered around women’s experiences of policing. Featuring a powerful forward by activist Angela Davis, Invisible No More is an essential exposé on police violence against WOC that demands a radical rethinking of our visions of safety - and the means we devote to achieving it.

In Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory Patricia Hill Collins offers a set of analytical tools for those wishing to develop intersectionality's capability to theorize social inequality in ways that would facilitate social change. While intersectionality helps shed light on contemporary social issues, Collins notes that it has yet to reach its full potential as a critical social theory. She contends that for intersectionality to fully realize its power, its practitioners must critically reflect on its assumptions, epistemologies, and methods. She places intersectionality in dialog with several theoretical traditions 'from the Frankfurt school to black feminist thought" to sharpen its definition and foreground its singular critical purchase, thereby providing a capacious interrogation into intersectionality's potential to reshape the world.

"Inside this place, not of it reveals some of the most egregious human rights violations within women's prisons in the United States. Here, in their own words, thirteen narrators recount their lives leading up to incarceration and their harrowing struggle once inside"--Cover, page [4].

With race and the police once more burning issues, this classic work from one of America's giants of black radicalism has lost none of its prescience or power The trial of Angela Davis is remembered as one of America's most historic political trials, and no one can tell the story better than Davis herself. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Angela, and including contributions from numerous radicals and commentators such as Black Panthers George Jackson, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins, this book is not only an account of Davis's incarceration and the struggles surrounding it, but also perhaps the most comprehensive and thorough analysis of the prison system of the United States and the figure embodied in Davis's arrest and imprisonment-the political prisoner. Since the book was written, the carceral system in the US has grown from strength to strength, with more of its black population behind bars than ever before. The scathing analysis of the role of prison and the policing of black populations offered by Davis and her comrades in this astonishing volume remains as relevant today as the day it was published. From the Trade Paperback edition.

From a leading voice on racial justice, an eye-opening account of growing up Black, Christian, and female that exposes how White America’s love affair with “diversity” so often falls short of its ideals. “Austin Channing Brown introduces herself as a master memoirist. This book will break open hearts and minds.” (Glennon Doyle, number one New York Times best-selling author of Untamed) Austin Channing Brown's first encounter with a racialized America came at age seven, when she discovered her parents named her Austin to deceive future employers into thinking she was a White man. Growing up in majority-White schools and churches, Austin writes, "I had to learn what it means to love blackness", a journey that led to a lifetime spent navigating America's racial divide as a writer, speaker, and expert helping organizations practice genuine inclusion. In a time when nearly every institution (schools, churches, universities, businesses) claims to value diversity in its mission statement, Austin writes in breathtaking detail about her journey to self-worth and the pitfalls that kill our attempts at racial justice. Her stories bear witness to the complexity of America's social fabric - from Black Cleveland neighborhoods to private schools in the middle-class suburbs, from prison walls to the boardrooms at majority-White organizations. For listeners who have engaged with America's legacy on race through the writing of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michael Eric Dyson, I'm Still Here is an illuminating look at how White, middle-class Evangelicalism has participated in an era of rising racial hostility, inviting the listener to confront apathy, recognize God's ongoing work in the world, and discover how Blackness - if we let it - can save us all.

With extensive new data, Donald A. Barr illuminates the ways low socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity interact to create and perpetuate health disparities in the United States. This thoroughly updated edition focuses on a new challenge the United States last experienced more than half a century ago: successive years of declining life expectancy. Barr addresses the causes of this decline, including what are commonly referred to as "deaths of despair"--Opiate overdose or suicide. Exploring the growing role geography plays in health disparities, Barr asks why people living in rural areas suffer the greatest increases in these deaths. He also analyzes recent changes under the Affordable Care Act and considers the literature on how race and ethnicity affect the way health care providers evaluate and treat patients.

