On the Shelf from CCBC Libraries
Stay Woke by
The essential guide to understanding how racism works and how racial inequality shapes black lives, ultimately offering a road-map for resistance for racial justice advocates and antiracists When #BlackLivesMatter went viral in 2013, it shed a light on the urgent, daily struggles of black Americans to combat racial injustice. The message resonated with millions across the country. Yet many of our political, social, and economic institutions are still embedded with racist policies and practices that devalue black lives. Stay Woke directly addresses these stark injustices and builds on the lessons of racial inequality and intersectionality the Black Lives Matter movement has challenged its fellow citizens to learn. In this essential primer, Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith inspire readers to address the pressing issues of racial inequality, and provide a basic toolkit that will equip readers to become knowledgeable participants in public debate, activism, and politics. This book offers a clear vision of a racially just society, and shows just how far we still need to go to achieve this reality. From activists to students to the average citizen, Stay Woke empowers all readers to work toward a better future for black Americans.
Call Number: E185.615 .L66 2019
White Fragility by Call Number: HT1521 .D486 2018
Law Enforcement in the Age of Black Lives Matter by
There is a reason why people claim great respect for officers of the law: the job, by description, is hard--if not deadly. It takes a certain kind of person to accept the consequences of the job-- seeing the very worst situations, on a regular basis, and knowing that one's life is on the line every hour of every day. Working in law enforcement is emotionally and psychologically draining. It affects these public servants both on and off the job. Said plainly, shaking an officers' hand when you see them or posting a sign in the front yard that reads "Support the Badge" is lip service. Even going as far as to donate money to a crowdsourcing fundraising site does little to support the long-term professional development needs of officers. These are surface level signs of solidarity, and do little in terms of showing respect for the job and those who do it. For those who want to do more, this text provides reasons and a rationale for doing better by these public servants. Showing respect does not mean that one agrees with whatever another person or institution claims to be the "right" way. Showing respect and admiration means that we charge individuals to live up to their fullest potentials and integrate innovation wherever possible. In the case of policing in the era of Black Lives Matters, policing as usual simply is not an option any longer. It is disrespectful, to both the officers and those who are being policed, to rest on the laurels of past policing tactics. As we enter a time period in which police interactions are recorded (dash cams or body cams, for example) and new populations are being targeted (Latinx people), there is much to learn about what is working and what is not.
Call Number: HV9950 .L39 2018
Toxic Inequality by
From a leading authority on race and public policy, a deeply researched account of how families rise and fall today Since the Great Recession, most Americans' standard of living has stagnated or declined. Economic inequality is at historic highs. But inequality's impact differs by race; African Americans' net wealth is just a tenth that of white Americans, and over recent decades, white families have accumulated wealth at three times the rate of black families. In our increasingly diverse nation, sociologist Thomas M. Shapiro argues, wealth disparities must be understood in tandem with racial inequities -- a dangerous combination he terms "toxic inequality." In Toxic Inequality, Shapiro reveals how these forces combine to trap families in place. Following nearly two hundred families of different races and income levels over a period of twelve years, Shapiro's research vividly documents the recession's toll on parents and children, the ways families use assets to manage crises and create opportunities, and the real reasons some families build wealth while others struggle in poverty. The structure of our neighborhoods, workplaces, and tax code-much more than individual choices-push some forward and hold others back. A lack of assets, far more common in families of color, can often ruin parents' careful plans for themselves and their children. Toxic inequality may seem inexorable, but it is not inevitable. America's growing wealth gap and its yawning racial divide have been forged by history and preserved by policy, and only bold, race-conscious reforms can move us toward a more just society. "Everyone concerned about the toxic effects of inequality must read this book." -- Robert B. Reich "This is one of the most thought-provoking books I have read on economic inequality in the US." -- William Julius Wilson
Call Number: HC110.P6 S43 2017
Racism Without Racists by
The fifth edition of Racism without Racists is available in June 2017. The paperback ISBN for the fifth edition is 9781442276239. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's acclaimed Racism without Racists documents how, beneath our contemporary conversation about race, lies a full-blown arsenal of arguments, phrases, and stories that whites use to account for--and ultimately justify--racial inequalities. This provocative book explodes the belief that America is now a color-blind society. The fourth edition adds a chapter on what Bonilla-Silva calls "the new racism," which provides the essential foundation to explore issues of race and ethnicity in more depth. This edition also updates Bonilla-Silva's assessment of race in America after President Barack Obama's re-election. Obama's presidency, Bonilla-Silva argues, does not represent a sea change in race relations, but rather embodies disturbing racial trends of the past. In this fourth edition, Racism without Racists will continue to challenge readers and stimulate discussion about the state of race in America today.
Call Number: E184.A1 B597 2014
Rethinking the Color Line by
User-friendly without sacrificing intellectual or theoretical rigor, this anthology of current research examines contemporary issues and explores new approaches to the study of race and ethnic relations. The featured readings effectively engage students by helping them understand theories and concepts. Active learning in the classroom is encouraged while providing relevance for students from all ethnic, cultural, and economic backgrounds. The fifth edition features ten new articles on such timely topics as: * The U.S. Census' changing definition of race and ethnicity * Race-based disparities in health * Racial and gender discrimination among racial minorities and women * Being Arab and American * How social control maintains racial inequality * The increase in black and brown incarceration * How racial bias may affect the use of DNA to locate suspects of crimes * How derogatory ethnic and racial images are created and disseminated by the media * The sexualization of African American women through the use of gender stereotypes * The portrayal of light- and dark-skinned biracial characters
Call Number: E184.A1 R4485 2012
Other Useful Guides
Streaming Videos
- Don't Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses America has long been a nation of immigrants, built by the labor of millions who came from other lands. As the words on the Statue of Liberty proclaim, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." But today, the United States is home to millions of undocumented immigrants, and the federal government has been unable to reach a consensus to overhaul the nation's immigration laws. Are immigrants taking American jobs, or are they helping our economy? How should the United States deal with border issues and the millions of immigrants living here illegally?
