Results by title
237 books match the query 'Race & Ethnic Relations' and 20 start with c
Caribbean American Narratives of Belonging
Vivian Nun Halloran
The Ohio State University Press, 2023
In Caribbean American Narratives of Belonging, Vivian Nun Halloran analyzes memoirs, picture books, comic books, young adult novels, musicals, and television shows through which Caribbean Americans recount and celebrate their contributions to contemporary politics, culture, and activism in the United States. The writers, civil servants, illustrators, performers, and entertainers whose work is discussed here show what it is like to fit in and be included within the body politic. From civic memoirs by Sonia Sotomayor and others, to West Side Story, Hamilton, and Into the Spider-Verse, these texts share a forward-looking perspective, distinct from the more nostalgic rhetoric of traditional diasporic texts that privilege connections to the islands of origin.
There is no one way of being Caribbean. Diasporic communities exhibit a broad spectrum of ethnic, racial, religious, linguistic, and political qualities. Claiming a Caribbean American identity asks wider society to recognize and affirm hybridity in ways that challenge binaristic conceptions of race and nationality. Halloran provides a common language and critical framework to discuss the achievements of members of the Caribbean diaspora and their considerable cultural and political capital as evident in their contributions to literature and popular culture.
Carry the Rock
Race, Football, and the Soul of an American CityJay Jennings
University of Arkansas Press, 2023
Carry the Rock tells the story of the dramatic ups and downs of a high school football season and reveals a city struggling with its legacy of racial discrimination and the complex issues of contemporary segregation. In the season Jennings masterfully chronicles, Cox finds his ideas sorely tested in his attempts to unify the team, and the result is an account brimming with humor, compassion, frustration, and honesty. What Friday Night Lights did for small-town Texas, Carry the Rock does for the urban South and for any place like Little Rock where sports, race, and community intersect.
Cedric J. Robinson
On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of ResistanceCedric J. Robinson
Pluto Press, 2019
"Like W. E. B. Du Bois, Michel Foucault, Sylvia Wynter, and Edward Said, Robinson was that rare polymath capable of seeing the whole....He left behind a body of work to which we must return constantly and urgently"—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams
Cedric J. Robinson is one of the doyens of Black Studies and a pioneer in study of the Black Radical Tradition. His works have been essential texts, deconstructing racial capitalism and inspiring insurgent movements from Ferguson, Missouri to the West Bank. For the first time, Robinson's essays come together, spanning over four decades and reflective of his diverse interests in the interconnections between culture and politics, radical social theory, and classic and modern political philosophy.
Themes explored include Africa and Black internationalism, World politics, race and US Foreign Policy, representations of blackness in popular culture, and reflections on popular resistance to racial capitalism, white supremacy and more. Essays here include:
*The Black Detective and American Memory
*Slavery and the Platonic Origins of Anti-Democracy
*Africa: In Hock to History and the Banks
*Blaxploitation and the Misrepresentation of Liberalism
*The Mulatta on Film
*Race, Capitalism, and Anti-democracy
*The Killing in Ferguson
*And much more!
Accompanied by an introduction by H. L. T. Quan and a foreword by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, this collection, which includes previously unpublished materials, extends the many contributions by a giant in Black radical thought.
Changing Minds
Social Movements’ Cultural ImpactsFrancesca Polletta
Russell Sage Foundation, 2025
Polletta and Amenta examine the trajectories of U.S. social movements, including the old-age pension movements of the 1930s and 1940s, the Black rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the women’s movement of the 1970s, right-wing movements in the 1980s and 1990s, and the environmental movement up to the present, to determine when, why, and how social movements change culture. They find that influential movements are featured in the news, but not only in the news. Movement perspectives may appear also in opinion and commentary outlets, on television talk shows and dramas, in movies, stand-up comedy, and viral memes. Popular culture producers remake movement messages as they transmit them, sometimes in ways that make those messages compelling. For example, while the news largely ignored feminists’ challenge to inequality in the home, popular cultural outlets turned “liberation” into a resonant demand for women’s right to self-fulfillment outside the home and within it. Widespread attention to the movement may lead people to change their minds individually. But more substantial change is likely when companies, schools, and other organizations outside government strive to get out in front of a newly legitimate issue, whether environmental sustainability or racial equity, by adopting movement-supportive norms and practices. Eventually, ideas associated with a movement may become a new common sense—though not always the ideas that the movement intended.