The study of religion and the practice of theology have been transformed in recent years by incorporating new perspectives on race, ethnicity, and gender. This volume of work by twelve young scholars highlights new work at this fruitful nexus.In historical and social studies, new methodologies from social theory, cultural anthropology, and gender studies have emerged that take religion explicitly into account and thereby illumine other cultural values. In theology, too, increased appreciation for the cultural location of all theologies and theologians has led to more contextual theologies and cultural-specific religious insights. The volume sheds particular light on the role of religious agency in African American and Caribbean social transformations (such as post-Civil-War laws and the lunch-counter struggles of the 1960s) and religious practices (such as folk healing, church women's roles in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, religious music). But the volume also offers new, ethnically influenced theological perspectives: specific contributions to Carribean, Cuban, womanist theologies and explorations of sacramental theology, ecotheology, and spirituality.

During World War II, unprecedented employment avenues opened up for women and minorities in U.S. defense industries at the same time that massive population shifts and the war challenged Americans to rethink notions of race. At this extraordinary historical moment, Mexican American women found new means to exercise control over their lives in the home, workplace, and nation. In From Coveralls to Zoot Suits, Elizabeth R. Escobedo explores how, as war workers and volunteers, dance hostesses and zoot suiters, respectable young ladies and rebellious daughters, these young women used wartime conditions to serve the United States in its time of need and to pursue their own desires. But even after the war, as Escobedo shows, Mexican American women had to continue challenging workplace inequities and confronting family and communal resistance to their broadening public presence. Highlighting seldom heard voices of the "Greatest Generation," Escobedo examines these contradictions within Mexican families and their communities, exploring the impact of youth culture, outside employment, and family relations on the lives of women whose home-front experiences and everyday life choices would fundamentally alter the history of a generation.

Some thinkers label this a "new"racism and call for new political responses to it. Using the experiences of African American women and men as a touchstone for analysis, Patricia Hill Collins examines new forms of racism as well as political responses to it. In this incisive and stimulating book, renowned social theorist Patricia Hill Collins investigates how nationalism has operated and re-emerged in the wake of contemporary globalization and offers an interpretation of how black nationalism works today in the wake of changing black youth identity. Hers is the first study to analyze the interplay of racism, nationalism, and feminism in the context of twenty-first century black America. From Black Power to Hip Hop covers a wide range of topics including the significance of race and ethnicity to the American national identity; how ideas about motherhood affect population policies; African American use of black nationalism ideologies as anti-racist practice; and the relationship between black nationalism, feminism and women in the hip-hop generation.

A professor of sociology explores how black feminist thought confronts the injustices of poverty and white supremacy, and argues that those operating outside the mainstream emphasize sociological themes based on assumptions different than those commonly accepted.

Beginning with a single dealer who lands in a small Virginia town and sets about turning high school football stars into heroin overdose statistics, journalist Beth Macy endeavors to answer a grieving mother's question--why her only son died--and comes away with a harrowing story of greed and need. From the introduction of OxyContin in 1996, Macy parses how America embraced a medical culture where overtreatment with painkillers became the norm. The unemployed use painkillers both to numb the pain of joblessness and pay their bills, while privileged teens trade pills in cul-de-sacs, and even high school standouts fall prey to prostitution, jail, and death. Through unsparing, yet deeply human portraits of the families and first responders struggling to ameliorate this epidemic, each facet of the crisis comes into focus.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented an important case study, on a global scale, of how democracy works - and fails to work - today. From leadership to citizenship, from due process to checks and balances, from globalization to misinformation, from solidarity within and across borders to the role of expertise, key democratic concepts both old and new are now being put to the test. The future of democracy around the world is at issue as today's governments manage their responses to the pandemic. Bringing together some of today's most creative thinkers, these essays offer a variety of inquiries into democracy during the global pandemic with a view to imagining post-crisis political conditions. Representing different regions and disciplines, including law, politics, philosophy, religion, and sociology, eighteen voices offer different outlooks - optimistic and pessimistic - on the future.

