Book Selections

"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..." --

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.

Race is clearly a factor in government efforts to control dangerous drugs, but the precise ways that race affects drug laws remain difficult to pinpoint. Illuminating this elusive relationship, Unequal under Law lays out how decades of both manifest and latent racism helped shape a punitive U.S. drug policy whose onerous impact on racial minorities has been willfully ignored by Congress and the courts. Doris Marie Provine's engaging analysis traces the history of race in anti-drug efforts from the temperance movement of the early 1900s to the crack scare of the late twentieth century, showing how campaigns to criminalize drug use have always conjured images of feared minorities. Explaining how alarm over a threatening black drug trade fueled support in the 1980s for a mandatory minimum sentencing scheme of unprecedented severity, Provine contends that while our drug laws may no longer be racist by design, they remain racist in design. Moreover, their racial origins have long been ignored by every branch of government. This dangerous denial threatens our constitutional guarantee of equal protection of law and mutes a much-needed national discussion about institutionalized racism--a discussion that Unequal under Law promises to initiate.

On September 18, 1928, Myles Yutaka Fukunaga kidnapped and brutally murdered ten-year-old George Gill Jamieson in Waikîkî. Fukunaga, a nineteen-year-old nisei, or second-generation Japanese American, confessed to the crime. Within three weeks, authorities had convicted him and sentenced him to hang, despite questions about Fukunaga's sanity and a deeply flawed defense by his court-appointed attorneys. Jonathan Y. Okamura argues that officials "raced" Fukunaga to death--first viewing the accused only as Japanese despite the law supposedly being colorblind, and then hurrying to satisfy the Haole (white) community's demand for revenge. Okamura sets the case against an analysis of the racial hierarchy that undergirded Hawai'ian society, which was dominated by Haoles who saw themselves most threatened by the islands' sizable Japanese American community. The Fukunaga case and others like it in the 1920s reinforced Haole supremacy and maintained the racial boundary that separated Haoles from non-Haoles, particularly through racial injustice. As Okamura challenges the representation of Hawai i as a racial paradise, he reveals the ways Haoles usurped the criminal justice system and reevaluates the tense history of anti-Japanese racism in Hawai i.

The essays in this volume illuminate a central paradox in the post-colonial West: race remains a potent index of social, economic and political inequality even while racial discrimination has become unlawful, even anathema. The standard account of this paradox is that racial discrimination and inequality are unfortunate vestiges of the past, which an enlightened legal system is now engaged in extirpating. These essays reveal a different story: equality law preserves racial inequality even while denouncing it. The authors show how in country after country, legal rules define racism so narrowly and make racial discrimination so difficult to prove that inequality persists despite its symbolic extinction. This ground-breaking volume of English-language essays, aimed at academics and researchers, shows how critical race theory, an analytic approach developed in the United States, can shed light on the workings of race in political-legal systems as diverse as South Africa, New Zealand, France and Latin and South America.

Winner of the 1998 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award Grand Prize "An original, wise and courageous work that moves beyond sterile arguments and lifts the discussion of race and justice to a new and more hopeful level."--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. In this groundbreaking, powerfully reasoned, lucid work that is certain to provoke controversy, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy takes on a highly complex issue in a way that no one has before. Kennedy uncovers the long-standing failure of the justice system to protect blacks from criminals, probing allegations that blacks are victimized on a widespread basis by racially discriminatory prosecutions and punishments, but he also engages the debate over the wisdom and legality of using racial criteria in jury selection. He analyzes the responses of the legal system to accusations that appeals to racial prejudice have rendered trials unfair, and examines the idea that, under certain circumstances, members of one race are statistically more likely to be involved in crime than members of another. "An admirable, courageous, and meticulously fair and honest book."--New York Times Book Review "This book should be a standard for all law students."--Boston Globe

