Civil Rights Movements & the Law

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.

Despite political and social progress, African Americans still lag far behind economically.

As international health agencies warn that COVID-19 could become a pandemic, fears over the new coronavirus' spread have activated old, racist suspicions toward Asians and Asian Americans. It's part of a longer history in the United States, in which xenophobia has often been camouflaged as a concern for public health and hygiene.

Three African American ER physicians in Washington, D.C., recount experiences on their wards, where Black patients make up the vast majority of the city's COVID-19 fatalities.

Gilbert Gee is a professor at UCLA's Fielding School of Public Health, and he says the coronavirus outbreak reminds him of what happened during both the SARS and AIDS crises. As the battle against the current outbreak continues, Gee tells Hari Sreenivasan about racism's role in public health emergencies.

This paper addresses “Orientalization,” which I define as the objectification of Asian women as the “Oriental Woman”—the stereotypical image of the Ex…

In this report, Perilous Chronicle analyzes the first 90 days of prisoner resistance to COVID-19, beginning in March 2020. It describes the context for the wave of unrest, describes major events from this period, and draws conclusions based on the data collected for each event.

This article is written as a series of letters between a law professor and a medical doctor in reaction to the events surrounding the rise of the Black Lives Ma

The emergence of COVID-19, the novel coronavirus, is causing great concern due to its rapid spread and high death rates, particularly among vulnerable

List of resources from the Prison Policy Initiative about the criminal justice system and COVID-19.

Condemns Reopening Economy As “Reckless” Washington, DC (April 24, 2020) Today, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law issued a new demand letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), calling for increased transparency and immediate action in response to COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on Black communities and other communities of color.  This letter follows […]

On December 20th, Michigan-based family medicine physician Dr. Susan Moore died due to complications from COVID-19. Less than two weeks before her death, Moore shared her experience with racism at the Indiana hospital where she was being treated, showing yet another example of anti-Blackness and medical apartheid.

A half-dozen corrections agencies provide less detail than they did a year ago.

The already large racial wealth gap between white and black American households grew even wider after the Great Recession. Targeted policies are necessary to reverse this deepening divide.

The deaths of Layleen Polanco and Tony McDade highlight how Black trans Americans are treated and criminalized.