Autobiography of an Ex-white Man

Autobiography of an Ex-white Man PDF Author: Robert Paul Wolff
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1580461808
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
Autobiography of an Ex-White Man is an intensely personal meditation on the nature of America by a White Philosopher who joined a Black Studies Department and found his understanding of the world transformed by the experience. The book begins with an autobiographical narrative of the events leading up to Wolff's transfer from a Philosophy Department to the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, and his experiences in the Department with his new colleagues, all of whom had come to Academia from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Wolff discovered that the apparently simple act of moving across campus to a new Department in a new building worked a startling change in the way he saw himself, his university, and his country. Reading as widely as possible to bring himself up to speed in his new field of academic responsibility, Wolff realized after a bit that his picture of American history and culture was undergoing an irreversible metamorphosis. America, he realized, has from its inception been a land both of Freedom and of Bondage: Freedom for the few, and then for those who are White; Bondage at first for the many, and then for those who are not White. Slavery is thus not an aberration, an accident, a Peculiar Institution -- it is the essence and core of the American experience. Wolff's optimistic outlook leads him to express the hope that our acknowledging the realities of America's racial history and present will begin to tear down the formidable barrier to change. He sees this refashioning of the American story as a first step toward the crafting of a truly liberatory project. Robert Paul Wolff is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the author of numerous books, including Introductory Philosophy and In Defense of Anarchism.

Autobiography of an Ex-white Man

Autobiography of an Ex-white Man PDF Author: Robert Paul Wolff
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1580461808
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
Autobiography of an Ex-White Man is an intensely personal meditation on the nature of America by a White Philosopher who joined a Black Studies Department and found his understanding of the world transformed by the experience. The book begins with an autobiographical narrative of the events leading up to Wolff's transfer from a Philosophy Department to the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, and his experiences in the Department with his new colleagues, all of whom had come to Academia from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Wolff discovered that the apparently simple act of moving across campus to a new Department in a new building worked a startling change in the way he saw himself, his university, and his country. Reading as widely as possible to bring himself up to speed in his new field of academic responsibility, Wolff realized after a bit that his picture of American history and culture was undergoing an irreversible metamorphosis. America, he realized, has from its inception been a land both of Freedom and of Bondage: Freedom for the few, and then for those who are White; Bondage at first for the many, and then for those who are not White. Slavery is thus not an aberration, an accident, a Peculiar Institution -- it is the essence and core of the American experience. Wolff's optimistic outlook leads him to express the hope that our acknowledging the realities of America's racial history and present will begin to tear down the formidable barrier to change. He sees this refashioning of the American story as a first step toward the crafting of a truly liberatory project. Robert Paul Wolff is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the author of numerous books, including Introductory Philosophy and In Defense of Anarchism.

The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man

The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man PDF Author: James Weldon Johnson
Publisher: Prabhat Prakashan
ISBN:
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 135

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Book Description
First published in the year 1912, 'The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man' by James Weldon Johnson is the fictional account of a young biracial man, referred to as the "Ex-Colored Man", living in post-Reconstruction era America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

A Companion to African-American Studies

A Companion to African-American Studies PDF Author: Jane Anna Gordon
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405154667
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 704

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Book Description
A Companion to African-American Studies is an exciting andcomprehensive re-appraisal of the history and future of AfricanAmerican studies. Contains original essays by expert contributors in the field ofAfrican-American Studies Creates a groundbreaking re-appraisal of the history and futureof the field Includes a series of reflections from those who establishedAfrican American Studies as a bona fide academic discipline Captures the dynamic interaction of African American Studieswith other fields of inquiry.

Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race

Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race PDF Author: Thomas Chatterton Williams
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393608875
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
A meditation on race and identity from one of our most provocative cultural critics. A reckoning with the way we choose to see and define ourselves, Self-Portrait in Black and White is the searching story of one American family’s multigenerational transformation from what is called black to what is assumed to be white. Thomas Chatterton Williams, the son of a “black” father from the segregated South and a “white” mother from the West, spent his whole life believing the dictum that a single drop of “black blood” makes a person black. This was so fundamental to his self-conception that he’d never rigorously reflected on its foundations—but the shock of his experience as the black father of two extremely white-looking children led him to question these long-held convictions. It is not that he has come to believe that he is no longer black or that his kids are white, Williams notes. It is that these categories cannot adequately capture either of them—or anyone else, for that matter. Beautifully written and bound to upset received opinions on race, Self-Portrait in Black and White is an urgent work for our time.

