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In an age of Black Lives Matter, James Baldwin's essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad are as powerful today as when they were first written. With documentaries like I Am Not Your Negro bringing renewed interest to Baldwin's life and work, Notes of a Native Son serves as a valuable introduction.Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of black life and black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the words of one of the most captivating essayists and foremost intellectuals of that era. Writing as an artist, activist, and social critic, Baldwin probes the complex condition of being black in America. With a keen eye, he examines everything from the significance of the protest novel to the motives and circumstances of the many black expatriates of the time, from his home in ';The Harlem Ghetto' to a sobering ';Journey to Atlanta.' Notes of a Native Soninaugurated Baldwin as one of the leading interpreters of the dramatic social changes erupting in the United States in the twentieth century, and many of his observations have proven almost prophetic. His criticism on topics such as the paternalism of white progressives or on his own friend Richard Wright's work is pointed and unabashed. He was also one of the few writing on race at the time who addressed the issue with a powerful mixture of outrage at the gross physical and political violence against black citizens and measured understanding of their oppressors, which helped awaken a white audience to the injustices under their noses. Naturally, this combination of brazen criticism and unconventional empathy for white readers won Baldwin as much condemnation as praise. Notes is the book that established Baldwin's voice as a social critic, and it remains one of his most admired works. The essays collected here create a cohesive sketch of black America and reveal an intimate portrait of Baldwin's own search for identity as an artist, as a black man, and as an American.

From the host of The David Pakman Show comes a vital look at how right-wing extremism has led to the fall of critical thinking and rise of reactionary politics—and what we can do about it to save our democracyKnown for providing incisive progressive political analysis without being dogmatic, popular radio and podcast host David Pakman delves into the vicious cycle of reactionary political ideology.If there is one thing the 2024 election cycle showed us, it’s how the right-wing has benefited and capitalized on disinformation and the polarization of US politics. Critical thinking and media literacy are on a rapid decline, and our republic is unable to agree upon a shared set of facts.Infused with Pakman’s signature pragmatic insight, The Echo Machine is not just a critique nor an instruction manual, but an invitation to think, question, and understand how we got to this point and what we can do to mend our broken system. Deeply researched and accessibly written, readers will learn:The underlying issues with political discourse in America today.How these issues have led to the intellectual race to the bottom.Practical ways to improve discourse through improving critical thinking, media literacy, and public education.Examples from real-world debates and discussions to better understand the impact of these issues on our democracy and why leftism is the best path forward.Pakman calmly cuts through the alarmist noise to inspire readers across the political spectrum to break out of our toxic political echo chambers and ultimately save our democracy.

A tale of 2 NYC affordable housing co-ops’ struggle over privatization, public goods, and the future of American housingThe American Dream of homeownership is becoming an American Delusion. As renters seek an escape from record-breaking rent hikes, first-time buyers find that skyrocketing interest rates and historically low inventory leave them with scant options for an affordable place to live. With home valued more than ever as a commodity, even social housing programs meant to insulate families from cut-throat markets are under threat—sometimes by residents themselves.In Homes for Living, urban planner and oral historian Jonathan Tarleton introduces readers to 2 social housing co-ops in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Longtime residents of St. James Towers and Southbridge Towers lock horns over whether to maintain the rules that have kept their homes affordable for decades or to cash out at great personal profit, thereby denying future generations the same opportunity to build thriving communities rooted in mutual care.With a deft hand for mapping personal histories atop the greater housing crisis, Tarleton explores housing as a public good, movements for tenant rights and Indigenous sovereignty, and questions of race and class to lay bare competing visions of what ownership means, what homes are for, and what neighbors owe each other.

A violence prevention expert helps women and other targets of gender-based violence discern fact from fiction, improve their personal safety, and support social changePersonal safety shouldn’t mean living in fear, nor should it come at the expense of political progress.There are two kinds of safety choices: those that disrupt power structures and those that leave them unquestioned. Safety decisions that challenge power inequities require more fortitude, but they also lead to real change.Every time we alter our lives to avoid violence, we are making a political statement, whether we intend to or not. Crossing the street to avoid a homeless person says one thing. Not leaving your kid alone with a parish priest in the wake of a clergy sexual abuse crisis says another.In The Cost of Fear, nationally recognized leader in abuse prevention Meg Stone returns the focus to empowerment and shows us safety strategies that really work. Stone argues there are two opposing philosophies of how to make people safer, one of which exacerbates victim-blame (safety through compliance) and the other challenges it (safety through resistance).Deeply researched, The Cost of Fear includes interviews with people who have used their bodies to stop violence, those who teach self-defense as part of political organizing, as well as organizations that are effectively preventing sexual violence by inviting people to speak up for themselves.Stone gives readers practical strategies for keeping themselves and their loved ones safer and shows how personal safety is an essential part of political change, especially for an injustice as intimate as gender-based violence.

