Social Justice

Beverly Daniel Tatum, a renowned authority on the psychology of racism, asserts that we do not know how to talk about our racial differences. Using real-life examples and the latest research, Tatum presents strong evidence that straight talk about our racial identities-whatever they may be-is essential if we are serious about facilitating communication across racial and ethnic divides.

In this meticulously researched and accessibly written interpretive history, Rushdy shows how lynching in America has endured, evolved, and changed in meaning over the course of three centuries, from its origins in early Virginia to the present day.

pt. 1. The social construction of black feminist thought. The politics of black feminist thought -- Distinguishing features of black feminist thought -- pt. 2. Core themes in black feminist thought. Work, family, and black women's oppression -- Mammies, matriarchs, and other controlling images -- The power of self-definition -- The sexual politics of black womanhood -- Black women's love relationships -- Black women and motherhood -- Rethinking black women's activism -- pt. 3. Black feminism, knowledge, and power. U.S. black feminism in transnational context -- Black feminist epistemology -- Toward a politics of empowerment.

In the Deep South of the 1950’s, a color line was etched in blood across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Journalist John Howard Griffin decided to cross that line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a Southern white man for the disenfranchised world of an unemployed black man.
This American classic has been corrected from the original manuscripts and indexed, featuring historic photographs and an extensive biographical afterword.

Author Cedric Robinson demonstrates that efforts to understand black people's history of resistance solely through the prism of Marxist theory are incomplete and inaccurate. Instead, black radicalism must be linked to the traditions of Africa and the unique experiences of blacks on western continents.

In Black Sexual Politics, one of America's most influential writers on race and gender explores how images of Black sexuality have been used to maintain the color line and how they threaten to spread a new brand of racism around the world today.

This comprehensive guide is filled with contemporary facts and figures on African Americans. It is an essential reference for anyone attempting to fathom the complex state of our nation.

Not a traditional political science work concerned with office-seeking, voting, or ideology, Sister Citizen instead explores how African American women understand themselves as citizens and what they expect from political organizing. Harris-Perry shows that the shared struggle to preserve an authentic self and secure recognition as a citizen links together black women in America, from the anonymous survivors of Hurricane Katrina to the current First Lady of the United States.

Drawing on film, fiction, music, and oral history, Marcus Anthony Hunter and Zandria F. Robinson trace the Black American experience of race, place, and liberation, mapping it from Emancipation to now.

Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.

Horne illuminates how the preservation of slavery was a motivating factor for the Revolutionary War.

Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve spent ten years working in and investigating the largest criminal courthouse in the country, Chicago–Cook County, and based on over 1,000 hours of observation, she takes readers inside our so-called halls of justice to witness the types of everyday racial abuses that fester within the courts, often in plain sight.

Drawing on a database of over seven thousand intercolonial slave trading voyages compiled from port records, newspapers, and merchant accounts, O'Malley identifies and quantifies the major routes of the intercolonial slave trade.

This book consists of two "letters," written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism.

In 1961, the Freedom Riders came together to ride buses through the South and challenge segregation in bus terminals. This book provides a comprehensive look at the bravery of those involved, describes the racism protestors fought, and outlines how peaceful tactics ultimately led to desegregation.

First published in 1983, this provocative treatise on the ravages of late capitalism, state violence, incarceration, and patriarchy on the life chances and struggles of black working-class men and women shaped an entire generation, directing our energies to the terrain of the prison-industrial complex, anti-racist work, labor organizing, alternatives to racial capitalism, and challenging patriarchy personally and politically.

hite identity in the United States is place bound, asserts George Lipsitz in How Racism Takes Place. An influential scholar in American and racial studies, Lipsitz contends that racism persists because a network of practices skew opportunities and life chances along racial lines. That is, these practices assign people of different races to different spaces and therefore allow grossly unequal access to education, employment, transportation, and shelter.Revealing how seemingly race-neutral urban sites contain hidden racial assumptions and imperatives, Lipsitz examines the

This book offers a set of analytical tools for those wishing to develop intersectionality's capability to theorize social inequality in ways that would facilitate social change

Health disparities have remained stubbornly entrenched in the American health care system. Dayna Bowen Matthew finds that they principally arise from unconscious racial and ethnic biases held by physicians, institutional providers, and their patients. In a time when the health of the entire nation is at risk, it is essential to confront the issues keeping the health care system from providing equal treatment to all.

