603 books match the query 'Discrimination (incl. Prejudice, Racism, Colorism, etc.)' and 26 start with w

cover of W. E. B. Du Bois: Revolutionary Across the Color Line

W. E. B. Du Bois

Revolutionary Across the Color Line

Bill V. Mullen

Pluto Press, 2016

On the 27th August, 1963, the day before Martin Luther King electrified the world from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with the immortal words, 'I Have a Dream', the life of another giant of the Civil Rights movement quietly drew to a close in Accra, Ghana: W.E.B. DuBois. In this new biography, Bill V. Mullen interprets the seismic political developments of the Twentieth Century through Du Bois’s revolutionary life. 

Du Bois was born in Massachusetts in 1868, just three years after formal emancipation of America’s slaves. In his extraordinarily long and active political life, he would emerge as the first black man to earn a PhD from Harvard; surpass Booker T. Washington as the leading advocate for African American rights; co-found the NAACP, and involve himself in anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles across Asia and Africa. Beyond his Civil Rights work, Mullen also examines Du Bois's attitudes towards socialism, the USSR, China’s Communist Revolution, and the intersectional relationship between capitalism, poverty and racism. 

An accessible introduction to a towering figure of American Civil Rights, perfect for anyone wanting to engage with Du Bois’s life and work.
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cover of Waiting for Gautreaux: A Story of Segregation, Housing, and the Black Ghetto

Waiting for Gautreaux

A Story of Segregation, Housing, and the Black Ghetto

Alexander Polikoff

Northwestern University Press, 2007

Winner, 2006 The American Lawyer Lifetime Achievement Award

On his thirty-ninth birthday in 1966, Alexander Polikoff, a volunteer ACLU attorney and partner in a Chicago law firm, met some friends to discuss a pro bono case. Over lunch, the four talked about the Chicago Housing Authority construction program. All the new public housing, it seemed, was going into black neighborhoods. If discrimination was prohibited in public schools, wasn't it also prohibited in public housing?

And so began Gautreaux v. CHA and HUD, a case that from its rocky beginnings would roll on year after year, decade after decade, carrying Polikoff and his colleagues to the nation's Supreme Court (to face then-solicitor general Robert Bork); establishing precedents for suits against the discriminatory policies of local housing authorities, often abetted by HUD; and setting the stage for a nationwide experiment aimed at ending the concentration--and racialization--of poverty through public housing. Sometimes Kafkaesque, sometimes simply inspiring, and never less than absorbing, the story of Gautreaux, told by its principal lawyer, moves with ease through local and national civil rights history, legal details, political matters, and the personal costs--and rewards--of a commitment to fairness, equality, and justice. Both the memoir of a dedicated lawyer, and the narrative of a tenacious pursuit of equality, this story--itself a critical, still-unfolding chapter in recent American history--urges us to take an essential step in ending the racial inequality that Alexis de Toqueville prophetically named America's "most formidable evil."
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cover of Wake: Why the Battle over Diverse Public Schools Still Matters

Wake

Why the Battle over Diverse Public Schools Still Matters

Karey Alison Harwood

Rutgers University Press, 2024

The Wake County Public School System was once described as a beacon of hope for American school districts. It was both academically successful and successfully integrated. It accomplished these goals through the hard work of teachers and administrators, and through a student assignment policy that made sure no school in the countywide district became a high poverty school. Although most students attended their closest school, the “diversity policy” modified where some students were assigned to make sure no school had more than 40% of its students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch or more than 25% performing below grade level. When the school board election of 2009 swept into office a majority who favored “neighborhood schools,” the diversity policy that had governed student assignment for years was eliminated. Wake: Why the Battle Over Diverse Public Schools Still Matters tells the story of the aftermath of that election, including the fierce public debate that ensued during school board meetings and in the pages of the local newspaper, and the groundswell of community support that voted in a pro-diversity school board in 2011. What was at stake in those years was the fundamental direction of the largest school district in North Carolina and the 14th largest in the U.S. Would it maintain a commitment to diverse schools, and if so, how would it balance that commitment with various competing interests and demands? Through hundreds of published opinion articles and several in depth interviews with community leaders, Wake examines the substance of that debate and explores the community’s vision for public education. Wake also explores the importance of knowing the history of a place, including the history of school segregation. Wake County’s example still resonates, and the battle over diverse public schools still matters, because owning responsibility for the problem of segregated schools (or not) will shape the direction of America’s future.
 