"This blisteringly candid discussion of the American dilemma in the age of Trump 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 leading lights of the legal profession and the fight for racial justice talk about the importance of reclaiming the racial narrative and keeping our eyes on the horizon as we work for justice in an unjust time. Covering topics as varied as "the commonality of pain," "when lawyers are heroes," 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, Ifill, Lynch, Stevenson, and Thompson also explore topics such as "when did 'public' become a dirty word" (hint, it has something to do with serving people of color), "you know what Jeff Sessions is going to say," and "what it means to be a civil rights lawyer in the age of Trump." Building on Stevenson's hugely successful Just Mercy, Lynch's national platform at the Justice Department, Ifill's role as one of the leading defenders of civil rights in the country, and the occasion of Thompson's launch of a new center on race, inequality, and the law at the NYU School of Law, A Perilous Path will speak loudly and clearly to everyone concerned about America's perpetual fault line."--Amazon.com.

"More than just a legal doctrine, color-blind constitutionalism has emerged as the defining metaphor of the post-Civil Rights era. Even for those challenging its constitutional authority, the language of color-blindness sets the terms of debate. Critics of color-blind constitutionalism are in this sense captured by the object of their critique. And yet, paradoxically, to enact a color-blind rule actually requires a heightened awareness of race. As such, color-blind constitutionalism represents a particular form of racial consciousness rather than an alternative to it. Challenging familiar understandings of race, rights, and American law, [this book] explores how current equal protection law renders the pursuit of racial equality constitutionally suspect. Identifying hierarchy rather than equality as an enduring constitutional norm, the book demonstrates how the pursuit of racial equality, historically, has been viewed as a violation of white rights. Arguing against conservative and liberal redemption narratives, both of which imagine racial equality as the perfection of American democracy, Is Racial Equality Unconstitutional? calls instead for a break from the current constitutional order, that it may be re-founded upon principles of racial democracy." -- Publisher's website.

Investigates the history and impact of the Second Amendment, how it was designed, and how it has been constructed from the start to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable.

"A groundbreaking expose about the alarming use of rap lyrics as criminal evidence to convict and incarcerate young men of color"--

What began as a neighborhood party during the summer of 1942 led to the largest mass murder trial in California's history. After young Jose Diaz was found murdered near Los Angeles' Sleepy Lagoon reservoir, 600 Mexican Americans were rounded up by the police, 24 were indicted, and 17 were convicted. But thanks to the efforts of crusading lawyers, Hollywood celebrities, and Mexican Americans throughout the nation, all 17 convictions were thrown out in an appellate decision that cited lack of evidence, coerced testimony, deprivation of the right to counsel, and judicial misconduct. Mark Weitz chronicles the Sleepy Lagoon case (People v. Zammora) from the streets of the L.A.'s Mexican-American neighborhoods to the criminal courts, through the appeals process, and to the ultimate release of the convicted. In the process, Weitz opens a window on the uneasy world of Hispanic-Anglo relations, which, exacerbated by an influx of Mexican immigrants, had simmered beneath the surface in California for a century and reached the boiling point by 1942. By demonstrating how an environment of hostility and fear had fostered a breakdown in the legal protections that should have been afforded to the Sleepy Lagoon defendants, Weitz also illuminates a vital episode in the evolution of defendants' rights--including the right to counsel and a fair and impartial trial. As the case unfolded, the prosecution and local media drew ominous comparisons between the supposed dangers posed by the Mexican-American defendants and the threat allegedly posed by thousands of Japanese Americans, whose sympathies had been called into question after Pearl Harbor. Weitz shows how Zammora demonstrates what it is like to literally be tried in the court of public opinion where the "opinion" has been shaped before the trial even begins. Now, as Americans once again feel threatened by outsiders--whether Islamic jihadists or illegal immigrants--Zammora provides a mirror showing us how we acted then compared to how we respond now. While much of what occurred in 1942 L.A. was unique to its time and place, Weitz's compelling narrative shows that many of the social, political, and culture issues that dominated America then are still with us today.