Throughout Changing Minds, Polletta and Amenta provide activists with strategies for getting their message heard and acted on. They suggest how movement actors can get into the news as political players or experts rather than lawbreakers or zealots. They show when it makes sense for activists to work with popular cultural producers and when they should create their own cultural outlets. They explain why the routes to cultural influence have changed and why urging people to take one easy step to save the planet can do more harm than good.
Changing Minds is a fascinating exploration of why and how some social movements have caused profound shifts in society.
Checkpoint 300
Colonial Space in PalestineMark Griffiths
University of Minnesota Press, 2025
Tracing how a notorious checkpoint shapes power, resistance, and lives in Palestine
Checkpoint 300, the highly securitized border facility between occupied Bethlehem and Jerusalem, is a central feature of Israeli control of Palestinian land and life. An apparatus of turnstiles, overcrowded corridors, and invasive inspections, the checkpoint regulates the movement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, granting access to some while excluding most. Offering a nuanced exploration of space, Mark Griffiths reveals Checkpoint 300 as a stark symbol of Israeli colonialism that embodies larger systems of control and violence.
Griffiths’s sensitive and timely work highlights the myriad ways Palestinians are affected by Israel’s spatial control—whether they travel through the checkpoint or not—demonstrating how colonial infrastructures of inequity extend far beyond their physical boundaries to shape daily life. Drawing on nearly a decade of fieldwork, Griffiths examines how colonial power infiltrates family dynamics, enforces gendered mobility restrictions, shapes local economies, and extends into the global exchange of capital and security technologies. He also underscores how Palestinians endure and resist under oppressive conditions and how indigenous forms of life and living are sustained, illuminating how colonial space is contested and countered, unmade and remade.
Blending meticulous research with vivid human stories to show the lived realities of borders, power, and resistance in the West Bank, Checkpoint 300 portrays the checkpoint as an entry into the ways that colonial space is formed through security infrastructure that is both the product and producer of wider geographies of oppression, complicity, and control.
Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.
Chesnutt and Realism
A Study of the NovelsRyan Simmons
University of Alabama Press, 2006
Provides an important examination of Charles Chesnutt as a practitioner of realism
Although Chesnutt is typically acknowledged as the most prominent African American writer of the realist period, scholars have paid little attention to the central question of this study: what does it mean to call Chesnutt a realist? As a writer whose career was restricted by the dismal racial politics of his era, Chesnutt refused to conform to literary conventions for depicting race. Nor did he use his imaginative skills to evade the realities he and other African Americans faced. Rather, he experimented with ways of portraying reality that could elicit an appropriate, proportionate response to it, as Ryan Simmons demonstrates in extended readings of each of Chesnutt’s novels, including important unpublished works overlooked by previous critics.
In addition, Chesnutt and Realism addresses a curiously neglected subject in American literary studies—the relationship between American literary realism and race. By taking Chesnutt seriously as a contributor to realism, this book articulates the strategies by which one African American intellectual helped to define the discourses that influenced his fate.
Child Benefits
The Smart Investment for America's FutureJane Waldfogel
Russell Sage Foundation, 2025
Drawing on research from peer countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development as well as the United States, Waldfogel shows that a child benefit would prevent poverty and hardship and protect children from deep poverty and income instability. The research is clear that families would spend the money from a child benefit on food, clothing, and other items for their children and that a child benefit would not have large negative impacts on parental employment or family decisions about fertility. It also shows that a child benefit would promote short- and longer-term child and family wellbeing. Child benefits have been shown to enhance opportunity and benefit society through healthier and better-educated young adults and stronger and more stable families. And rigorous benefit-cost analyses indicate that a child benefit, while costly, would more than pay for itself, yielding a large return on investment.