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cover of War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification

War Against the People

Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification

Jeff Halper

Pluto Press, 2015

* Shortlisted for the Palestine Book Awards 2016*

Modern warfare has a new form. The days of international combat are fading. So how do major world powers maintain control over their people today?

This book is a disturbing insight into the new ways world powers such as the US, Israel, Britain and China forge war today. It is a subliminal war of surveillance and whitewashed terror, conducted through new, high-tech military apparatuses, designed and first used in Israel against the Palestinian population. Including nano-technology, hidden camera systems, information databases on civilian activity, automated targeting systems and unmanned drones, it is used to control the very people the nation's leaders profess to serve.

Jeff Halper reveals that this practice is much more insidious than was previously thought. As Western governments claw back individual liberties, War Against the People is a reminder that fundamental human rights are being compromised for vast sections of the world, and that this is a subject that should concern everyone.
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cover of War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence

War on Autism

On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence

Anne McGuire

University of Michigan Press, 2016

War on Autism examines autism as a historically specific and powerladen cultural phenomenon that has much to teach about the social organization of a neoliberal western modernity. Bringing together a variety of interpretive theoretical perspectives including critical disability studies, queer and critical race theory, and cultural studies, the book analyzes the social significance and productive effects of contemporary discourses of autism as these are produced and circulated in the field of autism advocacy. Anne McGuire discusses how in the field of autism advocacy, autism often appears as an abbreviation, its multiple meanings distilled to various “red flag” warnings in awareness campaigns, bulleted biomedical ”facts” in information pamphlets, or worrisome statistics in policy reports. She analyzes the relationships between these fragmentary enactments of autism and traces their continuities to reveal an underlying, powerful, and ubiquitous logic of violence that casts autism as a pathological threat that advocacy must work to eliminate. Such logic, McGuire contends, functions to delimit the role of the “good” autism advocate to one who is positioned “against” autism.

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cover of Warring over Valor: How Race and Gender Shaped American Military Heroism in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Warring over Valor

How Race and Gender Shaped American Military Heroism in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Wendt, Simon

Rutgers University Press, 2019

By focusing on how the idea of heroism on the battlefield helped construct, perpetuate, and challenge racial and gender hierarchies in the United States between World War I and the present, Warring over Valor provides fresh perspectives on the history of American military heroism. The book offers two major insights into the history of military heroism. First, it reveals a precarious ambiguity in the efforts of minorities such as African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, women, and gay men to be recognized as heroic soldiers. Paradoxically, America’s heroism discourse allowed them to press their case for full membership in the nation, but doing so simultaneously validated the dichotomous interpretations of race and gender they repudiated. The ambiguous role of marginalized groups in war-related hero-making processes also testifies to this volume’s second general insight: the durability and tenacity of the masculine warrior hero in U.S. society and culture. Warring over Valor bridges a gap in the historiography of heroism and military affairs. 
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cover of We Fight To Win: Inequality and the Politics of Youth Activism

We Fight To Win

Inequality and the Politics of Youth Activism

Hava Rachel Gordon

Rutgers University Press, 2009

In an adult-dominated society, teenagers are often shut out of participation in politics. We Fight to Win offers a compelling account of young people's attempts to get involved in community politics, and documents the battles waged to form youth movements and create social change in schools and neighborhoods.

Hava Rachel Gordon compares the struggles and successes of two very different youth movements: a mostly white, middle-class youth activist network in Portland, Oregon, and a working-class network of minority youth in Oakland, California. She examines how these young activists navigate schools, families, community organizations, and the mainstream media, and employ a variety of strategies to make their voices heard on some of today's most pressing issuesùwar, school funding, the environmental crisis, the prison industrial complex, standardized testing, corporate accountability, and educational reform. We Fight to Win is one of the first books to focus on adolescence and political action and deftly explore the ways that the politics of youth activism are structured by age inequality as well as race, class, and gender.

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cover of We Shall Overcome: Press Photographs of Nashville during the Civil Rights Era

We Shall Overcome

Press Photographs of Nashville during the Civil Rights Era

Kathryn E. Delmez

Vanderbilt University Press, 2023

Named One of the "Best Art Books of 2018" by the New York Times

Fifty years after Martin Luther King Jr.'s death—and at a time when race relations and social justice are again at the forefront of our country's consciousness—this book expands on a Frist Art Museum exhibition to present a selection of approximately one hundred photographs that document an important period in Nashville's struggle for racial equality. The images were taken between 1957, the year that desegregation in public schools began, and 1968, when the National Guard was called in to surround the state capitol in the wake of the civil rights leader's assassination in Memphis.

