Showing titles in Racism & Discrimination

America’s backstory is a whitewashed mythology implanted in our collective memory. It should come as no surprise that the dominant narrative of American history is blighted with errors and oversights—after all, history books were written by white men with their perspectives at the forefront. It could even be said that the devaluation and erasure of the Black experience is as American as apple pie. In Black AF History, Michael Harriot presents a more accurate version of American history.

"Copaganda" is a special kind of propaganda employed by police, prosecutors, and news media. It stokes fear of police-recorded crime and distorts society’s responses to it. As the United States incarcerates five times more people per capita than it did in 1970—despite record low crime rates—a sprawling and profitable punishment bureaucracy spends a lot of time and money to manipulate what we think that bureaucracy does and why.

Pieces You’ll Never Get Back is a harrowing and redemptive memoir, in which a new mother must reconstruct her shattered mind, her relationship to her religious upbringing, and her life’s purpose.

Historian Calvin Schermerhorn traces four hundred years of Black dispossession and decapitalization—what Frederick Douglass called plunder—through the stories of families who have strived to earn and keep the fruits of their toils. Their struggles reveal that the ever-evolving strategies to strip Black income and wealth have been critical to sustaining a structure of racialized disadvantage. These accounts also tell of the quiet heroism of those who worked to overcome obstacles and defy the plunder.

Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic “Politics and the English Language,” but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities. In the first of the book’s three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind.

This audiobook offers a thorough investigation into the experiences and stories that Black Americans have had over the course of several centuries. It honors those who, despite experiencing harsh systems that were set up to oppress them, made significant contributions to shaping African American history.

In 1985, Anthony Ray Hinton was arrested and charged with two counts of capital murder in Alabama. Stunned, confused, and only 29 years old, Hinton knew that it was a case of mistaken identity and believed that the truth would prove his innocence and ultimately set him free. But with an incompetent defense attorney and a different system of justice for a poor black man in the South, Hinton was sentenced to death by electrocution. He spent his first three years on Death Row at Holman State Prison in despairing silence.

For the first time in generations, antisemitism has become a daily reality in America, and it’s getting worse. Jewish synagogues and their congregants are targeted and sometimes killed by extremists, Jewish students are harassed and attacked on campus, conspiracy theories about Jews have gone mainstream on social media, and debates over Israel have veered into dangerous territory. Senator Chuck Schumer tackles the historical, political, cultural, and international forces that have led to the alarming rise of antisemitism in America in the 21st Century.

For two centuries, the deep-seated fear that many White people feel—of losing power, of losing economic standing, of losing a particular “way of life”—has been the driving force behind American politics and culture. And as we approach a future where White people will become a racial minority in the US, something estimated to occur as early as 2043, that fear is only intensifying, festering, and becoming more visible. Are we destined for a violent clash? What can we do to step into our country’s inevitable future, without tearing ourselves apart in the process?

In 1974, a federal judge ruled that Boston’s public schools were unconstitutionally segregated. The solution? A controversial experiment in desegregation known as “busing,” which would take children from majority-white schools and bus them to predominantly Black schools, and vice versa. In this dramatic audiobook full of surprising twists and fascinating characters, journalist Leon Neyfakh unpacks the history of busing in Boston and brings to life the human stories behind the headlines by talking to the people who saw what happened with their own eyes.

Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race”, a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of Black women and men - bodies exploited through slavery and segregation and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a Black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son.

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation - that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, he incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation - the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments - that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.

In the 1980s, as HIV/AIDS ravaged queer communities and communities of color in the United States and beyond, a straight white teenager named Ryan White emerged as the face of the epidemic. Diagnosed with hemophilia at birth, Ryan contracted HIV through contaminated blood products.

A polyamorous black man explores the intersections of racism and polyamory and their impact on people of color navigating an already misunderstood lifestyle.

On a March night in 2000, two deputy sheriffs serving a warrant were shot in Atlanta, Georgia. One was severely wounded while the other would die a day later. The shooting kicked off a large manhunt in search of the alleged cop killer. Four days later in Alabama, authorities found their man—Jamil Al-Amin. He was a Muslim leader with the title of Imam in the West End neighborhood of Atlanta. He was also the man formerly known as H. Rap Brown. He was a charismatic Black radical in the late '60s.

This explosive new audiobook challenges many of the long-held assumptions about blacks, about Jews, about Germans and Nazis, about slavery, and about education. Plainly written, powerfully reasoned, and backed with a startling array of documented facts, Black Rednecks and White Liberals takes on the trendy intellectuals of our times as well as historic interpreters of American life.

Heather McGhee’s specialty is the American economy—and the mystery of why it so often fails the American public. From the financial crisis of 2008 to rising student debt to collapsing public infrastructure, she found a root problem: racism in our politics and policymaking. But not just in the most obvious indignities for people of color. Racism has costs for white people, too. It is the common denominator of our most vexing public problems, the core dysfunction of our democracy and constitutive of the spiritual and moral crises that grip us all.

As claims of antisemitism continue to distort our politics at home and abroad, it has become almost impossible to talk about constructively, even in private. Instead, we find ourselves in a storm of misinformation, political mudslinging, and bad-faith accusations. There is, however, a way to deliberate more honestly. Looking beyond our polarizing headlines and interrogating the reasons racism takes hold, Off-White offers urgent analysis of one of the most divisive issues of our time.

Data is fundamental to the modern world. From economic development, to healthcare, to education and public policy, we rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial decisions. But because so much data fails to take into account gender, treating men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems. And women pay tremendous costs for this bias in time, money, and often with their lives. Celebrated feminist advocate Caroline Criado Perez investigates the shocking root cause of gender inequality and research in Invisible Women.

In the days and months after Pearl Harbor, the lives of Japanese Americans across the continent and Hawaii were changed forever. In this unforgettable chronicle of war-time America and the battlefields of Europe, Daniel James Brown portrays the journey of Rudy Tokiwa, Fred Shiosaki, and Kats Miho, who volunteered for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and were deployed to France, Germany, and Italy, where they were asked to do the near impossible. Brown also tells the story of these soldiers' parents, immigrants who were forced to submit to life in concentration camps on U.S. soil.