"For Ta-Nehisi Coates, history has always been personal. At every stage of his life, he's sought in his explorations of history answers to the mysteries that surrounded him--most urgently, why he, and other black people he knew, seemed to live in fear ... In [this book], Coates takes readers along on his journey through America's history of race and its contemporary resonances through a series of awakenings--moments when he discovered some new truth...

In Blue Eyed we meet a group of 40 teachers, policemen, school administrators and social workers in/from Kansas City Blacks, Hispanics, Whites, men and women. The "blue eyed” participants are confronted with pseudo-scientific explanations of their inferiority, culturally biased IQ tests and discrimination. Within a few hours under Elliotts destructive power we see how adult persons despair and (almost) go crazy, not being able to cope with the...

Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. 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...

Chronicles the rollbacks to African American participation in the vote since the Supreme Court's 2013 Shelby ruling, which allowed districts to change voting requirments without approval from the Department of Justice.

Fifty years ago, Malcolm X told a white woman who asked what she could do for the cause, 'Nothing.' Michael Eric Dyson believes he was wrong. Now he responds to that question. If society is to make real racial progress, people must face difficult truths, including being honest about how Black grievance has been ignored, dismissed, or discounted.

In their quest for land in Southern Africa, the Boer people fought off the African inhabitants of the land they were invading from a circle of covered wagons, a laager.Long after they had won their battles, they still considered themselves a people besieged by black hordes even though these black hordes were the work force upon which their prosperity depended. With this siege mentality, the Afrikaners of South Africa created the notorious system known...

Cultural historian Dave Zirin, whose influential blog and bestselling books have offered searing insights into the politics of American sports, examines the myriad ways sports culture has worked both to reproduce and challenge the wider culture's dominant ideas about race and racial difference. Interviewed by Communication scholar Sut Jhally, whose own work has sought to clarify the relationship between popular culture and racial attitudes, Zirin's...

While on a forgettable first date together in Ohio, a black man and a black woman, are pulled over for a minor traffic infraction. The situation escalates, with sudden and tragic results, when the man kills the police officer in self-defense. Terrified and in fear for their lives, the man, a retail employee, and the woman, a criminal defense lawyer, are forced to go on the run. But the incident is captured on video and goes viral, and the couple unwittingly...

The elegant and compelling novel about a Pakistani man's abandonment of his high-flying life in New York an extraordinary portrait of a divided and yet ultimately indivisible world in America post-9/11. At a café table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an uneasy American stranger. He begins to tell the story of a man named Changez, who is living an immigrant's dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped...

"In the United States today, a young black man has a sixteen times greater chance of dying from violence than his white counterpart. Violence takes more years of life from black men than cancer, stroke, and diabetes combined. Even black women are more affected by violence than white men, despite its usual gender patterns. These disparities translate into starkly divergent experiences of life and death for whites and blacks in the United States. Yet...