Waldfogel evaluates four current, major proposals for a child benefit and provides recommendations for a policy that would deliver the best outcomes for children and families and the best return on investment. She argues that such a policy would be more generous, not tied to parental employment or earnings, available to all parents but phased out for higher-income families, delivered in monthly payments through the tax system, and provided in addition to existing social programs.
Child Benefits provides fascinating insights on the history and impacts of child benefits and makes a clear and definitive argument for the establishment of a child benefit in the United States.
Chronicle of a Genocide Foretold
Myanmar and the RohingyaPenny Green
Rutgers University Press, 2027
Chronicle of a Genocide Foretold is a powerful account of one of the most devastating human crises of the 21st century. Drawing on firsthand research conducted in Burma (Myanmar) and neighboring countries, the book uncovers how the Rohingya Muslims have been systematically isolated, impoverished, and targeted in a state-led genocidal campaign. Through more than 150 interviews with survivors, local officials, religious leaders, and international actors, the authors reveal how discrimination, mass displacement, and organized brutality have created conditions that meet the legal, criminological, and moral definition of genocide. The book also challenges the silence and complicity of the international community. Accessible and grounded in rigorous research, this book speaks to scholars, activists, policymakers, and anyone concerned with justice, human rights, and the global failure to prevent genocide.
Cinema Civil Rights
Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood EraScott, Ellen C
Rutgers University Press, 2015
Cinema's Original Sin
D.W. Griffith, American Racism, and the Rise of Film CulturePaul McEwan
University of Texas Press, 2022
For over a century, cinephiles and film scholars have had to grapple with an ugly artifact that sits at the beginnings of film history. D. W. Griffith’s profoundly racist epic, The Birth of a Nation, inspired controversy and protest at its 1915 release and was defended as both a true history of Reconstruction (although it was based on fiction) and a new achievement in cinematic art. Paul McEwan examines the long and shifting history of its reception, revealing how the film became not just a cinematic landmark but also an influential force in American aesthetics and intellectual life.
In every decade since 1915, filmmakers, museums, academics, programmers, and film fans have had to figure out how to deal with this troublesome object, and their choices have profoundly influenced both film culture and the notion that films can be works of art. Some critics tried to set aside the film’s racism and concentrate on the form, while others tried to relegate that racism safely to the past. McEwan argues that from the earliest film retrospectives in the 1920s to the rise of remix culture in the present day, controversies about this film and its meaning have profoundly shaped our understandings of film, race, and art.
Civil Rights in Bakersfield
Segregation and Multiracial Activism in the Central ValleyOliver A. Rosales
University of Texas Press, 2024
2024 Outstanding Book Award, National Association for Ethnic Studies
2025 Honorable Mention, Norris & Carol Hundley Award, Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association
2025 The Ambassador Julian Nava Best Ethnic Studies Book, International Latino Book Awards
A multiracial history of civil rights coalitions beyond the farm worker movement in twentieth-century Bakersfield, California.
In Civil Rights in Bakersfield, Oliver Rosales uncovers the role of the multiracial west in shaping the course of US civil rights history. Focusing on Bakersfield, one of the few sizable cities within California’s Central Valley for much of the twentieth century in a region most commonly known as a bastion of political conservatism, oil, and industrial agriculture, Rosales documents how multiracial coalitions emerged to challenge histories of racial segregation and discrimination. He recounts how the region was home to both the historic farm worker movement, led by César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and Larry Itliong, and also a robust multiracial civil rights movement beyond the fields. This multiracial push for civil rights reform included struggles for fair housing, school integration, public health, media representation, and greater political representation for Black and Brown communities. In expanding on this history of multiracial activism, Rosales further explores the challenges activists faced in community organizing and how the legacies of coalition building contribute to ongoing activist efforts in the Central Valley of today.