The populations of American cities have always included poor people, but the predicament of the urban poor has worsened over time. Their social capital, that is, the connections and organizations that traditionally enabled them to form communities, has shredded. Economically comfortable Americans have come to increasingly care less about the plight of the urban poor and to think of them in terms of “us and them.” Considered lazy paupers in the early nineteenth century, the urban poor came to be seen as a violent criminal “underclass” by the end of the twentieth. Living primarily in the nation’s deindustrialized inner cities and making up nearly 15 percent of the population, today’s urban poor are oppressed people living in the midst of American affluence. This book examines how law works for, against, and with regard to the urban poor, with “law” being understood broadly to include not only laws but also legal proceedings and institutions. Law is too complicated and variable to be seen as simply a club used to beat down the urban poor, but it does work largely in negative ways for them. An essential text for both law students and those drawn to areas of social justice, Containment and Condemnation shows how law helps create, expand, and perpetuate contemporary urban poverty.

"When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, the black community owned less than one percent of the United States' total wealth. More than one hundred and fifty years later, that number has barely budged. The Color of Money seeks to explain the stubborn persistence of this racial wealth gap by focusing on the generators of wealth in the black community: black banks. With the civil rights movement in full swing, President Nixon promoted "black capitalism," a plan to support black banks and minority-owned businesses. But the catch-22 of black banking is that the very institutions needed to help communities escape the deep poverty caused by discrimination and segregation inevitably became victims of that same poverty. In this timely and eye-opening account, Baradaran challenges the long-standing belief that black communities could ever really hope to accumulate wealth in a segregated economy"--Back cover.

In Black Sexual Politics, one of America's most influential writers on race and gender explores how images of Black sexuality have been used to maintain the color line and how they threaten to spread a new brand of racism around the world today.

"One doctor's passionate and profound memoir of his experience grappling with race, bias, and the unique health problems of black AmericansWhen Damon Tweedy begins medical school, he envisions a bright future where his segregated, working-class background will become largely irrelevant. Instead, he finds that he has joined a new world where race is front and center. The recipient of a scholarship designed to increase black student enrollment, Tweedy soon meets a professor who bluntly questions whether he belongs in medical school, a moment that crystallizes the challenges he will face throughout his career. Making matters worse, in lecture after lecture the common refrain for numerous diseases resounds, "More common in blacks than whites." Black Man in a White Coat examines the complex ways in which both black doctors and patients must navigate the difficult and often contradictory terrain of race and medicine. As Tweedy transforms from student to practicing physician, he discovers how often race influences his encounters with patients. Through their stories, he illustrates the complex social, cultural, and economic factors at the root of most health problems in the black community. These issues take on greater meaning when Tweedy is himself diagnosed with a chronic disease far more common among black people. In this powerful, moving, and deeply empathic book, Tweedy explores the challenges confronting black doctors, and the disproportionate health burdens faced by black patients, ultimately seeking a way forward to better treatment and more compassionate care"--;"When Damon Tweedy first enters the halls of Duke University Medical School on a full scholarship, he envisions a bright future where his segregated, working class background will become largely irrelevant. Instead, he finds that he has joined a new world where race is front and center. When one of his first professors mistakes him for a maintenance worker, it is a moment that crystallizes the challenges he will face throughout his early career. Making matters worse, in lecture after lecture the common refrain for numerous diseases resounds, "More common in blacks than whites." In riveting, honest prose, Black Man in a White Coat examines the complex ways in which both black doctors and patients must navigate the difficult and often contradictory terrain of race and medicine. As Tweedy transforms from student to practicing physician, he discovers how often race influences his encounters with patients. Through their stories, he illustrates the complex social, cultural, and economic factors at the root of most health problems in the black community. These elements take on greater meaning when Tweedy finds himself diagnosed with a chronic disease far more common among black people. In this powerful, moving, and compassionate book, Tweedy deftly explores the challenges confronting black doctors, and the disproportionate health burdens faced by black patients, ultimately seeking a way forward to better treatment and more compassionate care.- For readers of Atul Gawande, Sandeep Jauhar, Pauline W. Chen, and Henrietta Lacks"--

Beyond Respectability charts the development of African American women as public intellectuals and the evolution of their thought from the end of the 1800s through the Black Power era of the 1970s. Eschewing the Great Race Man paradigm so prominent in contemporary discourse, Brittney C. Cooper looks at the far-reaching intellectual achievements of female thinkers and activists like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Barrier Williams, Pauli Murray, and Toni Cade Bambara. Cooper delves into the processes that transformed these women and others into racial leadership figures, including long-overdue discussions of their theoretical output and personal experiences. As Cooper shows, their body of work critically reshaped our understandings of race and gender discourse. It also confronted entrenched ideas of how--and who--produced racial knowledge.

