As a youngster growing up in the segregated South, I didn’t have access to books about Black history, culture, and experiences. Although I attended all-Black schools, the curriculum and the books in our libraries were mostly selected by an all-White school board. So, I didn’t know that much about the history of my own people. I would not begin to learn that until I attended college. When I married and had children of my own, my wife and I still had problems finding a variety of books for children and young readers for our own children to read. So, we started our own publishing company to address the need for these books.
The description of this book lays it all out for the readers. It says, “This is NOT a history book.
This is a book about the here and now. A book to help us better understand why we are where we are. A book about race. What a journey it takes the readers on, exploring the construct of race in this country.
In this important and compelling young readers adaptation of his National Book Award-winning title, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, writing with award-winning author Jason Reynolds, chronicles the story of anti-black, racist ideas over the course of American history.
Racist ideas in our country did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Instead, they were developed by some of the most brilliant minds in history to justify and rationalise the nation's deeply entrenched discriminatory policies. But while racist ideas have always been easy to fabricate and distribute, they can also be discredited. In shedding light on the history of racist ideas in America,…
History is learned in the worst way by most, through textbooks. Textbooks are written heavy on dates, timelines, and synopsizing events for multiple-choice, maybe a few, essay questions in schools. Whose facts are they? To paraphrase Frederick Douglass, what does the Fourth of July mean when you’re black? History is taught in these fact silos. But that’s not how it happens. History happens in layers that build under pressure, erupt, and shift like rock sediment evolving over time. I chose these five nonfiction books because they unapologetically show the fault lines and pressures that make American history. These books also uncover the hidden gems created by those societal pressures.
What I found most rewarding about this book by Wilma King is the way she widened the research net to include the ways women communicated with each other through diaries, letters, and various church records. This makes sense and creates tremendous value because newspaper reporters of this period weren’t knocking on the doors of Maria Stewart or other black female leaders for their opinions.
Thanks to King's diligent work, I got a much better sense of the important role these underrepresented women played in the antislavery and early civil rights movement.
Before 1865, slavery and freedom coexisted tenuously in America in an environment that made it possible not only for enslaved women to become free but also for emancipated women to suddenly lose their independence. Wilma King now examines a wide-ranging body of literature to show that, even in the face of economic deprivation and draconian legislation, many free black women were able to maintain some form of autonomy and lead meaningful lives. ""The Essence of Liberty"" blends social, political, and economic history to analyze black women's experience in both the North and the South, from the colonial period through emancipation.…
I'm a labor journalist. I've spent the past 20 years writing widely about inequality, class war, unions, and the way that power works in America. My parents were civil rights and antiwar activists in the 1960s and 70s, and they instilled in me an appreciation for the fact that social movements are often the only thing standing between regular people and exploitation. My curiosity about power imbalances in America drew me inexorably towards the absence of worker power and led me to the conclusion that the labor movement is the tool that can solve America's most profound problems. I grew up in Florida, live in Brooklyn, and report all over.
Iknow Kim Kelly not just as a great labor reporter but also as an activist in my own union.
Shebrings her deep enthusiasm for radicalism and social justice to her book, which givesreaders a ton of background on the ways that the labor movement has fought not just for rightsin the workplace but also for the rights of women, disabled workers, sex workers, prisoners, andother groups marginalized by society.
A great book to learn how organized labor is a full part ofthe struggle for equality.
This revelatory and inclusive book "unearths the stories of the people-farm laborers, domestic workers, factory employees-behind some of the labor movement's biggest successes" (The New York Times) from independent journalist and Teen Vogue labor columnist Kim Kelly.
Freed Black women organizing for protection in the Reconstruction-era South. Jewish immigrant garment workers braving deadly conditions for a sliver of independence. Asian American fieldworkers rejecting government-sanctioned indentured servitude across the Pacific. Incarcerated workers advocating for basic human rights and fair wages. The queer Black labor leader who helped orchestrate America's civil rights movement. These are only some of the heroes who propelled…
Kundnani writes about racial capitalism and Islamophobia, surveillance and political violence, and Black radical movements. He is the author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, extremism, and the domestic War on Terror and The End of Tolerance: racism in 21st century Britain, which was selected as a New Statesman book of the year. He has written for the Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, Vice, and The Intercept. Born in London, he moved to New York in 2010. A former editor of the journal Race & Class, he was miseducated at Cambridge University, and holds a PhD from London Metropolitan University. He has been an Open Society fellow and a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.
A. Sivanandan was a key intellectual of the Asian and African-Caribbean working-class movements in Britain during their insurgent heyday from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. The essays collected in this volume, written between 1982 and 1990, are about how those movements were disaggregated and undermined – laying the ground for today’s racist Britain. The son of a rural postal clerk from the hinterland of a minor colonial territory, Sivanandan fled Sri Lanka after the anti-Tamil pogroms of 1958 and arrived in London as a refugee. The socialism the book advocates is poetic, loving, joyful, and centered upon the experiences of Third World peoples. Not a single sentence of Communities of Resistance is clunky or lacking in feeling.