"A Haitian-born, Boston-based poet explores the personal and political stories of the Haitians who were part of Congo's 1960s decolonization movement"--

"An acclaimed historian narrates the stories of newly emancipated children who were re-enslaved by white masters through apprenticeships and their parents fights to free them"--

"An urgent examination of the invisibility of Black women and girls as victims of targeted killings, and the lack of police intervention and media coverage"--

A searing critique of the disability rights movement from within, and a call for collective liberation that is pro-Black and centers disabled people of color For over twenty years, Dara Baldwin has often been the only person of color in the room when significant disability policy decisions are made. Disenfranchisement of people of color and multi-marginalized communities within the disability rights community is not new and has left many inside the community feeling frustrated and erased. In To Be a Problem, Baldwin candidly shares her journey to becoming a disability activist and policymaker in DC while critiquing the disability rights community. She reveals the reality of erasure for many Black people and people of color in the disability movement and argues that, in turn, many white disabled people center themselves within the work without addressing their own white privilege. Disability rights groups have been centering white, straight, cisgender people while racial justice groups often fail to center disabled people, leading many Black and Brown disabled people to start their own Disability Justice organizations. Drawing from her unique vantage point, Baldwin calls readers to understand the shortcomings of the disability rights movement while inspiring us to push all movements towards a more inclusive and authentic liberation.

For readers of Andrea Elliott and Matthew Desmond, the former CEO of the Coalition for the Homeless breaks through the highly destructive misinformation surrounding our homeless neighbors Conservative think tanks like the Manhattan Institute disseminate anti-homeless myths in the media, legislatures, and the larger culture, claiming that our homeless neighbors cause their own predicament and that the best we can do is manage the problem. Drawing on her deep legal knowledge, policy expertise, and decades of frontline service, Mary Brosnahan cuts through the misinformation to deliver two important messages: that homelessness ultimately stems from a lack of investment in affordable housing; and that the greatest myth of all is that we should have no hope. In fact, the proven solutions are well documented, and the ability to enact them depends on us all. Brosnahan takes a nationwide look from New York to Detroit, Philly to L.A., and from rural areas such as Cumberland County, Pennsylvania to debunk 15 widespread misconceptions, including: that the problem is inevitable (in fact, Housing First approaches have shown great success)that "handouts" cause homelessness (in fact, the primary causes are flat wages and high rent)that homeless people need to prove that they're "ready" to receive aid (in fact, enforcing hurdles is far more expensive and less effective than Housing First).With brilliant insight, Brosnahan showcases how by dispelling these pervasive myths rooted in fear, we can embrace the affordable, housing-based solutions that will bring our impoverished neighbors home.

"Profound and revelatory, Racial Innocence tackles head-on the insidious grip of white supremacy on our communities and how we all might free ourselves from its predation. Tanya Katerí Hernández is fearless and brilliant. ...What fire!" --Junot Díaz Ahora disponible en español, el primer libro exhaustivo sobre la antinegritud en la comunidad latina que desenmascara la idea equivocada de que los latinos están "exentos" de racismo debido a su origen étnico y multicultural Now available in Spanish, the first comprehensive book about anti-Black bias in the Latino community that unpacks the misconception that Latinos are "exempt" from racism due to their ethnicity and multicultural background Inocencia racial sacando a la luz las voces silenciadas de las víctimas afrolatinas y afroamericanas de la antinegritud de los latinos. Mediante estudios de caso jurídicos que prueban el discrimen, Hernández, profesora afrolatina de Derecho experta en 'CRT' la teoría crítica de la raza, desmiente la alegación de que la cultura de los latinos, por ser mestiza, los escuda del prejuicio. Con ejemplos diversos que nunca llegan a los titulares e incluyen los contextos del trabajo, el mercado de vivienda, las escuelas, los lugares de recreación y la justicia criminal, Hernández prueba la existencia del racismo latino. Inocencia racial demuestra que el racismo en Estados Unidos es complejo y multifacético, y que es posible que un grupo históricamente marginado --que ahora constituye el segundo grupo racial/étnico más grande de los Estados Unidos-- sea víctima de discrimen y a la vez discrimine. Este análisis pionero, valiente y urgente de la antinegritud latina y cómo enfrentarla correctamente impugnará y transformará nuestras discusiones acerca de la raza. Racial Innocence excavates the otherwise silenced voices of the Afro-Latino and African American victims of Latino anti-Blackness. Hernández, an Afro-Latina law professor and expert in critical race theory, exposes the claim that Latinos' racially mixed culture shields them from bias by showing how legal case studies prove discrimination. Through varied examples from around the country, including the workplace, the housing market, schools, places of recreation, and criminal justice contexts that never make the headlines, Hernández proves the existence of Latino racism. Racial Innocence demonstrates that US racism is complex and multifaceted, and that it's possible for a historically marginalized group--now the second-largest racial/ethnic group in the United States--to experience discrimination while simultaneously being discriminatory. Bold and urgent, this trailblazing analysis of Latino anti-Blackness, and how to properly address it, will challenge and transform our conversations about race.