When I Was White

When I Was White PDF Author: Sarah Valentine
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250146763
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The stunning and provocative coming-of-age memoir about Sarah Valentine's childhood as a white girl in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, and her discovery that her father was a black man. At the age of 27, Sarah Valentine discovered that she was not, in fact, the white girl she had always believed herself to be. She learned the truth of her paternity: that her father was a black man. And she learned the truth about her own identity: mixed race. And so Sarah began the difficult and absorbing journey of changing her identity from white to black. In this memoir, Sarah details the story of the discovery of her identity, how she overcame depression to come to terms with this identity, and, perhaps most importantly, asks: why? Her entire family and community had conspired to maintain her white identity. The supreme discomfort her white family and community felt about addressing issues of race–her race–is a microcosm of race relationships in America. A black woman who lived her formative years identifying as white, Sarah's story is a kind of Rachel Dolezal in reverse, though her "passing" was less intentional than conspiracy. This memoir is an examination of the cost of being black in America, and how one woman threw off the racial identity she'd grown up with, in order to embrace a new one.

Autobiography of an Ex-white Man

Autobiography of an Ex-white Man PDF Author: Robert Paul Wolff
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781782047513
Category : African American philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description


The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man PDF Author: James Weldon Johnson
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0593469615
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
A Contemporary Classics hardcover edition of the groundbreaking classic novel of the Black experience in America that is still remarkably relevant more than a century later. First published anonymously in 1912, this resolutely unsentimental novel gave many white readers their first glimpse of the double standards—and double consciousness—experienced by Black people in modern America. Republished in 1927, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man became a pioneering document of African-American culture and an eloquent model for later novelists ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. Narrated by a man whose light skin enables him to "pass" for white, the novel describes a journey through the strata of Black society at the turn of the century—from a cigar factory in Jacksonville to an elite gambling club in New York, from genteel aristocrats to the musicians who hammered out the rhythms of ragtime. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is a complex and moving examination of the question of race and an unsparing look at what it meant to forge an identity as a man in a culture that recognized nothing but color. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

Black White and Jewish

Black White and Jewish PDF Author: Rebecca Walker
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101647566
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The Civil Rights movement brought author Alice Walker and lawyer Mel Leventhal together, and in 1969 their daughter, Rebecca, was born. Some saw this unusual copper-colored girl as an outrage or an oddity; others viewed her as a symbol of harmony, a triumph of love over hate. But after her parents divorced, leaving her a lonely only child ferrying between two worlds that only seemed to grow further apart, Rebecca was no longer sure what she represented. In this book, Rebecca Leventhal Walker attempts to define herself as a soul instead of a symbol—and offers a new look at the challenge of personal identity, in a story at once strikingly unique and truly universal.

Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead

Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead PDF Author: Frank Meeink
Publisher: Hawthorne Books
ISBN: 0979018897
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead is Frank Meeink's raw telling of his descent into America's Nazi underground and his ultimate triumph over drugs and hatred. Frank's violent childhood in South Philadelphia primed him to hate, while addiction made him easy prey for a small group of skinhead gang recruiters. By 16 he had become one of the most notorious skinhead gang leaders on the East Coast and by 18 he was doing hard time. Teamed up with African-American players in a prison football league, Frank learned to question his hatred, and after being paroled he defected from the white supremac.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

The Autobiography of Malcolm X PDF Author: Malcolm X
Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics
ISBN: 9780141185439
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
Malcolm X's blazing, legendary autobiography, completed shortly before his assassination in 1965, depicts a remarkable life: a child born into rage and despair, who turned to street-hustling and cocaine in the Harlem ghetto, followed by prison, where he converted to the Black Muslims and honed the energy and brilliance that made him one of the most important political figures of his time - and an icon in ours. It also charts the spiritual journey that took him beyond militancy, and led to his murder, a powerful story of transformation, redemption and betrayal. Vilified by his critics as an anti-white demagogue, Malcolm X gave a voice to unheard African-Americans, bringing them pride, hope and fearlessness, and remains an inspirational and controversial figure today.