This collection of essays generates important enquiries into the teaching and practice of anti-racism education, by way of working through conversations, contestations, and emotions as presented by a diverse group of strong women committed to social justice work in their own right.

Using a critical anti-racism approach, contributors to this volume demonstrate and document the resistance and futurity possible when students, educators, administrators, policymakers, and community members engage in critical anti-racism education.

Firstt published in 2010, this book has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." This tenth-anniversary edition has a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today."

The pioneering Asian American labor organizer and writer's vision for intersectional and anti-racist activism. In this powerful, deeply humanistic book, Grace Lee Boggs, a legendary figure in the struggle for justice in America, shrewdly assesses the current crisis--political, economical, and environmental--and shows how to create the radical social change we need to confront new realities.

Presumed Incompetent is a pathbreaking account of the intersecting roles of race, gender, and class in the working lives of women faculty of color.

Vivid descriptions of violence and courageous acts fill David Garrow’s account of the momentous 1965 protest at Selma, Alabama, in which the author illuminates the role of Martin Luther King Jr. in organizing the demonstrations that led to the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.

This book explores the harsh and harmful experiences of Black girls across the country whose intricate lives are misunderstood, highly judged—by teachers, administrators, and the justice system—and degraded by the very institutions charged with helping them flourish.

A guide for facilitating and participating in difficult dialogues about race, author Derald Wing Sue explores the characteristics, dynamics, and meaning behind discussions about race as well as the hidden "ground rules" that inhibit honest and productive dialogue.

George Fredrickson surveys the history of Western racism from its emergence in the late Middle Ages to the present. Beginning with the medieval antisemitism that put Jews beyond the pale of humanity, he traces the spread of racist thinking in the wake of European expansionism and the beginnings of the African slave trade.

In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change.

Slavery and the University combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post-Civil War era to the present day.

An examination of the black experience in America following emancipation, and an introduction to the historic concept of “double-consciousness” as it pertains to that experience, The Souls of Black Folk is an extraordinary literary achievement—a provocative, profound, and courageous clarion call.

State of White Supremacy investigates how race functions as an enduring logic of governance in the United States, perpetually generating and legitimating racial hierarchy and privilege.

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s account of the first successful large-scale application of nonviolence resistance in America is comprehensive, revelatory, and intimate. King described his book as "the chronicle of fifty thousand Negroes who took to heart the principles of nonviolence, who learned to fight for their rights with the weapon of love, and who, in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth.''

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., lays out his thoughts, plans, and dreams for America's future, including the need for better jobs, higher wages, decent housing, and quality education.

"White Logic, White Methods" shows the ways that a reigning white ideological methodology has poisoned almost all aspects of social science research. With an assemblage of leading scholars, this collection explores the possibilities and necessary dethroning of current social research practices.

The white racial frame encompasses not only the stereotyping, bigotry, and racist ideology emphasized in other theories of "race," but also the visual images, array of emotions, sounds of accented language, interlinking interpretations and narratives, and inclinations to discriminate that are still central to the frame's everyday operations. Feagin examines its emergence and evolution, which racial groups are framed within it, how it has operated for both white Americans and Americans of color, and how the latter have long responded with strategies of resistance that include enduring counter-frames.

George Yancy gathers white scholarship that dwells on the experience of whiteness as a problem without sidestepping the question's implications for Black people or people of color. This unprecedented reversion of the "Black problem" narrative challenges contemporary rhetoric of a color-evasive world in a critically engaging and persuasive study.