"The war is still raging. And [Gene Nichol]'s still fighting." --John Grisham North Carolina has, since 2013, undergone a greater political sea change than any other state. For the first time, seven years ago, state government became completely captured by a radicalized and aggressive Republican leadership determined to produce the most ultra-conservative political regime in the nation. In a remarkably brief time span, Republican lawmakers have moved successfully toward that goal. TheNew York Times refers to the project as "North Carolina's pioneering work in bigotry." Other states have begun to follow what they expressly deemed the "North Carolina playbook." Indecent Assembly lays out in detail, and with no small dose of passion, the agenda, purposes, impacts, and transgressions of the Republican North Carolina General Assembly since it came to dominate life in the Tar Heel State. Nichol outlines, without holding punches, the stoutest war waged against people of color and low-income citizens seen in America for a half-century. All-white Republican caucuses, dominating both houses of the General Assembly, have behaved essentially like a White People's Party, without the nomenclature. Bold steps have also been taken to diminish the equal dignity of women and an internationally famed crusade against LGBTQ+ Tar Heels has capped off what has become a state-based battle against the Fourteenth Amendment. But the Republican General Assembly has not stopped with substantive legal changes. It has attacked the fundaments of American constitutional government. In 2019, the state of North Carolina, in short, is involved in a brutal battle for its own decency. Ifthe contest is lost here, other states will likely abandon defining cornerstones of American liberty and equality as well. North Carolina today is not presented with the mere give and take of normal politics. It struggles over its meaning as a commonwealth and its future as a democracy.

In 1967, the US Supreme Court ruled that laws prohibiting interracial marriage were unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia. Although this case promotes marital freedom and racial equality, there are still significant legal and social barriers to the free formation of intimate relationships. Marriage continues to be the sole measure of commitment, mixed relationships continue to be rare, and same-sex marriage is only legal in 6 out of 50 states. Most discussion of Loving celebrates the symbolic dismantling of marital discrimination. This book, however, takes a more critical approach to ask how Loving has influenced the 'loving' of America. How far have we come since then and what effect did the case have on individual lives?

"In the first comprehensive account of the Supreme Court's race-related jurisprudence, a distinguished historian and a renowned civil rights lawyer scrutinize a legacy too often blighted by racial injustice. Discussing nearly 200 cases in historical context, the authors show the Court can still help fulfill the nation's promise of equality for all"--

A portrait of the historic Barack Obama era features essays originally published in "The Atlantic," including "Fear of a Black President" and "The Case for Reparations," as well as new essays revisiting each year of the Obama administration;""We were eight years in power" was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America's "first white president." But the story of these present-day eight years is not just about presidential politics. This book also examines the new voices, ideas, and movements for justice that emerged over this period--and the effects of the persistent shadow of our nation's old and unreconciled history. Coates powerfully examines the events of the Obama era from his intimate and revealing perspective--the point of view of a young writer who begins the journey in an unemployment office in Harlem and ends it in the Oval Office, interviewing a president. We Were Eight Years in Power features Coates's iconic essays first published in The Atlantic, including "Fear of a Black President," "The Case for Reparations," and "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration," along with eight fresh essays that revisit each year of the Obama administration through Coates's own experiences, observations, and intellectual development, capped by a bracingly original assessment of the election that fully illuminated the tragedy of the Obama era."--Dust jacket

"Rumors of Thomas Jefferson's sexual involvement with his slave Sally Hemings have circulated for two centuries. It remains, among all aspects of Jefferson's renowned life, perhaps the most hotly contested topic. With Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, Annette Gordon-Reed promises to intensify this ongoing debate as she identifies glaring inconsistencies in many noted scholars' evaluations of the existing evidence. She has assembled a fascinating and convincing argument: not that the alleged thirty-eight-year liaison necessarily took place but rather that the evidence for its taking place has been denied a fair hearing."--BOOK JACKET. "Possessing both a layperson's unfettered curiosity and a lawyer's logical mind, Annette Gordon-Reed writes with a style and compassion that are irresistible. Her analysis is accessible, with each chapter revolving around a key figure in the Hemings drama. The resulting portraits are engrossing and very personal. Gordon-Reed also brings a keen intuitive sense of the psychological complexities of human relationships - relationships that, in the real world, often develop regardless of status or race. The most compelling element of all, however, is her extensive and careful research, which often allows the evidence to speak for itself."--Jacket.