Of central significance are photographs of lunch counter sit-ins in early 1960, led by a group of students, including John Lewis (who contributed the book's foreword) and Diane Nash, from local historically black colleges and universities. The demonstrations were so successful that King stated just a few weeks later at Fisk University: "I did not come to Nashville to bring inspiration but to gain inspiration from the great movement that has taken place in this community." The role that Nashville played in the national civil rights movement as a hub for training students in nonviolent protest and as the first Southern city to integrate places of business is a story that warrants reexamination.

The book also provides an opportunity to consider the role of images and the media in shaping public opinion, a relevant subject in today's news-saturated climate. Photographs from the archives of both daily newspapers are included: the Tennessean, which was the more liberal publication, and the Nashville Banner, a conservative paper whose leadership seemed less interested in covering events related to racial issues. Some of the photographs in the exhibition had been selected to be published in the papers, but many were not, and their disclosure reveals insight into the editorial process. In several images, other photojournalists and news crews are visible, serving as a reminder of the almost constant presence of the camera during these historic times.

Essays by Linda Wynn of Fisk University and the Tennessee Historical Commission and Susan H. Edwards, executive director of the Frist Art Museum, offer historical context on Nashville during the civil rights era and on photojournalism, respectively. Congressman John Lewis's foreword recounts memories of his time in Nashville and reminds us that there is still work to be done to build King's Beloved Community.
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cover of West of Jim Crow: The Fight against California's Color Line

West of Jim Crow

The Fight against California's Color Line

Lynn M. Hudson

University of Illinois Press, 2020

African Americans who moved to California in hopes of finding freedom and full citizenship instead faced all-too-familiar racial segregation. As one transplant put it, "The only difference between Pasadena and Mississippi is the way they are spelled." From the beaches to streetcars to schools, the Golden State—in contrast to its reputation for tolerance—perfected many methods of controlling people of color.

Lynn M. Hudson deepens our understanding of the practices that African Americans in the West deployed to dismantle Jim Crow in the quest for civil rights prior to the 1960s. Faced with institutionalized racism, black Californians used both established and improvised tactics to resist and survive the state's color line. Hudson rediscovers forgotten stories like the experimental all-black community of Allensworth, the California Ku Klux Klan's campaign of terror against African Americans, the bitter struggle to integrate public swimming pools in Pasadena and elsewhere, and segregationists' preoccupation with gender and sexuality.

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cover of What Is Islamophobia?: Racism, Social Movements and the State

What Is Islamophobia?

Racism, Social Movements and the State

Edited by Narzanin Massoumi, Tom Mills and David Miller

Pluto Press, 2017

Since Israel began its construction in 2002, the Wall has sparked intense debate, being condemned as illegal by the International Court of Justice. 

Israel claims it is a security measure to protect Israeli citizens from terrorist attacks. Opponents point to the serious impact on the rights of Palestinians, depriving them of their land, mobility and access to health and educational services. 

This book explores the Palestinian experience of the Wall in their international context. What are the real intentions behind the Israeli security argument? Is it a means of securing territory permanently through an illegal annexation of East Jerusalem? The West Bank Wall is a cutting account of the impact of the wall and how it affects prospects of a future peace in the Middle East.
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cover of Whatever Happened to Antisemitism?: Redefinition and the Myth of the 'Collective Jew'

Whatever Happened to Antisemitism?

Redefinition and the Myth of the 'Collective Jew'

Antony Lerman

Pluto Press, 2020

'This elegantly written, erudite book is essential reading for all of us, whatever our identifications' - Lynne Segal

Antisemitism is one of the most controversial topics of our time. The public, academics, journalists, activists and Jewish people themselves are divided over its meaning. Antony Lerman shows that this is a result of a 30-year process of redefinition of the phenomenon, casting Israel, problematically defined as the 'persecuted collective Jew', as one of its main targets.

This political project has taken the notion of the 'new antisemitism' and codified it in the flawed International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's 'working definition' of antisemitism. This text is the glue holding together an international network comprising the Israeli government, pro-Israel advocacy groups, Zionist organizations, Jewish communal defence bodies and sympathetic governments fighting a war against those who would criticize Israel.