Climate Freedoms
Julie Sze
University of Minnesota Press, 2027
A bold reimagining of climate justice as a collective struggle for freedom, grounded in hope, resistance, and transformative change
In Climate Freedoms, Julie Sze reframes climate justice as a freedom movement, offering a new lens on one of the defining crises of our time. Rather than treating despair as inevitable, Sze argues that denial is a prison and despair sustains the status quo, reinforcing systems built on domination and extraction. Alternatively, climate justice movements can advance a positive vision of collective freedom—one rooted in care, reciprocity, and the possibility of livable worlds.
Centering the perspectives of those most impacted and least responsible for climate disasters, Sze engages climate reparations and traces the connections between climate justice and abolitionist, decolonial, Indigenous, feminist, and Black radical traditions. By analyzing movement stories sparked by climate change–induced disasters specifically affecting frontline communities in the Caribbean, Small Island States in the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and Indigenous communities across the United States, Sze explores how environmental harm is inseparable from colonialism and racial capitalism. These community-based movements challenge narrow, individualist notions of freedom, emphasizing shared responsibility and interconnected futures across local and global scales.
Sze develops three interrelated freedoms: the epistemic freedom to recognize injustice, the imaginative freedom to envision alternatives, and the transformative freedom to create change. These freedoms illuminate how climate justice movements cultivate resistance, survivance, and collective continuance in the face of crisis. The result is a form of grounded hope: clear-eyed about ongoing harm, yet committed to building life-affirming futures.
Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.
Clothed Villainy
Acting White in Early Modern DramaJamie Paris
University of Alabama Press, 2026
Examines how centuries-old stagecraft shaped modern racial politics—and why the performance of whiteness still commands the spotlight.
From Shakespearean blackface to the alt-right’s khaki-clad protests, Clothed Villainy: Acting White in in Early Modern Drama by Jamie Paris confronts the uncomfortable truths of racial performance across centuries. Paris argues that whiteness is not a fixed identity but a precarious and performative construct—shaped and sustained through actions, appearances, and cultural scripts.
Drawing on critical race theory, performance studies, and Indigenous scholarship, Clothed Villainy traces how racial scripts—whether “playing Black,” “playing Indian,” or especially “playing white”—have been used to uphold white supremacy and erase marginalized identities. By examining the costuming and characterization of white actors portraying Black villains on the early modern stage, Paris reveals how these theatrical traditions continue to echo in contemporary racial politics.
Written with bold clarity and personal insight, this book opens space for reimagining race, history, and identity through a more critical and inclusive lens. Clothed Villainy is essential reading for scholars, students, and anyone seeking to understand the deep-rooted performance of race in society and how we might reimagine it for a more equitable future.
Collateral Damages
Landlords and the Urban Housing CrisisMeredith Greif
Russell Sage Foundation, 2022
For three years, Greif followed sixty private landlords serving low- and moderate-income residents in the Cleveland, Ohio, metropolitan area to better understand how local regulations, such as criminal activity nuisance ordinances (CANOs) and local water billing regulations, affect their landlording practices. CANOs are intended to protect communities by discouraging criminal activity on private properties. Property owners can face financial and criminal sanctions if they do not abate nuisance activities, which can include littering, noise, drug use, and calls for police assistance, including calls for domestic violence. Local water billing regulations hold landlords responsible for delinquent water bills, even in cases where the account is registered in the tenant’s name. Greif finds that such laws often increase landlords’ sense of “financial precarity” – the real or perceived uncertainty that their business is financially unsustainable – by holding them responsible for behavior they feel is out of their control. Feelings of financial uncertainty led some landlords to use illegitimate business practices against their tenants, including harassment, oversurveillance, poor property upkeep, and illegal evictions. And to avoid to financial penalties associated with CANOs and delinquent water bills, some landlords engage in discriminatory screening of vulnerable potential tenants who are unemployed or have histories of domestic violence or drug use. In this sense, by promoting a sense of financial insecurity among landlords, laws meant to protect renters ultimately had the opposite effect.