A timely companion to the New York Times bestseller For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood...and the Rest of Y'all Too Progressive white educators on the challenges and reimaginings of anti-racist education, cultural responsiveness, and sustained liberatory learning practices Designed for educators by educators, From White Folks Who Teach in the Hood is the white teachers' guide to effective multicultural, anti-racist pedagogy. Over 20 educators are featured in this book, representing different types of schools, different geographies, different durations of experience in the classroom, and different depths of experience in interrogating their whiteness. Throughout the text, nationally renowned educators and coeditors Dr. Christopher Emdin and sam seidel offer feedback and perspective on how to incorporate the practices and wrestle with the ideas outlined by the contributors. Replete with practical reflections and actionable exercises, this book explores among other things: --identity formation, healing, and growth in the early years of a teacher's career --the restrictive, harmful nature of standardization and the power of localization as a tool for transformation --hip-hop as a vehicle for promoting culture and authenticity within the classroom --whiteness as a racial identity and intentional anti-racist teacher trainings to identify and unlearn white supremacy From White Folks Who Teach in the Hood is the essential classroom companion for every white teacher committed to fostering productive learning spaces that respect the races, cultures, and identities of their students. It offers all readers a window into the essential work that must be done to transform our nation's schools from sites of harm to sites of healing.

SELECTED BY MAHOGANY L. BROWNE FOR THE NATIONAL POETRY SERIESAn irreverent poetry collection that wrestles with questions of family, mortality, cultural history, and identity from the Filipinx-American experience "you showed him your teeth, you dared him to look into your mouth to see the metal bands straightening your jaw into an American smile."—from Field Guide for AccidentsBorn in the United States to Filipino immigrants, poet Albert Abonado is no stranger to the language of periphery. Neither wholly “American” nor Filipino, Field Guide for Accidents’s speakers are defined by what they are not: not white enough to be born in America, not Asian enough to feel at home in the Philippines. Abonado’s poetry illuminates the strange and surreal in domestic routine, suturing wounds of love, grief, and the contradiction of being Filipinx-American, two identities bound with a hyphen that resists negation. What results is a growing exposure to a world mired in paradox.The poems in Field Guide for Accidents experiment with the constraints of the poetic line, shaping forms that exhume what tend to haunt us in the silence. In Field Guide for Accidents, memory becomes augmented with the imaginary; suspicion collides with superstition, while spirituality crosses paths with scientific fact. A mother returns to her son as a boat. A stew is prepared with blood yet masked as chocolate. The living eat with the dead in memories built like houses. Mythic, bloodthirsty creatures in Pinoy folklore prey on an exhausted poet. Research conducted in hindsight provides new avenues to explore regret.For many third-culture kids of the Asian-American diaspora, there is no such thing as a success story for “fitting in.” What matters more is finding where you belong. Spooning images from hand to mouth, the poems in Field Guide for Accidents struggle with what it means to consume and be consumed by American culture.

In a time of climate crisis and housing shortages, a bold, visionary call to replace current wasteful construction practices with an architecture of reuseAs climate change has escalated into a crisis, the reuse of existing structures is the only way to even begin to preserve our wood, sand, silicon, and iron, let alone stop belching carbon monoxide into the air. Our housing crisis means that we need usable buildings now more than ever, but architect and critic Aaron Betsky shows that new construction—often seeking to maximize profits rather than resources, often soulless in its feel—is not the answer. Whenever possible, it is better to repair, recycle, renovate, and reuse—not only from an environmental perspective, but culturally and artistically as well.Architectural reuse is as old as civilization itself. In the streets of Europe, you can find fragments from the Roman Empire. More recently, marginalized communities from New York to Detroit—queer people looking for places to gather or cruise, punks looking to make loud music, artists and displaced people looking for space to work and live—have taken over industrial spaces created then abandoned by capitalism, forging a unique style in the process. Their methods—from urban mining to dumpster diving—now inform architects transforming old structures today.Betsky shows us contemporary imaginative reuse throughout the world: the Mexican housing authority transforming concrete slums into well-serviced apartments; the MassMOCA museum, built out of old textile mills; the squatted city of Christiana in Copenhagen, fashioned from an old army base; Project Heidelberg in Detroit. All point towards a new circular economy of reuse, built from the ashes of the capitalist economy of consumption.