The consequences of this redefinition have been alarming, supressing free speech on Palestine/Israel, legitimizing Islamophobic right-wing forces, and politicizing principled opposition to antisemitism.

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cover of Whatever Happened to Antisemitism?: Redefinition and the Myth of the 'Collective Jew'

Whatever Happened to Antisemitism?

Redefinition and the Myth of the 'Collective Jew'

Antony Lerman

Pluto Press, 2020

'This elegantly written, erudite book is essential reading for all of us, whatever our identifications' - Lynne Segal

Antisemitism is one of the most controversial topics of our time. The public, academics, journalists, activists and Jewish people themselves are divided over its meaning. Antony Lerman shows that this is a result of a 30-year process of redefinition of the phenomenon, casting Israel, problematically defined as the ‘persecuted collective Jew’, as one of its main targets.

This political project has taken the notion of the ‘new antisemitism’ and codified it in the flawed International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s ‘working definition’ of antisemitism. This text is the glue holding together an international network comprising the Israeli government, pro-Israel advocacy groups, Zionist organizations, Jewish communal defence bodies and sympathetic governments fighting a war against those who would criticize Israel.

The consequences of this redefinition have been alarming, supressing free speech on Palestine/Israel, legitimizing Islamophobic right-wing forces, and politicizing principled opposition to antisemitism.

[more]
cover of When Care is Conditional: Immigrants and the U.S. Safety Net

When Care is Conditional

Immigrants and the U.S. Safety Net

Dani Carrillo

Russell Sage Foundation, 2024

From its inception, the public safety net in the United States has excluded many people because of their race, gendered roles, or other factors. As a result, they must prove their moral worthiness to get resources for themselves and their families. In When Care Is Conditional, sociologist Dani Carrillo reveals the ramifications of this conditional safety net by focusing on one particularly vulnerable population: undocumented immigrants.

Through in-depth interviews with Latinx immigrants in northern California, Carrillo examines three circumstances—place, gender, and immigration status—that intersect to influence an individual’s access to health care, food assistance, and other benefits. She demonstrates that place of residence affects undocumented immigrants’ ability to get care since more services are available in urban areas, where many immigrants cannot afford to live, than suburban areas, where public transportation is limited. She also shows that while both men and women who are undocumented have difficulty obtaining care, men often confront more challenges. Undocumented women who are pregnant or mothers are eligible for some government safety net programs and rely on informal coethnic networks or a “guiding figure”—a relative, friend, neighbor, or coworker—who explains how to get care and makes them feel confident in accessing it. Most undocumented men, in contrast, are not eligible for public programs except in a medical emergency and often lack someone to guide them directly to care. Men sometimes steer one another to jobs through worker centers—where they may learn about various services and take advantage of those that increase their employability, like English or computer classes—but a culture of masculinity leads them to downplay medical problems and seek health care only in a crisis.   
 
As undocumented immigrants navigate this exclusionary system, Carrillo finds that they resist the rhetoric stigmatizing them as lawbreakers. Dismissing the importance of “papers” and highlighting their work ethic, they question the fairness of U.S. immigration policies and challenge ideas about who deserves care.

Carrillo offers concrete recommendations, such as improving labor conditions and reexamining benefit eligibility, to increase access to care for not only undocumented immigrants but also people who have been excluded because of their race, criminal record, gender identity, sexual orientation, or disability. She argues that working with and across populations creates a powerful form of solidarity in advocating for inclusive care.
When Care Is Conditional provides compelling insights into how safety net and immigration policies intersect to affect people’s everyday lives and calls for a cultural shift so that the United States can provide unconditional care for all.
 
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cover of When Diversity Drops: Race, Religion, and Affirmative Action in Higher Education

When Diversity Drops

Race, Religion, and Affirmative Action in Higher Education

Park, Julie J.

Rutgers University Press, 2013

Julie J. Park examines how losing racial diversity in a university affects the everyday lives of its students. She uses a student organization, the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) at “California University,” as a case study to show how reductions in racial diversity impact the ability of students to sustain multiethnic communities.

The story documents IVCF’s evolution from a predominantly white group that rarely addressed race to the most racially diverse campus fellowship at the university. However, its ability to maintain its multiethnic membership was severely hampered by the drop in black enrollment at California University following the passage of Proposition 209, a statewide affirmative action ban.

