Author: Bill Mullen
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807854778
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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Book Description
This collection of fifteen new essays explores the impact of the organized Left and Leftist theory on American literature and culture from the 1920s to the present. In particular, the contributors explore the participation of writers and intellectuals on
Author: Gregory Howard Williams
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440673330
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Book Description
“Heartbreaking and uplifting… a searing book about race and prejudice in America… brims with insights that only someone who has lived on both sides of the racial divide could gain.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer “A triumph of storytelling as well as a triumph of spirit.”—Alex Kotlowitz, award-winning author of There Are No Children Here As a child in 1950s segregated Virginia, Gregory Howard Williams grew up believing he was white. But when the family business failed and his parents’ marriage fell apart, Williams discovered that his dark-skinned father, who had been passing as Italian-American, was half black. The family split up, and Greg, his younger brother, and their father moved to Muncie, Indiana, where the young boys learned the truth about their heritage. Overnight, Greg Williams became black. In this extraordinary and powerful memoir, Williams recounts his remarkable journey along the color line and illuminates the contrasts between the black and white worlds: one of privilege, opportunity and comfort, the other of deprivation, repression, and struggle. He tells of the hostility and prejudice he encountered all too often, from both blacks and whites, and the surprising moments of encouragement and acceptance he found from each. Life on the Color Line is a uniquely important book. It is a wonderfully inspiring testament of purpose, perseverance, and human triumph. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
Author: Randall Kennedy
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307455556
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
A “provocative and richly insightful new book” (The New York Times Book Review) that gives us a shrewd and penetrating analysis of the complex relationship between the first black president and his African-American constituency. Renowned for his insightful, common-sense critiques of racial politics, Randall Kennedy now tackles such hot-button issues as the nature of racial opposition to Obama; whether Obama has a singular responsibility to African Americans; the differences in Obama’s presentation of himself to blacks and to whites; the challenges posed by the dream of a post-racial society; the increasing irrelevance of a certain kind of racial politics and its consequences; the complex symbolism of Obama’s achievement and his own obfuscations and evasions regarding racial justice. Eschewing the critical excesses of both the left and the right, Kennedy offers an incisive view of Obama’s triumphs and travails, his strengths and weaknesses, as they pertain to the troubled history of race in America.
Author: Paul Heideman
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608461939
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 363
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Book Description
As Black oppression moves again to the forefront of American public life, the history of radical approaches to combating racism has acquired renewed relevance. Collecting, for the first time, source materials from a diverse array of writers and organizers, this reader provides a new perspective on the complex history of revolutionary debates about fighting anti-Black racism. Contextual material from the editor places each contribution in its historical and political setting, making this volume ideal for both scholars and activists. "Paul Heideman’s book reconstructs for us the long flowering of anti-racist thought and organizing on the American Left and the central role played by Black Socialists in advancing a theory and practice of human liberation. Class struggle and anti-racism are two sides of the same coin in this powerful collection. At a time when the emancipation of oppressed and working-class people remain goals of progressives everywhere, Heideman’s book provides us a map to a past that can help us get free."-Bill V. Mullen, Professor of American Studies, Purdue University "Should white workers pursue racial supremacy to make America great again? Ignore race by practicing color-blindness and dwelling on labor and economic issues alone? Or challenge oppression, bigotry, and exploitation in all their forms, wherever and whenever they appear? These strategies may sound like ones from our own time, but they were live options for the left a century ago. We are all in Paul Heideman's debt for compiling Class Struggle and the Color Line, a set of rare original sources that remind us of this: In the absence of sound social theory, disgusting racism can be passed off as populist rebellion. Don't let it happen again." -Christopher Phelps, co-author, Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War Paul Heideman is a PhD student in Sociology at New York University and is a frequent contributor to Jacobin and the Historical Materialism Conference.
Author: Abigail Thernstrom
Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
ISBN: 081799873X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 436
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Book Description
Twenty-five essays covering a range of areas from religion and immigration to family structure and crime examine America's changing racial and ethnic scene. They clearly show that old civil rights strategies will not solve today's problems and offer a bold new civil rights agenda based on today's realities.