"In this electrifying literary memoir, Kate Hamilton deftly traces her complicated journey from loving wife to gaslit victim to furious feminist with an urgent goal: to expose how women are pressured to uphold the institutions of marriage and family, no matter the cost. In the tradition of Know My Name and The Argonauts, Hamilton braids her own story with cultural criticism to argue that we must face the misogyny lurking in the shadows of marriage in the 21st century. She examines the beliefs and conditioning that held her in an increasingly destructive marriage and unflinchingly documents what she did to keep her family together-therapy, unwanted sex with her husband, swinging, affairs, an abortion-without always knowing what she freely chose. And she considers the damage that was done, to herself and others, until she could acknowledge that to save herself and her sons, she had to destroy her marriage. Emotionally intense and timely, Mad Wife interrogates how marriage and the institutions that support it provide the perfect ecosystem for abuse of women and children, endangering their lives and denying them autonomy-all in the service of men's desires"--

"An incisive examination of how the pillars of feminism have eroded-and how all women, not just the white neoliberals, can rebuild them"--

"In stunning full color and accessible text, a graphic adaptation of the American Book Award winning history of the United States as told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples"--

"Four stories of resilience, mutual aid, and radical rebellion that will transform how we understand the Great Depression"--

Rebecca Parker was a young minister in Seattle when a woman walked into her church and asked if God really wanted her to accept her husband's beatings and bear them gladly, as Jesus bore the cross. Parker knew, at that moment, that if she were to answer the woman's question truthfully she would have to rethink her theology. And she would have to think hard about some of the choices she was making in her own life. When Rita Nakashima Brock was a young child growing up in Kansas, kids taunted her viciously, calling her names like "Chink" or "Jap." She learned to pretend that she did not feel the sting of scorn and the humiliation of contempt. The solitude and silence of her suffering-decreed by both her mother's Japanese culture and her father's Christian heritage-kept the wound alive. It was the gap between knowledge born of personal experience and traditional theology that led Rita Brock and Rebecca Parker to write this emotionally gripping and intellectually rich exploration of the doctrine of the atonement. Using an unusual combination of memoir and theology in the tradition of Augustine's Confessions, they lament the inadequacy of how Christian tradition has interpreted the violence that happened to Jesus. Ultimately, they argue, the idea that the death of Jesus on the cross saves us reveals a sanctioning of violence at the heart of Christianity. Brock and Parker draw on a wide array of intimate stories about family violence, the sexual abuse of children, racism, homophobia, and war to reveal how they came to understand the widespread damage being done by this theology. But the authors also undertake their own arduous and unexpected journeys to recover from violence and to assist others to do so. On these journeys they discover communities that begin to give them the strength to question the destructive ideas they have internalized, and the strength to seek out an alternative vision of Christianity, one based on healing and love. Proverbs of Ashes is both a condemnation of bad theology and a passionate search for what truly saves us.

"Joshua Douglas takes us behind the scenes of significant cases in voting rights--some surprising and unknown, and some familiar--to investigate the historic crossroads that have irrevocably changed our elections and the nation. In crisp and accessible prose, Douglas tells the story of each case, sheds light on the intractable election problems we face as a result, and highlights the unique role the highest court has played in producing a broken electoral system."--

"A short introduction to Black Humanism: its history, its present, and the rich cultural sensibilities that infuse it"--

The rise of collective violence and genocide is the twentieth century's most terrible legacy. Martha Minow, a Harvard law professor and one of our most brilliant and humane legal minds, offers a landmark book on our attempts to heal after such large-scale tragedy. Writing with informed, searching prose of the extraordinary drama of the truth commissions in Argentina, East Germany, and most notably South Africa; war-crime prosecutions in Nuremberg and Bosnia; and reparations in America, Minow looks at the strategies and results of these riveting national experiments in justice and healing.

Breathing Space is the story of Heidi Neumark and the Hispanic and African-American Lutheran church-Transfiguration-that took a chance calling on a pastor from a starkly different background. Despite living and working in a milieu of overwhelming poverty and violence, Neumark and the congregation encounter even more powerful forces of hope and renewal. This story of a community creating space for new life and breath is also the story of a young woman-working, raising her children, and struggling for spiritual breathing space. Through poignant, intimate stories, Neumark charts her journey alongside her parishioners as pastor, church, and community grow in wisdom and together experience transformation.

In this classic work, Herbert Marcuse takes as his starting point Freud's statement that civilization is based on the permanent subjugation of the human instincts, his reconstruction of the prehistory of mankind - to an interpretation of the basic trends of western civilization, stressing the philosophical and sociological implications.

In The Sociology of Religion, first published in the United States in 1963, Max Weber looks at the significant role religion has played in social change throughout history. The book was a formative text of the new discipline of sociology and has gone on to become a classic in the social sciences.