Park demonstrates how the friendships that students have—or do not have—across racial lines are not just a matter of personal preference or choice; they take place in the contexts that are inevitably shaped by the demographic conditions of the university. She contends that a strong organizational commitment to diversity, while essential, cannot sustain racially diverse student subcultures. Her work makes a critical contribution to our understanding of race and inequality in collegiate life and is a valuable resource for educators and researchers interested in the influence of racial politics on students’ lives.
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cover of When Protest Becomes Crime: Politics and Law in Liberal Democracies

When Protest Becomes Crime

Politics and Law in Liberal Democracies

Carolijn Terwindt

Pluto Press, 2019

How does protest become criminalised? Applying an anthropological perspective to political and legal conflicts, Carolijn Terwindt urges us to critically question the underlying interests and logic of prosecuting protesters. The book draws upon ethnographic research in Chile, Spain, and the United States to trace prosecutorial narratives in three protracted contentious episodes in liberal democracies. Terwindt examines the conflict between Chilean landowners and the indigenous Mapuche people, the Spanish state and the Basque independence movement, and the United States' criminalisation of 'eco-terrorists.' Exploring how patterns and mechanisms of prosecutorial narrative emerge through distinct political, social and democratic contexts, Terwindt shines a light on how prosecutorial narratives in each episode changed significantly over time. Challenging the law and justice system and warning against relying on criminal law to deal with socio-political conflicts, Terwindt's observations have implications for a wide range of actors and constituencies, including social movement activists, scholars, and prosecutors.
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cover of When Time Warps: The Lived Experience of Gender, Race, and Sexual Violence

When Time Warps

The Lived Experience of Gender, Race, and Sexual Violence

Megan Burke

University of Minnesota Press, 2019

An inquiry into the phenomenology of “woman” based in the relationship between lived time and sexual violence

 
Feminist phenomenologists have long understood a woman’s life as inhibited, confined, and constrained by sexual violence. In this important inquiry, author Megan Burke both builds and expands on this legacy by examining the production of normative womanhood through racist tropes and colonial domination. Ultimately, Burke charts a new feminist phenomenology based in the relationship between lived time and sexual violence.

By focusing on time instead of space, When Time Warps places sexualized racism at the center of the way “woman” is lived. Burke transports questions of time and gender outside the realm of the historical, making provocative new insights into how gendered individuals live time, and how their temporal existence is changed through particular experiences.

Providing a potent reexamination of the theory of Simone de Beauvoir—while also bringing to the fore important women of color theorists and engaging in the temporal aspects of #MeToo—When Time Warps makes a necessary, lasting contribution to our understanding of gender, race, and sexual violence.

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cover of Where the Hood At?: Fifty Years of Change in Black Neighborhoods

Where the Hood At?

Fifty Years of Change in Black Neighborhoods

Michael C. Lens

Russell Sage Foundation, 2024

Substantial gaps exist between Black Americans and other racial and ethnic groups in the U.S., most glaringly Whites, across virtually all quality-of-life indicators. Despite strong evidence that neighborhood residence affects life outcomes, we lack a comprehensive picture of Black neighborhood conditions and how they have changed over time. In Where the Hood At? urban planning and public policy scholar Michael C. Lens examines the characteristics and trajectories of Black neighborhoods across the U.S. over the fifty years since the Fair Housing Act.
 
Hip hop music was born out of Black neighborhoods in the 1970s and has evolved alongside them. In Where the Hood At? Lens uses rap’s growth and influence across the country to frame discussions about the development and conditions of Black neighborhoods. Lens finds that social and economic improvement in Black neighborhoods since the 1970s has been slow. However, how well Black neighborhoods are doing varies substantially by region. Overall, Black neighborhoods in the South are doing well and growing quickly. Washington D.C. and Atlanta, in particular, stand out as centers of Black affluence. Black neighborhoods in the Midwest and the Rust Belt, on the other hand, are particularly disadvantaged. The welfare of Black neighborhoods is related not only to factors within neighborhoods, such as the unemployment rate, but also to characteristics of the larger metropolitan area, such as overall income inequality. Lens finds that while gentrification is increasingly prevalent, it is growing slowly, and is not as pressing an issue as public discourse would make it seem. Instead, concentrated disadvantage is by far the most common and pressing problem in Black neighborhoods.
 