This handbook "offers powerful and practical tools to help you explore the history of racism, challenge stereotypes, and manage the stress and remorse that result from living in an unequal worlds. You'll understand your own racial identity, navigate daily and past experiences of racism, and examine ways racism affects all aspects of life-- from work to family to relationships. FInally, you'll discover how you can fight for racial justice, be an ally, and forge the building blocks needed to create a community of healing."--Cover.

On September 15, 1924, Martha Lum and her older sister Berda were barred from attending middle school in Rosedale, Mississippi. The girls were Chinese American and considered by the school to be "colored"; the school was for whites. This event would lead to the first US Supreme Court case to challenge the constitutionality of racial segregation in Southern public schools, thirty years before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. By confronting the "separate but equal" doctrine, the Lum family fought for the right to educate Chinese Americans in the white schools of the Jim Crow South. Using their groundbreaking lawsuit as a compass, Berard depicts the complicated condition of racial otherness in rural Southern society. The author evokes a time and place previously defined by black and white, a time and place that, until now, has never been viewed through the eyes of a forgotten third race. In vivid prose, the Mississippi Delta, an empire of cotton and a bastion of slavery, is reimagined to reveal the experiences of a lost immigrant community. Berard illuminates a forgotten chapter of America's past and uncovers the journey of an oppressed people in their struggle for equality. --From publisher description

The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson' is the story of Clarence Henderson, a wrongfully accused Black sharecropper who was sentenced to die three different times for a murder he didn't commit, and the prosecution desperate to pin the crime on him despite scant evidence. His first trial lasted only a day and featured a lackluster public defense. The book also tells the story of Homer Chase, a former World War II paratrooper and New England radical who was sent to the South by the Communist Party to recruit African Americans to the cause while offering them a chance at increased freedom. And it's the story of Thurgood Marshall's NAACP and their battle against not only entrenched racism but a Communist Party -- despite facing nearly as much prejudice as those they were trying to help -- intent on winning the hearts and minds of Black voters. The bitter battle between the two groups played out as the sides sparred over who would take the lead on Henderson's defense, a period in which he spent years in prison away from a daughter he had never seen. Through it all, The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson is a portrait of a community, and a country, at a crossroads, trying to choose between the path it knows is right and the path of least resistance. The case pitted powerful forces -- often those steering legal and journalistic institutions -- attempting to use racism and Red-Scare tactics against a populace that by and large believed the case against Henderson was suspect at best. But ultimately, it's a hopeful story about how even when things look dark, some small measure of justice can be achieved against all the odds, and actual progress is possible. It's the rare book that is a timely read, yet still manages to shed an informative light on America's past and future, as well as its present.

How did America recover after its years of civil war? How did freed men and women, former slaves, respond to their newly won freedom? David Roediger's radical new history redefines the idea of freedom after the jubilee, using fresh sources and texts to build on the leading historical accounts of Emancipation and Reconstruction. Reinstating ex-slaves' own "freedom dreams" in constructing these histories, Roediger creates a masterful account of the emancipation and its ramifications on a whole host of day-to-day concerns for Whites and Blacks alike, such as property relations, gender roles, and labor

Almost one-hundred years ago, W.E.B. Du Bois proposed the notion of the "talented tenth, " an African American elite that would serve as leaders and models for the larger black community. In this unprecedented collaboration, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cornel West--two of Du Bois's most prominent intellectual descendants--reassess that relationship and its implications for the future of black Americans. If the 1990s are the best of times for the heirs of the Talented Tenth, they are unquestionably worse for the growing black underclass. As they examine the origins of this widening gulf and propose solutions for it, Gates and West combine memoir and biography, social analysis and cultural survey into a book that is incisive and compassionate, cautionary and deeply stirring.

