
In Open Contempt
Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space
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Narrated by:
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Irvin Weathersby Jr.
About this listen
“An awe-striking masterpiece of love.”—Jason Reynolds, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“The sentences alone in In Open Contempt make it one of the most memorable books of the decade. But it’s the unexpected lingering and genius crafting of consequential action that makes this one of the freshest explorations of space I’ve ever read. Irvin Weathersby Jr. has made something we’ve never before seen, felt, or witnessed.”—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir
A stirring journey into the soul of a fractured America that confronts the enduring specter of white supremacy in our art, monuments, and public spaces, from a captivating new literary voice.
Amid the ongoing reckoning over America’s history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly dot the country’s landscape, while schools and street signs continue to bear the names of segregationists. With poignant, lyrical prose, cultural commentator Irvin Weathersby confronts the inescapable specter of white supremacy in our open spaces and contemplates what it means to bear witness to sites of lasting racial trauma.
Weathersby takes us from the streets of his childhood in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward to the Whitney Plantation; from the graffitied pedestals of Confederate statues lining Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, to the location of a racist terror attack in Charlottesville; from the site of the Wounded Knee massacre in South Dakota to a Kara Walker art installation at a former sugar factory in Brooklyn, New York. Along the way, he challenges the creation myths embedded in America’s landmarks and meets artists, curators, and city planners doing the same. Urgent and unflinchingly intimate, In Open Contempt offers a hopeful reimagining of the spaces we share in order to honor our nation’s true history, encouraging us to make room for love as a way to heal and treat each other more humanely.
©2025 Irvin Weathersby, Jr. (P)2025 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“In language gorgeous enough to be lyric, Irvin Weathersby Jr. helps us examine some of the stone grotesquerie erected and living among us—the remainders of before, the reminders of blood. And in doing so with such care, he’s granted us this work, a new monument to gaze at. One that should be raised and never razed. One that should be seen for what it is, an awe-striking masterpiece of love.” —Jason Reynolds, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“A fierce and personal refutation of the monuments that loomed and continue to loom over communities. Weathersby’s roving eye misses nothing. The reader is left enlightened and ready to tear down the remaining idols from their pedestals. The nation needs In Open Contempt.” —Maurice Carlos Ruffin, author of The American Daughters
“Weathersby interrogates public space and how artists, architects, city planners, and others are doubling down on our racist inception story. He reimagines our society towards one that honors the world we claim to be fighting for.” —Elle
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So many lessons in this book
- By Christina the Teacher on 02-04-25
By: Imani Perry
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Black Folk
- The Roots of the Black Working Class
- By: Blair L.M. Kelley
- Narrated by: Anika Noni Rose
- Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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There have been countless books, articles, and televised reports in recent years about the almost mythic "white working class," a tide of commentary that has obscured the labor, and even the very existence, of entire groups of working people, including everyday Black workers. In this brilliant corrective, Black Folk, acclaimed historian Blair LM Kelley restores the Black working class to the center of the American story.
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Clarifying
- By Leah Grae on 04-02-25
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Pretty
- A Memoir
- By: KB Brookins
- Narrated by: KB Brookins
- Length: 6 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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By a prize-winning young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race, Pretty is as much a powerful and tender love letter as it is a call for change.
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Love
- By Brie on 02-11-25
By: KB Brookins
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From These Roots
- My Fight with Harvard to Reclaim My Legacy
- By: Tamara Lanier
- Narrated by: Shonrael Lanier
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Tamara Lanier grew up listening to her mother’s stories about her ancestors. As Black Americans descended from enslaved people brought to America, they knew all too well how fragile the tapestry of a lineage could be. As her mother’s health declined, she pushed her daughter to dig into those stories. "Tell them about Papa Renty," she would say. It was her mother’s last wish. Thus begins one woman’s remarkable commitment to document that story.
By: Tamara Lanier
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Night Flyer
- Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People
- By: Tiya Miles, Henry Louis Gates Jr.
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Harriet Tubman is among the most famous Americans ever born and soon to be the face of the twenty-dollar bill. Yet often she’s a figure more out of myth than history, almost a comic-book superhero. You could almost say she’s America’s Robin Hood, a miraculous vision, often rightly celebrated but seldom understood. Tiya Miles’s extraordinary Night Flyer changes all that.
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It was original.
- By Tree Jones on 04-30-25
By: Tiya Miles, and others
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We Refuse
- A Forceful History of Black Resistance
- By: Kellie Carter Jackson
- Narrated by: Kellie Carter Jackson
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolence and Malcolm X's "by any means necessary." In We Refuse, historian Kellie Carter Jackson urges us to move past this false choice, offering an unflinching examination of the breadth of Black responses to white oppression, particularly those pioneered by Black women.