Lens argues that Black neighborhoods represent urban America’s greatest policy failures, and that recent housing policies have only had mild success. He provides several suggestions for policies with the goal of uplifting Black neighborhoods. One radical proposal is enacting policies and programs, such as tax breaks for entrepreneurs or other small business owners, that would encourage Black Americans to move back to the South. Black Americans migrating South would have a better chance at moving to an advantaged Black neighborhood as improving neighborhood location is higher when moving across regions. It would also help Black Americans expand their political and economic power. He also suggests a regional focus for economic development policies, particularly in the Midwest where Black neighborhoods are struggling the most. One way to boost economic development would be to move federal agencies to the area. He also calls for building more affordable housing in Black suburbs. Black poverty is lower in suburbs than in central cities, so increasing housing in Black suburbs would allow Black households to relocate to more advantaged neighborhoods, which research has shown leads to improved life outcomes.
 
Where the Hood At? is a remarkable and comprehensive account of Black neighborhoods that helps us to better understand the places and conditions that allow them flourish or impedes their advancement.
 
 
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cover of White Boy: A Memoir

White Boy

A Memoir

Mark D. Naison

Temple University Press, 2002

How does a Jewish boy who spent the bulk of his childhood on the basketball courts of Brooklyn wind up teaching in one of the city's pioneering black studies departments? Naison's odyssey begins as Brooklyn public schools respond to a new wave of Black migrants and Caribbean immigrants, and established residents flee to virtually all-white parts of the city or suburbs. Already alienated by his parents' stance on race issues and their ambitions for him, he has started on a separate ideological path by the time he enters Columbia College. Once he embarks on a long-term interracial relationship, becomes a member of SDS, focuses his historical work on black activists, and organizes community groups in the Bronx, his immersion in the radical politics of the 1960s has emerged as the center of his life. Determined to keep his ties to the Black community, even when the New Left splits along racial lines, Naison joined the fledgling African American studies program at Fordham, remarkable then as now for its commitment to interracial education.This memoir offers more than a participant's account of the New Left's racial dynamics; it eloquently speaks to the ways in which political commitments emerge from and are infused with the personal choices we all make.
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cover of White Guys on Campus: Racism, White Immunity, and the Myth of "Post-Racial" Higher Education

White Guys on Campus

Racism, White Immunity, and the Myth of "Post-Racial" Higher Education

Cabrera, Nolan L

Rutgers University Press, 2019

Winner of the 2019 AERA Division J Outstanding Publication Award and the 2019 ASHE Outstanding Book Award

On April 22, 2015, Boston University professor Saida Grundy set off a Twitter storm with her provocative question: “Why is white America so reluctant to identify white college males as a problem population?” White Guys on Campus is a critical examination of race in higher education, centering Whiteness, in an effort to unveil the frequently unconscious habits of racism among White male undergraduates. Nolan L. Cabrera moves beyond the “few bad apples” frame of contemporary racism, and explores the structures, policies, ideologies, and experiences that allow racism to flourish. This book details many of the contours of contemporary, systemic racism, while engaging the possibility of White students to participate in anti-racism. Ultimately, White Guys on Campus calls upon institutions of higher education to be sites of social transformation instead of reinforcing systemic racism, while creating a platform to engage and challenge the public discourse of “post- racialism.” 
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cover of White Men Challenging Racism: 35 Personal Stories

White Men Challenging Racism

35 Personal Stories

Cooper Thompson, Emmett Schaefer, and Harry Brod

Duke University Press, 2003

White Men Challenging Racism is a collection of first-person narratives chronicling the compelling experiences of thirty-five white men whose efforts to combat racism and fight for social justice are central to their lives. Based on interviews conducted by Cooper Thompson, Emmett Schaefer, and Harry Brod, these engaging oral histories tell the stories of the men’s antiracist work. While these men discuss their accomplishments with pride, they also talk about their mistakes and regrets, their shortcomings and strategic blunders. A foreword by James W. Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, provides historical context, describing antiracist efforts undertaken by white men in America during past centuries.

Ranging in age from twenty-six to eighty-six, the men whose stories are presented here include some of the elder statesmen of antiracism work as well as members of the newest generation of activists. They come from across the United States—from Denver, Nashville, and San Jose; rural North Carolina, Detroit, and Seattle. Some are straight; some are gay. A few—such as historian Herbert Aptheker, singer/songwriter Si Kahn, Stetson Kennedy (a Klan infiltrator in the 1940s), and Richard Lapchick (active in organizing the sports community against apartheid)—are relatively well known; most are not. Among them are academics, ministers, police officers, firefighters, teachers, journalists, union leaders, and full-time community organizers. They work with Latinos and African-, Asian-, and Native-Americans. Many ground their work in spiritual commitments. Their inspiring personal narratives—whether about researching right-wing groups, organizing Central American immigrants, or serving as pastor of an interracial congregation—connect these men with one another and with their allies in the fight against racism in the United States.