While some landlords, particularly those who rented a larger number of units, were able to operate their businesses both lawfully and profitably, the majority could not. Greif offers practical recommendations to address the concerns of small- and mid-sized landlords, such as regular meetings that bring landlords and local authorities together to engage in constructive dialogue about local housing policy, issues, and concerns. She also proposes policy recommendations to protect renters, such as establishing the right to counsel for lower-income tenants in eviction hearings and enacting a federal renter’s tax credit.
Collateral Damages is an enlightening investigation on how local laws and practices perpetuate disadvantage among marginalized populations and communities, in ways that are hidden and often unintended.
Colorblind Tools
Global Technologies of Racial PowerMarzia Milazzo
Northwestern University Press, 2023
Winner of the 2023 Association for Ethnic Studies Outstanding Book Award
A study of anti-Blackness and white supremacy across four continents demonstrates that colorblindness is neither new nor a subtype of racist ideology, but a constitutive technology of racism
In Colorblind Tools, Marzia Milazzo offers a transnational account of anti-Blackness and white supremacy that pushes against the dominant emphasis on historical change pervading current racial theory. This emphasis on change, she contends, misses critical lessons from the past.
Bringing together a capacious archive of texts on race produced in Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, the United States, and South Africa from multiple disciplines and genres, Milazzo uncovers transnational continuities in structural racism and white supremacist discourse from the inception of colonial modernity to the present. In the process, she traces the global workings of what she calls colorblind tools: technologies and strategies that at once camouflage and reproduce white domination. Whether examining Rijno van der Riet’s defense of slavery in the Cape Colony, discourses of racial mixture in Latin American eugenics and their reverberations in contemporary scholarship, the pitfalls of white “antiracism,” or Chicana indigenist aesthetics, Milazzo illustrates how white people collectively disavow racism to maintain power across national boundaries, and how anti-Black and colonial logics can be reproduced even in some decolonial literatures. Milazzo’s groundbreaking study proves that colorblindness is not new, nor is it a subtype of racist ideology or a hallmark of our era. It is a constitutive technology of racism—a tool the master cannot do without.
Community, Cosmopolitanism and the Problem of Human Commonality
Vered Amit and Nigel Rapport
Pluto Press, 2012
In this follow up to their widely read earlier volume, The Trouble with Community, Vered Amit and Nigel Rapport ask: 'Do notions of community remain central to our sense of who we are, in the dislocating context of globalization, or can we see beyond community closures to a human whole?'
This volume explores the variable nature of contemporary sociality. It focuses on the ethical, organizational and emotional claims and opportunities sought or fashioned for mobilizing and evading social collectivities in a world of mobile subjects. Here is an examination of the tensions and interactions between everyday forms of fluid fellowship, culturally normative claims to identity, and opportunities for realizing a universal humanity.
The book offers a new perspective on human commonality through a dialogue between two eminent anthropologists who come from distinct, but complementary positions.
Conditionally Accepted
Navigating Higher Education from the MarginsEdited by Eric Joy Denise and Bertin M. Louis, Jr.
University of Texas Press, 2024
A collection of essays that provides advice and strategies for BIPOC scholars on how to survive, thrive, and resist in academic institutions.
Conditionally Accepted builds upon an eponymous blog on InsideHigherEd.com, which is now a decade-old national platform for BIPOC academics in the United States. Bringing together perspectives from academics of color on navigating intersecting forms of injustice in the academy, each chapter offers situated knowledge about experiencing—and resisting—marginalization in academia. Contextualized within existing scholarship, these personal narratives speak to institutional betrayals while highlighting agency and sharing stories of surviving on treacherous terrain. Covering topics from professional development to the emptiness of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, and redefining what it means to be an academic in our contemporary moment, this edited collection directly confronts issues of systemic exclusion, discrimination, harassment, microaggressions, tokenism, and surveillance. Letting marginalized scholars know they are not alone, Conditionally Accepted offers concrete wisdom for readers seeking to navigate and transform oppressive academic institutions.
Constance Baker Motley
One Woman's Fight for Civil Rights and Equal Justice under LawGary L. Ford Jr.
