Library Catalog
On the Shelf at CCBC Libraries
Tears We Cannot Stop by
"Elegantly written, Tears We Cannot Stop is powerful in several areas: moving personal recollections; profound cultural analysis; and guidance for moral redemption. A work to relish." --Toni Morrison"Here's a sermon that's as fierce as it is lucid. It shook me up, but in a good way. This is how it works if you're black in America, this is what happens, and this is how it feels. If you're black, you'll feel a spark of recognition in every paragraph. If you're white, Dyson tells you what you need to know--what this white man needed to know, at least. This is a major achievement. I read it and said amen." --Stephen KingAs the country grapples with racist division at a level not seen since the 1960s, one man's voice is heard above the rest. In his New York Times op-ed piece "Death in Black and White," Michael Eric Dyson moved a nation. Isabel Wilkerson called it "an unfiltered Marlboro of black pain" and "crushingly powerful," and Beyonce tweeted about it. Now he continues to speak out in Tears We Cannot Stop--a provocative and deeply personal call for change. Dyson argues that if we are to make real racial progress we must face difficult truths, including being honest about how black grievance has been ignored, dismissed, or discounted. Short, emotional, literary, powerful--this is the book that all Americans who care about the current and long-burning crisis in race relations will want to read.
Call Number: E185.615 .D97 2017
They Can't Kill Us All by
A deeply reported book that brings alive the quest for justice in the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Freddie Gray, offering both unparalleled insight into the reality of police violence in America and an intimate, moving portrait of those working to end it. Conducting hundreds of interviews during the course of over one year reporting on the ground, Washington Post writer Wesley Lowery traveled from Ferguson, Missouri, to Cleveland, Ohio; Charleston, South Carolina; and Baltimore, Maryland; and then back to Ferguson to uncover life inside the most heavily policed, if otherwise neglected, corners of America today. In an effort to grasp the magnitude of the repose to Michael Brown's death and understand the scale of the problem police violence represents, Lowery speaks to Brown's family and the families of other victims other victims' families as well as local activists. By posing the question, "What does the loss of any one life mean to the rest of the nation?" Lowery examines the cumulative effect of decades of racially biased policing in segregated neighborhoods with failing schools, crumbling infrastructure and too few jobs. Studded with moments of joy, and tragedy, They Can't Kill Us All offers a historically informed look at the standoff between the police and those they are sworn to protect, showing that civil unrest is just one tool of resistance in the broader struggle for justice. As Lowery brings vividly to life, the protests against police killings are also about the black community's long history on the receiving end of perceived and actual acts of injustice and discrimination. They Can't Kill Us All grapples with a persistent if also largely unexamined aspect of the otherwise transformative presidency of Barack Obama: the failure to deliver tangible security and opportunity to those Americans most in need of both.
Call Number: E185.86 .L69 2016
Democracy in Black by
A powerful polemic on the state of black America that savages the idea of a post-racial society. America's great promise of equality has always rung hollow in the ears of African Americans. But today the situation has grown even more dire. From the murders of black youth by the police, to the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, to the disaster visited upon poor and middle-class black families by the Great Recession, it is clear that black America faces an emergency--at the very moment the election of the first black president has prompted many to believe we've solved America's race problem. Democracy in Black is Eddie S. Glaude Jr.'s impassioned response. Part manifesto, part history, part memoir, it argues that we live in a country founded on a "value gap"--with white lives valued more than others--that still distorts our politics today. Whether discussing why all Americans have racial habits that reinforce inequality, why black politics based on the civil-rights era have reached a dead end, or why only remaking democracy from the ground up can bring real change, Glaude crystallizes the untenable position of black America--and offers thoughts on a better way forward. Forceful in ideas and unsettling in its candor, Democracy In Black is a landmark book on race in America, one that promises to spark wide discussion as we move toward the end of our first black presidency.
Call Number: E185.615 .G548 2016
Jim Crow's Legacy by
Jim Crow's Legacy shows the lasting impact of segregation on the lives of African Americans who lived through it, as well as its impact on future generations. The book draws on interviews with elderly African American southerners whose stories poignantly show the devastation of racism not only in the past, but also in the present. The book introduces readers to the realities of the Jim Crow era for African Americans--from life at home to work opportunities to the broader social context in America. However, the book moves beyond merely setting the scene into the powerful memories of elderly African Americans who lived through Jim Crow. Their voices tell the complex stories of their everyday lives--from caring for white children to the racially-motivated murder of a loved one. Their stories show the pernicious impact of racism on both the past and the present. The authors use the phrase segregation stress syndrome to describe the long-term impact on physical, mental, and emotional health, as well as the unshakable influence of racism across years and generations. Jim Crow's Legacy takes readers on an unparalleled journey into the bitter realities of America's racial past and shows racism's unmistakable influence today.
Call Number: E185.61 .T465 2015
For Discrimination by
In the wake of the Supreme Court's recent decision regarding Fisher v. University of Texas, For Discrimination is at once the definitive reckoning with one of America's most explosively contentious and divisive issues and a principled work of advocacy for clearly defined justice. What precisely is affirmative action, and why is it fiercely championed by some and just as fiercely denounced by others? Does it signify a boon or a stigma? Or is it simply reverse discrimination? What are its benefits and costs to American society? What are the exact indicia determining who should or should not be accorded affirmative action? When should affirmative action end, if it must? Randall Kennedy, Harvard Law School professor and author of such critically acclaimed and provocative books as Race, Crime, and the Law and the national best-seller Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, gives us a concise, gimlet-eyed, and deeply personal conspectus of the policy, refusing to shy away from the myriad complexities of an issue that continues to bedevil American race relations. With pellucid reasoning, Kennedy accounts for the slipperiness of the term "affirmative action" as it has been appropriated by ideologues of every stripe; delves into the complex and surprising legal history of the policy; coolly analyzes key arguments pro and con advanced by the left and right, including the so-called color-blind, race-neutral challen≥ critiques the impact of Supreme Court decisions on higher education; and ponders the future of affirmative action.