All authors’ royalties go directly to fund antiracist work. To read excerpts from the book, please visit http://www.whitemenchallengingracism.com/

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cover of Whitewashing the Movies: Asian Erasure and White Subjectivity in U.S. Film Culture

Whitewashing the Movies

Asian Erasure and White Subjectivity in U.S. Film Culture

David C Oh

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Whitewashing the Movies addresses the popular practice of excluding Asian actors from playing Asian characters in film. Media activists and critics have denounced contemporary decisions to cast White actors to play Asians and Asian Americans in movies such as Ghost in the Shell and Aloha. The purpose of this book is to apply the concept of “whitewashing” in stories that privilege White identities at the expense of Asian/American stories and characters. To understand whitewashing across various contexts, the book analyzes films produced in Hollywood, Asian American independent production, and US-China co-productions. Through the analysis, the book examines the ways in which whitewashing matters in the project of Whiteness and White racial hegemony. The book contributes to contemporary understanding of mediated representations of race by theorizing whitewashing, contributing to studies of Whiteness in media studies, and producing a counter-imagination of Asian/American representation in Asian-centered stories.
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cover of Who Is Antiracist?: Beliefs, Motivations, and Politics

Who Is Antiracist?

Beliefs, Motivations, and Politics

George Yancey and Hayoung Oh

Temple University Press, 2025

In the summer of 2020 when protests were mobilizing for social justice, the term “antiracist” started getting more traction. It demanded a more active civic orientation and a commitment to uprooting racism from institutions. In Who Is Antiracist? George Yancey and Hayoung David Oh use this flashpoint moment to ask, what are the characteristics of those who support antiracism? Who is most likely to be swayed toward this set of commitments, who is not, and how do they understand each other?

Who Is Antiracist? provides a systematic approach to understanding the motivations and intentions of racial progressives as well as the impact of political ideology on antiracism. The authors discuss the theoretical origins of contemporary antiracism and review key works of antiracism to piece together the characteristics that define it. They also create the Antiracism Attitude Scale to explore the demographic makeup and social views of those who support the type of antiracism popularized in the United States.

Acknowledging that antiracism faces powerful challenges in fully obtaining the goals articulated by its proponents, Who Is Antiracist? enlightens us about the continuing racial conflict in our society and warns against the risk of antiracism becoming just a proxy for ordinary party politics.
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cover of Who Killed John Clayton?: Political Violence and the Emergence of the New South, 1861-1893

Who Killed John Clayton?

Political Violence and the Emergence of the New South, 1861-1893

Kenneth C. Barnes

Duke University Press, 1998

In 1888 a group of armed and masked Democrats stole a ballot box from a small town in Conway County, Arkansas. The box contained most of the county’s black Republican votes, thereby assuring defeat for candidate John Clayton in a close race for the U.S. Congress. Days after he announced he would contest the election, a volley of buckshot ripped through Clayton’s hotel window, killing him instantly. Thus began a yet-to-be-solved, century-old mystery.

More than a description of this particular event, however, Who Killed John Clayton? traces patterns of political violence in this section of the South over a three-decade period. Using vivid courtroom-type detail, Barnes describes how violence was used to define and control the political system in the post-Reconstruction South and how this system in turn produced Jim Crow. Although white Unionists and freed blacks had joined under the banner of the Republican Party and gained the upper hand during Reconstruction, during these last decades of the nineteenth century conservative elites, first organized as the Ku Klux Klan and then as the revived Democratic Party, regained power—via such tactics as murdering political opponents, lynching blacks, and defrauding elections.

This important recounting of the struggle over political power will engage those interested in Southern and American history.