- Tim Wise on white privilege:racism, white denial & the costs of inequality For years, acclaimed author and speaker Tim Wise has been electrifying audiences on the college lecture circuit with his deeply personal take on whiteness and white privilege. In this spellbinding lecture, the author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son offers a unique, inside-out view of race and racism in America. Expertly overcoming the defensiveness that often surrounds these issues, Wise provides a non-confrontational explanation of white privilege and the damage it does not only to people of color, but to white people as well. This is an invaluable classroom resource: an ideal introduction to the social construction of racial identities, and a critical new tool for exploring the often invoked - but seldom explained - concept of white privilege.
Databases
- SocINDEX This link opens in a new window
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Viewpoint essays, topic essays, and news and magazine articles on controversial issues. Browse for topics or search.
Online from CCBC Libraries
Prophet of Discontent by
This book is openly available in digital formats thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Many of today's insurgent Black movements call for an end to racial capitalism. They take aim at policing and mass incarceration, the racial partitioning of workplaces and residential communities, the expropriation and underdevelopment of Black populations at home and abroad. Scholars and activists increasingly regard these practices as essential technologies of capital accumulation, evidence that capitalist societies past and present enshrine racial inequality as a matter of course. In Prophet of Discontent, Andrew J. Douglas and Jared A. Loggins invoke contemporary discourse on racial capitalism in a powerful reassessment of Martin Luther King Jr.'s thinking and legacy. Like today's organizers, King was more than a dreamer. He knew that his call for a "radical revolution of values" was complicated by the production and circulation of value under capitalism. He knew that the movement to build the beloved community required sophisticated analyses of capitalist imperialism, state violence, and racial formations, as well as unflinching solidarity with the struggles of the Black working class. Shining new light on King's largely implicit economic and political theories, and expanding appreciation of the Black radical tradition to which he belonged, Douglas and Loggins reconstruct, develop, and carry forward King's strikingly prescient critique of capitalist society.
Publication Date: 2021-09-15
Tacit Racism by
We need to talk about racism before it destroys our democracy. And that conversation needs to start with an acknowledgement that racism is coded into even the most ordinary interactions. Every time we interact with another human being, we unconsciously draw on a set of expectations to guide us through the encounter. What many of us in the United States--especially white people--do not recognize is that centuries of institutional racism have inescapably molded those expectations. This leads us to act with implicit biases that can shape everything from how we greet our neighbors to whether we take a second look at a resume. This is tacit racism, and it is one of the most pernicious threats to our nation. In Tacit Racism, Anne Warfield Rawls and Waverly Duck illustrate the many ways in which racism is coded into the everyday social expectations of Americans, in what they call Interaction Orders of Race. They argue that these interactions can produce racial inequality, whether the people involved are aware of it or not, and that by overlooking tacit racism in favor of the fiction of a "color-blind" nation, we are harming not only our society's most disadvantaged--but endangering the society itself. Ultimately, by exposing this legacy of racism in ordinary social interactions, Rawls and Duck hope to stop us from merely pretending we are a democratic society and show us how we can truly become one.
Publication Date: 2020-11-13
The Lines Between Us by
Deeply reported and deftly told, The Lines Between Us, a riveting story from DuPont Award - winning journalist Lawrence Lanahan, compels reflection on America's entrenched inequality - and on where the rubber meets the road not in the abstract, but in our own backyards. The criss-crossing stories of Mark, a white devout Christian who sells his suburban home to move to Baltimore's inner city, and Nicole, a black mother determined to leave West Baltimore for the suburbs, chronicle how the region became so deeply segregated and why these fault lines persist today.
Publication Date: 2019-05-21
The Color of Our Shame by
For many Americans, the election of Barack Obama as the country's first black president signaled that we had become a post-racial nation - some even suggested that race was no longer worth discussing. Of course, the evidence tells a very different story. While social scientists are fullyengaged in examining the facts of race, normative political thought has fallen behind the curve in making race not only an interesting moral case, but making it a focus in the expansive theory of social justice. Political thought's under participation in the debate over the status of blacks inAmerican society raises serious concerns, since its main task is to adjudicate discrepancies between the demands of ideal justice and social realities.Christopher Lebron argues that political thought must supply the arguments necessary to address the moral problems that attend racial inequality and make those problems salient to a democratic polity. Thus, in The Color of Our Shame he asks two major questions. First, given the success of the CivilRights Act and the sharp decline in overt racist norms, how can we explain the persistence of systemic racial inequality? Second, once we have settled on an explanation, what might political philosophy have to offer in terms of a solution?In order to answer these questions Lebron suggests that we reconceive of racial inequality as a condition that marks the normative status of black citizens in the eyes of the nation. He argues that our collective response to racial inequality ought to be shame. While we reject race as a reason formarginalizing blacks on the basis of liberal democratic ideals, we fail to live up to those ideals - a situation that Lebron sees as a failure of national character. He proposes a move toward a "perfectionist politics" that would compel a higher level of racially relevant moral excellence fromindividuals and institutions and enable America to meet the democratic ideals that it has set for itself.
Publication Date: 2013-09-09