Author: Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 0446533904
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 409
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Book Description
The readable companion, in the oral-history tradition of Studs Terkel, to the PBS documentary series, peeking behind the veil "that still, far too often, separates black America from white." Renowned scholar and New York Times bestselling author Gates delivers a stirring and authoritative companion to the major new PBS documentary America Behind the Color Line. The book includes thought-provoking essays from Colin Powell, Morgan Freeman, Russell Simmons, Vernon Jordan, Alicia Keys, Bernie Mac, and Quincy Jones.
Author: Robert C. Lieberman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
Shifting the Color Line explores the historical and political roots of racial conflict in American welfare policy, beginning with the New Deal. Robert Lieberman demonstrates how racial distinctions were built into the very structure of the American welfare state.
Author: Kate A. Baldwin
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822383837
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
Examining the significant influence of the Soviet Union on the work of four major African American authors—and on twentieth-century American debates about race—Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain remaps black modernism, revealing the importance of the Soviet experience in the formation of a black transnationalism. Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, and Paul Robeson each lived or traveled extensively in the Soviet Union between the 1920s and the 1960s, and each reflected on Communism and Soviet life in works that have been largely unavailable, overlooked, or understudied. Kate A. Baldwin takes up these writings, as well as considerable material from Soviet sources—including articles in Pravda and Ogonek, political cartoons, Russian translations of unpublished manuscripts now lost, and mistranslations of major texts—to consider how these writers influenced and were influenced by both Soviet and American culture. Her work demonstrates how the construction of a new Soviet citizen attracted African Americans to the Soviet Union, where they could explore a national identity putatively free of class, gender, and racial biases. While Hughes and McKay later renounced their affiliations with the Soviet Union, Baldwin shows how, in different ways, both Hughes and McKay, as well as Du Bois and Robeson, used their encounters with the U. S. S. R. and Soviet models to rethink the exclusionary practices of citizenship and national belonging in the United States, and to move toward an internationalism that was a dynamic mix of antiracism, anticolonialism, social democracy, and international socialism. Recovering what Baldwin terms the "Soviet archive of Black America," this book forces a rereading of some of the most important African American writers and of the transnational circuits of black modernism.
Author: David Lyons
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000023117
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 215
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Book Description
The Color Line provides a concise history of the role of race and ethnicity in the US, from the early colonial period to the present, to reveal the public policies and private actions that have enabled racial subordination and the actors who have fought against it. Focusing on Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latino Americans, it explores how racial subordination developed in the region, how it has been resisted and opposed, and how it has been sustained through independence, the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, and subsequent reforms. The text also considers the position of European immigrants to the US, interrogates relevant moral issues, and identifies persistent problems of public policy, arguing that all four centuries of racial subordination are relevant to understanding contemporary America and some of its most urgent issues. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of American history, the history of race and ethnicity, and other related courses in the humanities and social sciences.
Author: J. A. Rogers
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819575518
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
The classic refutation of scientific racism from the renowned African American journalist and author of Africa’s Gift to America. In Nature Knows No Color-Line, originally published in 1952, historian Joel Augustus Rogers examines the origins of racial hierarchy and the color problem. Rogers was a humanist who believed that there were no scientifically evident racial divisions—all humans belong to one “race.” He believed that color prejudice generally evolved from issues of domination and power between two physiologically different groups. According to Rogers, color prejudice was then used a rationale for domination, subjugation and warfare. Societies developed myths and prejudices in order to pursue their own interests at the expense of other groups. This book argues that many instances of the contributions of black people had been left out of the history books, and gives many examples. “Most contemporary college students have never heard of J.A Rogers nor are they aware of his long journalistic career and pioneering archival research. Rogers committed his life to fighting against racism and he had a major influence on black print culture through his attempts to improve race relations in the United States and challenge white supremacist tracts aimed at disparaging the history and contributions of people of African descent to world civilizations.” —Thabiti Asukile, “Black International Journalism, Archival Research and Black Print Culture,” The Journal of African American History