Ambalavaner Sivanandan was one of Britain's most influential radical thinkers. As Director of the Institute of Race Relations for forty years, his work changed the way that we think about race, racism, globalisation and resistance. Communities of Resistance collects together some of his most famous essays, including his excoriating polemic on Thatcherism and the left "The Hokum of New Times".
This updated edition contains a new preface by Gary Younge and an introduction by Arun Kundnani.
After hearing scholars argue that the “Latinx” category is solely an ethnicity, not a race, I questioned my assumption that “Latinx” was a race—and this led me to ask, “What is race?” To answer this, I read extensively, reflecting on my education and experience as a high school Spanish teacher. At the time, I was also studying a bilingual education program, and I started noticing how the program socially constructed race and the Latinx racialized group. Now, as a UCLA professor researching and teaching about Latinx education, I’m sharing insights in my book, a book that helps readers rethink race and see how schools construct Latinidad.
I picked up this book because I was struggling to make sense of the different ways race is theorized in education. Zeus Leonardo’s work blew me away—it’s like he handed me a map to navigate the complexities of race frameworks. He breaks down four major approaches, critiques their limitations, and then introduces his own concept of “race ambivalence,” which completely shifted my perspective.
What I love most is how Leonardo doesn’t just theorize; he challenges readers to think critically about how these frameworks play out in real life. This book isn’t just for educators—it’s for anyone who wants to understand the nuances of race in society. It’s a book I keep coming back to, and it’s one I always recommend to friends who are ready to dig deeper.
This is a comprehensive introduction to the main frameworks for thinking about, conducting research on, and teaching about race and racism in education. Renowned theoretician and philosopher Zeus Leonardo surveys the dominant race theories and, more specifically, focuses on those frameworks that are considered essential to cultivating a critical attitude toward race and racism. The book examines four frameworks: Critical Race Theory (CRT), Marxism, Whiteness Studies, and Cultural Studies, with a critique following each one in order to analyze its strengths and set its limits. The last chapter offers a theory of "race ambivalence," which combines aspects of all four…
After hearing scholars argue that the “Latinx” category is solely an ethnicity, not a race, I questioned my assumption that “Latinx” was a race—and this led me to ask, “What is race?” To answer this, I read extensively, reflecting on my education and experience as a high school Spanish teacher. At the time, I was also studying a bilingual education program, and I started noticing how the program socially constructed race and the Latinx racialized group. Now, as a UCLA professor researching and teaching about Latinx education, I’m sharing insights in my book, a book that helps readers rethink race and see how schools construct Latinidad.
This book is required reading for anyone wanting to understand how race operates in the U.S. as an ever-changing social construct.
While many people only read Chapter 4 (the one usually assigned in college courses), I urge you to read the whole book—it’s packed with insights that are often overlooked. One line that stopped me in my tracks was on page 111: “Once specific concepts of race are widely circulated and accepted as a social reality, racial difference is not dependent on visual observation alone.” That sentence reshaped how I thought about race in education and beyond.
Omi and Winant’s work is foundational, and it’s one I returned to while writing “How Schools Make Race” to grapple with the complexities of racial formation.
Twenty years since the publication of the Second Edition and more than thirty years since the publication of the original book, Racial Formation in the United States now arrives with each chapter radically revised and rewritten by authors Michael Omi and Howard Winant, but the overall purpose and vision of this classic remains the same: Omi and Winant provide an account of how concepts of race are created and transformed, how they become the focus of political conflict, and how they come to shape and permeate both identities and institutions. The steady journey of the U.S. toward a majority nonwhite…
I am a historian of the slave trade and slavery in the Rio de la Plata region (today’s Argentina and Uruguay) who then turned to the study of the traffic of captive Africans in the whole Spanish Americas. Yet, my love remains in the Rio de la Plata, what I call the “cold Caribbean.” Exciting books on the history of Africans and their descendants examine this region within the framework of Atlantic History, racial capitalism, gender, and the connections between twentieth-century Black culture and politics. As these recommendations are limited to English-language books, readers should note that much more has been published on this subject in Spanish and Portuguese.
George Reid Andrews is one of the founders of Afro-Latin American Studies. In Blackness in the White Nation, he combines the study of Afro-Uruguayan music and performance of candombe, the African-based rhythm that Uruguay shares with Argentina (as these countries share tango too), with the history of Afro-Uruguayan political mobilization in the twentieth century. Andrews guides readers into this story by telling them about his experience of learning candombe, and marching playing the drums on the streets of Montevideo, which makes this story unique. We learn how a country who depicts itself as predominantly populated by descendants of Europeans, appropriated African-based music and dance as a national rhythm.