University of Alabama Press, 2017
The story of NAACP’s sole female attorney. She shaped civil rights history as lead strategist and litigator from 1946–1964, arguing landmark desegregation cases and defending Martin Luther King Jr. and countless freedom fighters.
Constance Baker Motley was an African American woman; the daughter of immigrants from Nevis, British West Indies; a wife; and a mother who became a pioneer and trailblazer in the legal profession. She broke down barriers, overcame gender constraints, and operated outside the boundaries placed on black women by society and the civil rights movement. In Constance Baker Motley: One Woman’s Fight for Civil Rights and Equal Justice under Law, Gary L. Ford Jr. explores the key role Motley played in the legal fight to desegregate public schools as well as colleges, universities, housing, transportation, lunch counters, museums, libraries, parks, and other public accommodations.
The only female attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., Motley was also the only woman who argued desegregation cases in court during much of the civil rights movement. From 1946 through 1964, she was a key litigator and legal strategist for landmark civil rights cases including the Montgomery Bus Boycott and represented Martin Luther King Jr. as well as other protesters arrested and jailed as a result of their participation in sit-ins, marches, and freedom rides.
Motley was a leader who exhibited a leadership style that reflected her personality traits, skills, and strengths. She was a visionary who formed alliances and inspired local counsel to work with her to achieve the goals of the civil rights movement. As a leader and agent of change, she was committed to the cause of justice and she performed important work in the trenches in the South and behind the scene in courts that helped make the civil rights movement successful.
"Highly recommended."
—CHOICE
CounterStories from the Writing Center
Frankie Condon
Utah State University Press, 2021
Practicing what Derrick Bell has termed “creative truth telling,” these writers are not concerned with individual white women in writing centres but with the social, political, and cultural capital that is the historical birthright of white, straight, cis-gendered women, particularly in writing centre studies. The essays collected in this volume test, defy, and overflow the bounds of traditional academic discourse in the service of powerful testimony, witness, and counterstory.
CounterStories from the Writing Center is a must-read for writing centre directors, scholars, and tutors who are committed to antiracist pedagogy and offers a robust intersectional analysis to those who seek to understand the relationship between the work of writing centres and the problem of racism. Accessible and usable for both graduate and undergraduate students of writing centre theory and practice, this work troubles the field’s commonplaces and offers a rich envisioning of what writing centres materially committed to inclusion and equity might be and do.
Contributors: Dianna Baldwin, Nicole Caswell, Mitzi Ceballos, Romeo Garcia, Neisha-Anne Green, Doug Kern, T. Haltiwanger Morrison, Bernice Olivas, Moira Ozias, Trixie Smith, Willow Trevino
Cumboto
By Ramón Díaz Sánchez
University of Texas Press, 1969
This richly orchestrated novel, which won a national literary prize in the author's native land, Venezuela, also earned international recognition when the William Faulkner Foundation gave it an award as the most notable novel published in Ibero America between 1945 and 1962.
Cumboto's disturbing story unfolds during the early decades of the twentieth century on a Venezuelan coconut plantation, in a turbulent Faulknerian double world of black and white. It records the lives of Don Federico, the effete survivor of a once vigorous family of landowners, and his Black servant Natividad, who since the days of their mutual childhood has been his only friend.
Young Federico, psychologically impotent and lost to human contact, lives on as a lonely recluse in the century-old main house of "Cumboto," surrounded by descendants of African slaves who still manage, despite his apathy, to keep the plantation on its feet. Natividad's heroic and selfless struggle to redeem his friend by awakening him to the stirrings of the earth and life about him sets in motion a series of events that are to shatter Federico's childlike world: a headlong love affair with a voluptuous black girl, her terrified flight in the face of the bitter condemnation of her own people, and the unexpected appearance, twenty years later, of their extraordinary son.
Throughout the novel runs a recurring theme: neither race can survive without the other. Black and white, Díaz Sánchez suggests, embody contrasting aspects of human nature, which are not inimical but complementary: the languid intellectualism of European culture must be tempered with the indestructible vitality and intuition of the African soul if humanity is ever fully to comprehend the living essence of the world.