Before the Civil War, colonization schemes and black laws threatened to deport former slaves born in the United States. Birthright Citizens recovers the story of how African American activists remade national belonging through battles in legislatures, conventions, and courthouses. They faced formidable opposition, most notoriously from the US Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott. Still, Martha S. Jones explains, no single case defined their status. Former slaves studied law, secured allies, and conducted themselves like citizens, establishing their status through local, everyday claims. All along they argued that birth guaranteed their rights. With fresh archival sources and an ambitious reframing of constitutional law-making before the Civil War, Jones shows how the Fourteenth Amendment constitutionalized the birthright principle, and black Americans' aspirations were realized. Birthright Citizens tells how African American activists radically transformed the terms of citizenship for all Americans.

"The Black Power movement is usually associated with heroic, iconic figures, like Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X, but largely missing from stories about the Black freedom struggle are the hundreds of ordinary foot soldiers who were just as essential to the movement. Stayed on Freedom presents a new history of Black Power by focusing on two unheralded organizers: Zoharah Robinson and Michael Simmons. Robinson was born in Memphis, raised by her grandmother who told her stories of slavery and taught her the value of self-reliance. Simmons was born in Philadelphia, a child of the Great Migration. They met in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, where Robinson was one of the only woman project directors in Mississippi Freedom Summer, after she had dropped out of college to work in the movement full-time. Falling in love while organizing against the war in Vietnam and raising the call for Black Power, their simultaneous commitment to each other and social change took them from SNCC, to the Nation of Islam, to a global movement, as they fought for social justice well after the 1960s. By centering the lives of Robinson and Simmons, Stayed On Freedom offers a history of Black Power that is more expansive, complex, and personal than those previously written. Historian Dan Berger shows how Black Power linked the political futures of African Americans with those of people in Angola, Cambodia, Cuba, South Africa, and the Soviet Union, making it a global movement for workers and women's rights, for peace and popular democracy. Robinson's and Simmons's activism blurs the divides -- between North and South, faith and secular, the US and the world, and the past and the present -- typically applied to Black Power. And, in contrast to conventional surveys of the history of civil rights, Stayed on Freedom is an intimate story anchored in lives of the people who made the movements move, where heroism mingles with uncertainty over decades of intensive political commitment. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews with Robinson and Simmons, their families and their friends, in addition to immense archival research, Berger weaves a joyous and intricate history of the Black Power movement, providing a powerful portrait of two people trying to make a life while working to make a better world"--

"With journalistic skill, heart, and hope, Requiem for the Massacre reckons with the racial tension in Tulsa, Oklahoma one hundred years after the most infamous act of racial violence in American history"--;"More than one hundred years ago, the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, perpetrated a massacre against its Black residents. For generations, the true story was ignored, covered up, and diminished by those in power and in a position to preserve the status quo. Blending memoir and immersive journalism, RJ Young shows how, today, Tulsa combats its racist past while remaining all too tolerant of racial injustice.Requiem for the Massacre is a cultural excavation of Tulsa one hundred years after one of the worst acts of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. Young focuses on unearthing the narrative surrounding previously all-Black Greenwood district while challenging an apocryphal narrative that includes so-called Black Wall Street, Booker T. Washington, and Black exceptionalism. Young provides a firsthand account of the centennial events commemorating Tulsa's darkest day as the city attempts to reckon with its self-image, commercialization of its atrocity, and the aftermath of the massacre that shows how things have changed and how they have stayed woefully the same..." --

"This book analyzes how the particular dynamics and effects emerging from the COVID-19 crisis both impact and are perceived by its most vulnerable yet visionary populations, based on their pragmatic and prescient analysis of the American experiment of freedom with regards to race and religion. Without a doubt, this book addresses the various ways the COVID-19 crisis marks not merely a moment in time, but also a world-historical event that threatens to leave its imprint on lives and cultures for decades to come"--