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Insightful
- By TRACEY D. SCOTT on 06-10-25
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Black Faces in High Places
- 10 Strategic Actions for Black Professionals to Reach the Top and Stay There
- By: Randal D. Pinkett, Jeffrey A. Robinson
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Black Faces in High Places is the essential guide for Black professionals who are moving up through their organizations or industries but need a roadmap for how to get to the top and stay there. Based on the authors' considerable experiences in business, in the public eye, and as a minority, the book shows how African-American professionals can (and must) think and act both entrepreneurially and "intrapreneurially".
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purchased by accident, too much one way
- By mimi on 02-22-22
By: Randal D. Pinkett, and others
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The Life of Herod the Great
- By: Zora Neale Hurston, Deborah G. Plant - editor
- Narrated by: Blair Underwood, Robin Miles
- Length: 12 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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In the 1950s, as a continuation of Moses, Man of the Mountain, Zora Neale Hurston penned a historical novel about one of the most infamous figures in the Bible, Herod the Great. In Hurston’s retelling, Herod is not the wicked ruler of the New Testament who is charged with the “slaughter of the innocents,” but a forerunner of Christ—a beloved king who enriched Jewish culture and brought prosperity and peace to Judea.
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like the lion needs no weapon but himself
- By william t. on 03-25-25
By: Zora Neale Hurston, and others
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South to America
- A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
- By: Imani Perry
- Narrated by: Imani Perry
- Length: 16 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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We all think we know the South. Even those who have never lived there can rattle off a list of signifiers: the Civil War, Gone with the Wind, the Ku Klux Klan, plantations, football, Jim Crow, slavery. But the idiosyncrasies, dispositions, and habits of the region are stranger and more complex than much of the country tends to acknowledge. In South to America, Imani Perry shows that the meaning of American is inextricably linked with the South, and that our understanding of its history and culture is the key to understanding the nation as a whole.
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An incredible achievement
- By Tom on 02-16-22
By: Imani Perry
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Erased
- What American Patriarchy Has Hidden from Us
- By: Anna Malaika Tubbs
- Narrated by: Anna Malaika Tubbs
- Length: 12 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Across the world, patriarchy has oppressed women and denied their contributions, but every nation has its own unique gendered hierarchy. Dr. Anna Malaika Tubbs applies her signature approachable yet rigorous analysis to define American patriarchy in this definitive and groundbreaking history. Humanity in the United States is determined by gender in a limited and flawed binary logic that is also always tied to whiteness. Tubbs shows how a fabricated hierarchy became so deeply ingrained in the country over time that it now goes unnoticed, along with everything it intentionally conceals.
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Madness
- Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum
- By: Antonia Hylton
- Narrated by: Antonia Hylton
- Length: 11 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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On a cold day in March of 1911, officials marched twelve Black men into the heart of a forest in Maryland. Under the supervision of a doctor, the men were forced to clear the land, pour cement, lay bricks, and harvest tobacco. When construction finished, they became the first twelve patients of the state’s Hospital for the Negro Insane. For centuries, Black patients have been absent from our history books. Madness transports listeners behind the brick walls of a Jim Crow asylum. In Madness, journalist Antonia Hylton tells the 93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital.
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Glad to have added this to my cerebral quarters
- By Alednam A Uonopk on 04-25-24
By: Antonia Hylton
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Written in the Waters
- A Memoir of History, Home, and Belonging
- By: Tara Roberts
- Narrated by: Tara Roberts
- Length: 13 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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When Tara Roberts first caught sight of a photograph at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History depicting the underwater archaeology group Diving With a Purpose, it called out to her. Here were Black women and men strapping on masks, fins, and tanks to explore Atlantic Ocean waters along the coastlines of Africa, North America, and Central America, seeking the wrecks of slave ships long lost in time. Inspired, Roberts joined them—and started on a path of discovery more challenging and personal than she could ever have imagined.
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Grateful for this book!
- By Adreiona J on 06-29-25
By: Tara Roberts
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Woodworking
- By: Emily St. James
- Narrated by: L. Morgan Lee, Saoirse Ní Shúilleabháin, Emily St. James
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Erica Skyberg is thirty-five years old, recently divorced—and trans. Not that she's told anyone yet. Mitchell, South Dakota, isn't exactly bursting with other trans women. Instead, she keeps to herself, teaching by day and directing community theater by night. That is, until Abigail Hawkes enters her orbit.
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Love the story/ buy the physical book if you hate grating noises!
- By elanni sherick on 06-22-25
By: Emily St. James
You will gain a new lens on how you view art
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Extraordinary
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