Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history arguing that the “Global South” was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV–everywhere, all the time.Īn African American and Latinx History of the United States by Paul OrtizĪn intersectional history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil rights.
Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.Most important of all, it 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.”Ĭitizen: An American Lyric by Claudia RankineĬlaudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindnessby Michelle Alexander
The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” by Audre Lordeįrom the self-described ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’, these soaring, urgent essays on the power of women, poetry and anger are filled with darkness and light. Bearing singular insight into the rage and frustration of colonized peoples, and the role of violence in effecting historical change, the book incisively attacks the twin perils of post-independence colonial politics: the disenfranchisement of the masses by the elites on the one hand, and intertribal and interfaith animosities on the other. The Wretched of the Earth is a brilliant analysis of the psychology of the colonized and their path to liberation. The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon In ‘A More Beautiful and Terrible History’, award-winning historian Jeanne Theoharis dissects this national myth-making, teasing apart the accepted stories to show them in a strikingly different light. This fable, featuring dreamy heroes and accidental heroines, has shuttered the movement firmly in the past, whitewashed the forces that stood in its way, and diminished its scope. The civil rights movement has become national legend, lauded by presidents from Reagan to Obama to Trump, as proof of the power of American democracy. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinkmanship – and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever.Ī More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History by Jeanne Theohari One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn’t commit. Stamped from the Beginning uses the lives of five major American intellectuals to offer a window into the contentious debates between assimilationists and segregationists and between racists and antiracists.īryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need- the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history.
In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it. Kendi’s concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America - but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other.