In eighteen oral histories, this volume tells the stories of men and women who have been needlessly swept up in the War on Terror, and who have found themselves subject to rendition and torture, to workplace discrimination, bullying, or FBI surveillance and harassment. Includes: a sixteen-year-old Muslim American seized from her home by the FBI, and forced to wear a tracking bracelet for the next three years; a mother of a missing 9/11 first responder and her husband searching for their son, even as the media hounded them and portrayed their son as a possible terrorist in hiding; a Sikh man whose brother was the first reported hate murder victim after 9/11. -- Based on publisher's description and page 4 of cover.

"A journey for justice turned into a love story when Maya Moore, one of the WNBA's brightest stars, married the man she helped free from prison, Jonathan Irons. Jonathan was only sixteen when he was arrested for a crime he did not commit. Maya Moore's family met Jonathan through a prison ministry program in 1999 and over time developed a close bond with him. Maya met Jonathan in 2007, shortly before her freshman year at the University of Connecticut, where she became one of the most heralded women's basketball players in collegiate history. She visited him often throughout the years, as well as sending him letters and books as he fought for his freedom; ultimately, she became a strong voice for prosecutorial changes. She stunned the sports world when she announced in February 2019 that she would step away from her career in women's basketball, in part so she could help Jonathan in what they hoped would be his final appeal. In March 2020, his conviction was overturned by a state judge in Jefferson City, Mo. In this inspiring memoir, the couple will explore their unwavering faith, their deep connection, and how Maya stepped away from basketball to pursue justice both to prove Jonathan's innocence and inspire activism in others"--

"This book examines how deep structural racism embedded in the fabric of American society leads to worse health outcomes and lower life expectancy for people of color. By presenting evidence of discrimination in housing, education, employment, and the criminal justice system, Dayna Bowen Matthew shows how racial inequality pervades American society and the multitude of ways that this undermines the health of minority populations. The author provides a path forward for overcoming these massive barriers to health and ensuring that everyone has an equal opportunity to be healthy. She encourages health providers to take a leading role in the fight to dismantle the structural inequities their patients face"--

'Indefinite' is an ethnographic study of life in a contemporary county jail system. Having been arrested and jailed, Michael L. Walker turned his experience into an examination of jails from the inside out, revealing the physical and emotional experience of doing time, the set of strategies prisoners use to endure it, and the deputies who use race to control prisoners and the kinds of experiences prisoners had.

"A field guide to the memorials, museums, and practices that commemorate white supremacy in the United States nd how to reimagine a more deeply shared cultural infrastructure for the future"--;Monuments, museums, and everyday patriotic practices have made headlines for most of the twenty-first century, yet they are seldom look at together or understood explicitly as tools used by particular people in particular times and places to shape the culture in particular ways. Hass explore the complicated histories of sites of cultural infrastructure: memorials in parks, museums visited by school kids, and routine practices of patriotism. She unearths legacies of white supremacy and traces movements to reevaluate and resist countless sites that have been doing this work, and asks that we look for sites that actually work to tell us who we are, how we came to be, and who belongs in the country. -- adapted from jacket

"This book starts the conversation about what attorneys can do to improve both health and justice outcomes for people of diverse backgrounds who have mental illness. Focusing on the role of litigators working in the criminal justice system-particularly prosecutors and defense attorneys-this book offers an overview of foundational concepts, lawyering skills, and legal theories that attorneys can use in day-to-day practice as they work toward achieving fair and equitable access to justice for all"--

In Everyday Violence against Black and Latinx LGBT Communities, Siobhan Brooks argues that hate crimes and violence against Black and Latinx LGBT people are the products of institutions and ideologies that exist both outside and inside of Black and Latinx communities. Brooks analyzes families, educational systems, healthcare industries, and religious spaces as institutions that can perpetuate and transform the political and cultural beliefs and attitudes that engender violence toward LGBT Black and Latinx people--back cover.