Call Number: KF4755.5 .K46 2013
The New Jim Crow by
In a bold and innovative argument, a rising legal star shows readers how the mass incarceration of a disproportionate number of black men amounts to a devastating system of racial control. This is a terrifying reality that exists in the UK as much as in the US. Despite the triumphant dismantling of the Jim Crow laws, the system that once forced African-Americans into a segregated second-class citizenship still haunts and the criminal justice system still unfairly targets black men and deprives an entire segment of the population of their basic rights.
Call Number: HV9950 .A437 2012
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From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by
Winner of the 2016 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize for an Especially Notable Book "Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's searching examination of the social, political and economic dimensions of the prevailing racial order offers important context for understanding the necessity of the emerging movement for black liberation." --Michelle Alexander The eruption of mass protests in the wake of the police murders of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York City have challenged the impunity with which officers of the law carry out violence against Black people and punctured the illusion of a postracial America. The Black Lives Matter movement has awakened a new generation of activists. In this stirring and insightful analysis, activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and Black unemployment. In this context, she argues that this new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for Black liberation.
Publication Date: 2016
The Emotional Politics of Racism by
With stop-and-frisk laws, new immigration policies, and cuts to social welfare programs, majorities in the United States have increasingly supported intensified forms of punishment and marginalization against Black, Latino, Arab and Muslim people in the United States, even as a majority of citizens claim to support "colorblindness" and racial equality. With this book, Paula Ioanide examines how emotion has prominently figured into these contemporary expressions of racial discrimination and violence. How U.S. publics dominantly feel about crime, terrorism, welfare, and immigration often seems to trump whatever facts and evidence say about these politicized matters. Though four case studies--the police brutality case of Abner Louima; the exposure of torture at Abu Ghraib; the demolition of New Orleans public housing units following Hurricane Katrina; and a proposed municipal ordinance to deny housing to undocumented immigrants in Escondido, CA--Ioanide shows how racial fears are perpetuated, and how these widespread fears have played a central role in justifying the expansion of our military and prison system and the ongoing divestment from social welfare. But Ioanide also argues that within each of these cases there is opportunity for new mobilizations, for ethical witnessing: we must also popularize desires for justice and increase people's receptivity to the testimonies of the oppressed by reorganizing embodied and unconscious structures of feeling.
Publication Date: 2015
Color Matters by
In the United States, as in many parts of the world, people are discriminated against based on the color of their skin. This type of skin tone bias, or colorism, is both related to and distinct from discrimination on the basis of race, with which it is often conflated. Preferential treatment of lighter skin tones over darker occurs within racial and ethnic groups as well as between them. While America has made progress in issues of race over the past decades, discrimination on the basis of color continues to be a constant and often unremarked part of life. In Color Matters, Kimberly Jade Norwood has collected the most up-to-date research on this insidious form of discrimination, including perspectives from the disciplines of history, law, sociology, and psychology. Anchored with historical chapters that show how the influence and legacy of slavery have shaped the treatment of skin color in American society, the contributors to this volume bring to light the ways in which colorism affects us all--influencing what we wear, who we see on television, and even which child we might pick to adopt. Sure to be an eye-opening collection for anyone curious about how race and color continue to affect society, Color Matters provides students of race in America with wide-ranging overview of a crucial topic.
Publication Date: 2013
Seeing Race in Modern America by
In this fiercely urgent book, Matthew Pratt Guterl focuses on how and why we come to see race in very particular ways. What does it mean to see someone as a color? As racially mixed or ethnically ambiguous? What history makes such things possible? Drawing creatively from advertisements, YouTube videos, and everything in between, Guterl redirects our understanding of racial sight away from the dominant categories of color--away from brown and yellow and black and white--and instead insists that we confront the visual practices that make those same categories seem so irrefutably important. Zooming out for the bigger picture, Guterl illuminates the long history of the practice of seeing--and believing in--race, and reveals that our troublesome faith in the details discerned by the discriminating glance is widespread and very popular. In so doing, he upends the possibility of a postracial society by revealing how deeply race is embedded in our culture, with implications that are often matters of life and death.
Publication Date: 2013
Jim Crow Guide to the U. S. A by
Jim Crow Guide documents the system of legally imposed American apartheid that prevailed during what Stetson Kennedy calls "the long century from Emancipation to the Overcoming." The mock guidebook covers every area of activity where the tentacles of Jim Crow reached. From the texts of state statutes, municipal ordinances, federal regulations, and judicial rulings, Kennedy exhumes the legalistic skeleton of Jim Crow in a work of permanent value for scholars and of exceptional appeal for general readers.
ISBN: 0817356711Publication Date: 2011
Ethics and Mores of Race by
Preeminent philosopher, Naomi Zack, brings us an indispensable work in the ethics of race through an inquiry into the history of moral philosophy. Beginning with Plato and a philosophical tradition that has largely ignored race, The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality After the History of Philosophy enters into a web of ideas, ethics, and morals that untangle our evolving ideas of racial equality straight into the twenty-first century. The dichotomy between ethics and mores has long aided the separation of what is right with ideas of equality. Zack tackles the co-existence of slavery with the classic moral systems and continues to show how our society has evolved and our mores with it. An ethics of race my not exist yet, but this book gives us twelve discerning requirements to establish it.
Publication Date: 2011
