America is the greatest ideal in history: “all men are created equal…” Sadly, Americans have never quite lived up to America. Only twice (Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement) have they even tried. As a black man, I live daily with the fruit of that failure, so I have an obvious personal investment in the subject. But I’m also drawn intellectually by an appalled fascination with the idea that any human beings can believe themselves superior by dint of their paint job or religion, or sex organs, or how they choose to use said sex organs. Why are we like this? That question has long vexed my reading and writing.
The fact that African-American men are funneled through the justice system at rates that dwarf every other demographic does not reflect a flaw in the system. Rather, it is the system, functioning as designed. With that revolutionary thesis, Michelle Alexander upended everything I thought I understood about race and crime.
In this ground-breaking volume, she dared me to see what was right before my eyes all the time: not simply that criminal justice in this country is deeply unfair but rather that it functions as a way of re-imposing upon black men a defacto Jim Crow sixty years after the original was sent slinking away into the dustbin of history.
In a bold and innovative argument, a rising legal star shows readers how the mass incarceration of a disproportionate number of black men amounts to a devastating system of racial control. This is a terrifying reality that exists in the UK as much as in the US. Despite the triumphant dismantling of the Jim Crow laws, the system that once forced African-Americans into a segregated second-class citizenship still haunts and the criminal justice system still unfairly targets black men and deprives an entire segment of the population of their basic rights.
There are other books on African-American history, some arguably even more authoritative. But this was the only one that felt to me as if the writer had dipped his pen in fire.
Lerone Bennett, Jr., traces African-American passages from the great kingdoms of early Africa through the 1619 encounter with Jamestown settlers that changed everything, up until (depending on which edition you read) about the middle 1980s and does so with a fierce moral urgency and poetic passion that drew me into the story and, more to the point, that implanted the story into me.
Traces black history from its origins in western Africa, through the transatlantic journey and slavery, the Reconstruction period, the Jim Crow era, and the civil rights movement, to life in the 1990s. Reprint. 35,000 first printing. $20,000 ad/promo.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
This book made me rethink everything I thought I understood about race and culture. David Roediger is among a group of academics (Matt Wray and Nell Irvin Painter are others) who have been exploring the idea of race as a construction, an invention of relatively recent origin.
It–to borrow the words of a student of mine with whom I shared this book’s findings–“blew my mind” to discover that markers of identity I was taught to consider fixed and immutable (i.e., black and white) were, in fact, created and enforced for the benefit of capitalist oligarchs, first in order to justify slavery and then, in order to control and exploit labor.
At the vanguard of the study of race and labour in American history, David R. Roediger is the author of the now-classic The Wages of Whiteness , a study of racism in the development of a white working class in nineteenth-century America. In Working Toward Whiteness , he continues that history into the twentieth century. He recounts how American ethnic groups considered white today-including Jewish-, Italian-, and Polish-Americans-once occupied a confused racial status in their new country. They eventually became part of white America thanks to the nascent labour movement, New Deal reforms, and a rise in home-buying. From ethnic…
This book breaks my heart. It covers the African-American experience in the postbellum years and into the early 20th Century. This was a time when the country might have chosen–and fleetingly seemed as if it would choose–to finally live up to its founding ideals.
Instead, the country chose another path, and Leon F. Litwack chronicles that path–mob violence, electoral intimidation, and official government indifference–in brutal color and unsparing detail. This is one of those books that makes me think of what might have been.
A searing history of life under Jim Crow that recalls the bloodiest and most repressive period in the history of race relations in the United States—and the painful record of discrimination that haunts us to this day. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Been in the Storm So Long.
"The stain of Jim Crow runs deep in 20th-century America.... Its effects remain the nation's most pressing business. Trouble in Mind is an absolutely essential account of its dreadful history and calamitous legacy." —The Washington Post
In April 1899, Black laborer Sam Hose killed his white boss in self-defense. Wrongly accused…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
My God, the way this man writes. There is an unforced elegance to his sentence structure and word choice that never fails to leave me with my metaphoric mouth agape, whether I’m nodding along with his arguments or, as sometimes happens, debating with him in my head.
Either way, Ta-Nehisi Coates is a clear-eyed and unsentimental observer of the hypocrisies, betrayals, and stubborn resilience that have characterized the African-American sojourn.
'I've been wondering who might fill the intellectual void after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates' Toni Morrison
'Searing. One of the foremost essayists on race in the West... [He] is responsible for some of the most important writing about what it is to be black in America today' Nikesh Shukla, editor of The Good Immigrant
An essential account of modern America, from Obama to Trump, from black lives matter to white supremacists rising - by the bestselling author of Between the World and Me
Obama's presidency was a watershed moment in American…
Two families, one secret, and a murder unavenged collide at the crescendo of the Civil Rights Movement. As protesters gather on a bridge in Selma to demand voting rights, a marcher named Adam learns that his father is not his father. His “real” father is a brutal white racist who raped his mom 22 years ago. Meanwhile, Luther stumbles upon a feeble old white man who once burned Luther’s parents alive as their nine-year-old son watched in helpless horror. But Luther isn’t nine—or helpless—anymore.
And as her brother and son face these crucibles, Thelma—who fled Alabama twenty years ago—is drawn back to the cradle of her nightmares to save them. But she might not even be able to save herself.