Uruguay is not conventionally thought of as part of the African diaspora, yet during the period of Spanish colonial rule, thousands of enslaved Africans arrived in the country. Afro-Uruguayans played important roles in Uruguay's national life, creating the second-largest black press in Latin America, a racially defined political party, and numerous social and civic organizations.
Afro-Uruguayans were also central participants in the creation of Uruguayan popular culture and the country's principal musical forms, tango and candombe. Candombe, a style of African-inflected music, is one of the defining features of the nation's culture, embraced equally by white and black citizens.
I’m a writer and a Shakespeare and critical race studies scholar who’s always been intrigued by the invisible, artificial race-based boundaries in our world. I love analyzing the lives of literary characters and seeing how they can serve as mirrors for us along lines of gender, mental health, and more. My critical interests are informed by the fact that I grew up in a predominantly Black/Latino low-income neighborhood and attended an affluent, predominantly white private school from the sixth to twelfth grade. My adolescent experiences with inclusion/exclusion dynamics required me to reflect on race, for example, so I could understand and navigate the kinds of socio-cultural dynamics that affect us all.
I love this book not only because of the hard truths it tells in relation to racial whiteness and racism but also because of how Rankine’s writerly voice reverberates through one’s mind long after finishing the book.
As someone who sometimes finds it hard to sit still to finish a book, I did not have that issue with Just Us partly because of how diverse and stimulating the content is. In addition to including poetry and prose within the text, there are many images to see and study as one internalizes the urgent points made by a witty, seasoned author whose overall tone demands that readers be part of and sit with this “American conversation” that asks us to think deeply about power, privilege, inequality, whiteness and more.
Now in paperback, Claudia Rankine's "skyscraper in the literature on racism" (Christian Science Monitor)
In Just Us, Claudia Rankine invites us into a necessary conversation about Whiteness in America. What would it take for us to breach the silence, guilt, and violence that arise from addressing Whiteness for what it is? What are the consequences if we keep avoiding this conversation? What might it look like if we step into it? "I learned early that being right pales next to staying in the room," she writes.
This brilliant assembly of essays, poems, documents, and images disrupts the false comfort of…
Memory is capricious and impacts our view of the past. That’s why I do what I do! I am a twenty-year museum professional who began my career at Conner Prairie Interactive History Park, worked at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science for almost ten years, and am now part of the Arts & History department at the City and County of Broomfield. I have designed and developed programs and events, as well as managed teams in each of these stops. I seek to illuminate stories, elevate critical voices, and advocate for equity through the unique pathways of the arts, history, and museum magic.
I attended a university just down the road from Marion, Indiana, the site of an infamous lynching of two Black men (and the attempted lynching of a third) in 1930.
The prison from which these men were forcibly taken still stands on the main square in Marion. Many textbooks use the grisly photograph that Lawrence Beitler took of this event to illustrate the horrors of violence against African-Americans in postbellum United States.
Madison deftly weaves the lives, stories, and memories of resilient Black residents of Marion today with the story of the hate-filled mob that lynched Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp and the aftermath of the event in the community to illustrate that individual choices matter, and that how we view the past is shaped profoundly by historical trauma.
On a hot summer night in 1930, three black teenagers accused of murdering a young white man and raping his girlfriend waited for justice in an Indiana jail. A mob dragged them from the jail and lynched two of them. No one in Marion, Indiana was ever punished for the murders. In this gripping account, James H. Madison refutes the popular perception that lynching was confined to the South, and clarifies 20th century America's painful encounters with race, justice, and memory.
I have always loved cities, New York in particular. A few weeks after 9/11, I decided to study the rebuilding of the WTC site for my graduate thesis, compelled by the immensity of the project and the layers of conflict embedded in the reconstruction and memorialization. None of the books listed below are directly about 9/11, but the attacks and their aftermath thread through all of their stories. New York is an intense, fraught, sometimes fun, sometimes heartbreaking place, like these stories, which are listed from newest to oldest.
This essay collection isn’t exclusively about New York, but the four essays that open the collection are, and they are excellent. Biss writes personally about race relations in the city, and the United States. Her insights still feel relevant more than a decade later. She also refreshingly tackles the myth of New York, and the way that it is, as she says, overimagined.
A frank and fascinating exploration of race and racial identity, Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays begins with a series of lynchings and ends with a series of apologies. Eula Biss explores race in America and her response to the topic is informed by the experiences chronicled in these essays - teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting from an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of hurricane Katrina from a college town in Iowa, and settling in Chicago's most diverse neighbourhood.
As Biss moves across the country from New York to…