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cover of Won't You be My Neighbor: Race, Class, and Residence in Los Angeles

Won't You be My Neighbor

Race, Class, and Residence in Los Angeles

Camille Zubrinksy Charles

Russell Sage Foundation, 2006

Los Angeles is a city of delicate racial and ethnic balance. As evidenced by the 1965 Watts violence, the 1992 Rodney King riots, and this year's award-winning film Crash, the city's myriad racial groups coexist uneasily together, often on the brink of confrontation. In fact, Los Angeles is highly segregated, with racial and ethnic groups clustered in homogeneous neighborhoods. These residential groupings have profound effects on the economic well-being and quality of life of residents, dictating which jobs they can access, which social networks they can tap in to, and which schools they attend. In Won't You Be My Neighbor?, sociologist Camille Zubrinsky Charles explores how modern racial attitudes shape and are shaped by the places in which people live. Using in-depth survey data and information from focus groups with members of L.A.'s largest racial and ethnic groups, Won't You Be My Neighbor? explores why Los Angeles remains a segregated city. Charles finds that people of all backgrounds prefer both racial integration and a critical mass of same-race neighbors. When asked to reveal their preferred level of racial integration, people of all races show a clear and consistent order of preference, with whites considered the most highly desired neighbors and blacks the least desirable. This is even true among recent immigrants who have little experience with American race relations. Charles finds that these preferences, which are driven primarily by racial prejudice and minority-group fears of white hostility, taken together with financial considerations, strongly affect people's decisions about where they live. Still, Charles offers reasons for optimism: over time and with increased exposure to other racial and ethnic groups, people show an increased willingness to live with neighbors of other races. In a racially and ethnically diverse city, segregated neighborhoods can foster distrust, reinforce stereotypes, and agitate inter-group tensions. Won't You Be My Neighbor? zeroes in on segregated neighborhoods to provide a compelling examination of the way contemporary racial attitudes shape, and are shaped by, the places where we live.
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cover of Words of Witness: Black Women's Autobiography in the Post-<i>Brown</i> Era

Words of Witness

Black Women's Autobiography in the Post-<i>Brown</i> Era

Angela A. Ards

University of Wisconsin Press, 2015

A literary and political genealogy of the last half-century, Words of Witness explores black feminist autobiographical narratives in the context of activism and history since the landmark 1954 segregation case, Brown v. Board of Education. Angela A. Ards examines how activist writers, especially five whose memoirs were published in the 1990s and 2000s, crafted these life stories to engage and shape progressive, post-Brown politics.
            Exploring works by the critically acclaimed June Jordan and Edwidge Danticat, as well as by popular and emerging authors such as Melba Beals, Rosemary Bray, and Eisa Davis, Ards demonstrates how each text asserts countermemories to official—and often nostalgic—understandings of the civil rights and Black Power movements. She situates each writer as activist-citizen, adopting and remaking particular roles—warrior, “the least of these,” immigrant, hip-hop head—to crystallize a range of black feminist responses to urgent but unresolved political issues.
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cover of Work in Black and White: Striving for the American Dream

Work in Black and White

Striving for the American Dream

Enobong Hannah Branch

Russell Sage Foundation, 2022

The ability to achieve economic security through hard work is a central tenet of the American Dream, but significant shifts in today’s economy have fractured this connection. While economic insecurity has always been a reality for some Americans, Black Americans have historically long experienced worse economic outcomes than Whites. In Work in Black and White, sociologists Enobong Hannah Branch and Caroline Hanley draw on interviews with 80 middle-aged Black and White Americans to explore how their attitudes and perceptions of success are influenced by the stories American culture has told about the American Dream – and about who should have access to it and who should not.

Branch and Hanley find that Black and White workers draw on racially distinct histories to make sense of today’s rising economic insecurity. White Americans have grown increasingly pessimistic and feel that the American Dream is now out of reach, mourning the loss of a sense of economic security which they took for granted. But Black Americans tend to negotiate their present insecurity with more optimism, since they cannot mourn something they never had. All educated workers bemoaned the fact that their credentials no longer guarantee job security, but Black workers lamented the reality that even with an education, racial inequality continues to block access to good jobs for many.

The authors interject a provocative observation into the ongoing debate over opportunity, security, and the American Dream: Among policymakers and the public alike, Americans talk too much about education. The ways people navigate insecurity, inequality, and uncertainty rests on more than educational attainment. The authors call for a public policy that ensures dignity in working conditions and pay while accounting for the legacies of historical inequality.

Americans want the game of life to be fair. While the survey respondents expressed common ground on the ideal of meritocracy, opinions about to achieve economic security for all diverge along racial lines, with the recognition – or not – of differences in current and past access to opportunity in America.

Work in Black and White is a call to action for meaningful policies to make the premise of the American Dream a reality.

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