Derrick Jensen takes no prisoners in The Culture of Make Believe, his brilliant and eagerly awaited follow-up to his powerful and lyrical A Language Older Than Words. What begins as an exploration of the lines of thought and experience that run between the massive lynchings in early twentieth-century America to today's death squads in South America soon explodes into an examination of the very heart of our civilization. The Culture of Make Believe is a book that is as impeccably researched as it is moving, with conclusions as far-reaching as they are shocking.

Drawing on scores of interviews with black and white tobacco workers in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Robert Korstad brings to life the forgotten heroes of Local 22 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers of America-CIO. These workers confronted a system of racial capitalism that consigned African Americans to the basest jobs in the industry, perpetuated low wages for all southerners, and shored up white supremacy. Galvanized by the emergence of the CIO, African Americans took the lead in a campaign that saw a strong labor movement and the reenfranchisement of the southern poor as keys to reforming the South--and a reformed South as central to the survival and expansion of the New Deal. In the window of opportunity opened by World War II, they blurred the boundaries between home and work as they linked civil rights and labor rights in a bid for justice at work and in the public sphere. But civil rights unionism foundered in the maelstrom of the Cold War. Its defeat undermined later efforts by civil rights activists to raise issues of economic equality to the moral high ground occupied by the fight against legalized segregation and, Korstad contends, constrains the prospects for justice and democracy today.

"First published in 1961, and reissued in this sixtieth anniversary edition with a powerful new introduction by Cornel West, Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth is a masterful and timeless interrogation of race, colonialism, psychological trauma, and revolutionary struggle, and a continuing influence on movements from Black Lives Matter to decolonization. A landmark text for revolutionaries and activists, The Wretched of the Earth is an eternal touchstone for civil rights, anti-colonialism, psychiatric studies, and Black consciousness movements around the world. Alongside Cornel West's introduction, the book features critical essays by Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi K. Bhabha. This sixtieth anniversary edition of Fanon's most famous text stands proudly alongside such pillars of anti-colonialism and anti-racism as Edward Said's Orientalism and The Autobiography of Malcolm X"--

"The classic, bestselling book on the psychology of racism-now fully revised and updated. Walk into any racially mixed high school and you will see Black, White, and Latino youth clustered in their own groups. Is this self-segregation a problem to address or a coping strategy? Beverly Daniel Tatum, a renowned authority on the psychology of racism, argues that straight talk about our racial identities is essential if we are serious about enabling communication across racial and ethnic divides. These topics have only become more urgent as the national conversation about race is increasingly acrimonious. This fully revised edition is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the dynamics of race in America. "An unusually sensitive work about the racial barriers that still divide us in so many areas of life."--Jonathan Kozol"--;"Walk into any racially mixed high school and you will see black youth seated together in the cafeteria. Of course, it's not just the black kids sitting together--the white, Latino, Asian Pacific, and, in some regions, American Indian youth are clustered in their own groups, too. The same phenomenon can be observed in college dining halls, faculty lounges, and corporate cafeterias. What is going on here? Is this self-segregation a problem we should try to fix, or a coping strategy we should support? How can we get past our reluctance to talk about racial issues to even discuss it? Beverly Daniel Tatum, a renowned authority on the psychology of racism, asserts that we do not know how to talk about our racial differences: Whites are afraid of using the wrong words and being perceived as "racist" while parents of color are afraid of exposing their children to painful racial realities too soon. Using real-life examples and the latest research, Tatum presents strong evidence that straight talk about our racial identities-whatever they may be-is essential if we are serious about facilitating communication across racial and ethnic divides. This remarkable book, infused with great wisdom and humanity, has already helped hundreds of thousands of readers figure out where to start. These topics have only become more urgent in recent years, as the national conversation about race has become increasingly acrimonious-and sometimes violent. This fully revised and updated edition is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand-and perhaps someday fix-the problem of segregation in America"--

"Politicians often extoll the common sense of running government like a business. Indeed, business acumen was arguably the principal qualification of then-candidate Donald Trump to become president of the United States. Likening government to a business, however, invites another analogy: voters as employers. Employers are constrained by practical and legal considerations in choosing employees. For example, it's almost impossible to imagine a board of directors selecting Donald Trump as its CEO after the revelation of the Access Hollywood tape on which he boasted of grabbing women by their genitalia without their consent. The reputational and legal exposure for the business would be too great. Yet American voters elected Trump as the nation's CEO"--

"In his most recent book, Who We Be, Jeff Chang looked at how art and culture effected massive social changes in American society. Since the book was published, the country has been gripped by waves of racial discord, most notably the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. In these highly relevant, powerful essays, Chang examines some of the most contentious issues in the current discussion of race and inequality. Built around a central essay looking at the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the events in Ferguson, Missouri, surrounding the death of Michael Brown, Chang questions the value of "the diversity discussion" in an era of increasing racial and economic segregation. He unpacks the return of student protest across the country and reveals how the debate over inclusion and free speech was presaged by similar protests in the 1980s and 1990s. The author of Can't Stop Won't Stop looks at how culture impacts our understanding of the politics of this polarized moment. Throughout these essays Chang includes the voices of many of the leading activists as he charts how popular voices on the ground and in social media have catalyzed the push for protest and change."-- Provided by publisher

"When America makes progress toward racial equality, the systemic response is a backlash that rolls back those wins. This edition adapted from the author's White Rage especially for teens illuminates these dark moments of history." --;"This ... young adult adaptation brings her ideas to a new audience. When America achieves milestones of progress toward full and equal black participation in democracy, the systemic response is a consistent racist backlash that rolls back those wins. We Are Not Yet Equal examines five of these moments: The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with Jim Crow laws; the promise of new opportunities in the North during the Great Migration was limited when blacks were physically blocked from moving away from the South; the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 led to laws that disenfranchised millions of African American voters and a War on Drugs that disproportionally targeted blacks; and the election of President Obama led to an outburst of violence including the death of black teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri as well as the election of Donald Trump. This YA adaptation will be written in an approachable narrative style that provides teen readers with additional context to these historic moments, photographs and archival images, and additional backmatter and resources for teens."--Provided by publisher.

Segregation by Design draws on more than 100 years of quantitative and qualitative data from thousands of American cities to explore how local governments generate race and class segregation. Starting in the early twentieth century, cities have used their power of land use control to determine the location and availability of housing, amenities (such as parks), and negative land uses (such as garbage dumps). The result has been segregation - first within cities and more recently between them. Documenting changing patterns of segregation and their political mechanisms, Trounstine argues that city governments have pursued these policies to enhance the wealth and resources of white property owners at the expense of people of color and the poor. Contrary to leading theories of urban politics, local democracy has not functioned to represent all residents. The result is unequal access to fundamental local services - from schools, to safe neighborhoods, to clean water.

"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. The insights Dr. West brings to these complex problems remain relevant, provocative, creative, and compassionate. In a new introduction for the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, Dr. West argues that we are in the midst of a spiritual blackout characterized by imperial decline, racial animosity, and unchecked brutality and terror as seen in Baltimore, Ferguson, and Charlottesville. Calling for a moral and spiritual awakening, Dr. West finds hope in the collective and visionary resistance exemplified by the Movement for Black Lives, Standing Rock, and the Black freedom tradition. Now more than ever, Race Matters is an essential book for all Americans, helping us to build a genuine multiracial democracy in the new millennium."--Amazon.com.