On the Other Side of Freedom

On the Other Side of Freedom PDF Author: DeRay Mckesson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525560572
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
"Hope and insight and empathy spring from every page. . . . [McKesson] stares down the faces of bigotry and unfreedom and cynicism and doesn't flinch in writing out our marching orders toward freedom." --Ibram X. Kendi, #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist From the internationally recognized civil rights activist/organizer and host of the podcast Pod Save the People, a meditation on resistance, justice, and freedom, and an intimate portrait of a movement from the front lines. In August 2014, twenty-nine-year-old activist DeRay Mckesson stood with hundreds of others on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to push a message of justice and accountability. These protests, and others like them in cities across the country, resulted in the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. Now, in his first book, Mckesson lays down the intellectual, pragmatic, and political framework for a new liberation movement. Continuing a conversation about activism, resistance, and justice that embraces our nation's complex history, he dissects how deliberate oppression persists, how racial injustice strips our lives of promise, and how technology has added a new dimension to mass action and social change. He argues that our best efforts to combat injustice have been stunted by the belief that racism's wounds are history, and suggests that intellectual purity has curtailed optimistic realism. The book offers a new framework and language for understanding the nature of oppression. With it, we can begin charting a course to dismantle the obvious and subtle structures that limit freedom. Honest, courageous, and imaginative, On the Other Side of Freedom is a work brimming with hope. Drawing from his own experiences as an activist, organizer, educator, and public official, Mckesson exhorts all Americans to work to dismantle the legacy of racism and to imagine the best of what is possible. Honoring the voices of a new generation of activists, On the Other Side of Freedom is a visionary's call to take responsibility for imagining, and then building, the world we want to live in.

On the Other Side of Freedom

On the Other Side of Freedom PDF Author: DeRay Mckesson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525560572
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Hope and insight and empathy spring from every page. . . . [McKesson] stares down the faces of bigotry and unfreedom and cynicism and doesn't flinch in writing out our marching orders toward freedom." --Ibram X. Kendi, #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist From the internationally recognized civil rights activist/organizer and host of the podcast Pod Save the People, a meditation on resistance, justice, and freedom, and an intimate portrait of a movement from the front lines. In August 2014, twenty-nine-year-old activist DeRay Mckesson stood with hundreds of others on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to push a message of justice and accountability. These protests, and others like them in cities across the country, resulted in the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. Now, in his first book, Mckesson lays down the intellectual, pragmatic, and political framework for a new liberation movement. Continuing a conversation about activism, resistance, and justice that embraces our nation's complex history, he dissects how deliberate oppression persists, how racial injustice strips our lives of promise, and how technology has added a new dimension to mass action and social change. He argues that our best efforts to combat injustice have been stunted by the belief that racism's wounds are history, and suggests that intellectual purity has curtailed optimistic realism. The book offers a new framework and language for understanding the nature of oppression. With it, we can begin charting a course to dismantle the obvious and subtle structures that limit freedom. Honest, courageous, and imaginative, On the Other Side of Freedom is a work brimming with hope. Drawing from his own experiences as an activist, organizer, educator, and public official, Mckesson exhorts all Americans to work to dismantle the legacy of racism and to imagine the best of what is possible. Honoring the voices of a new generation of activists, On the Other Side of Freedom is a visionary's call to take responsibility for imagining, and then building, the world we want to live in.

Summary of DeRay Mckesson's On the Other Side of Freedom

Summary of DeRay Mckesson's On the Other Side of Freedom PDF Author: Everest Media,
Publisher: Everest Media LLC
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 26

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Book Description
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 I learned hope the hard way. In September 2014, I was arrested while recording the police brutality in St. Louis. I was surrounded by officers, and one of them threatened to tase me. But instead of fear, I felt calmness wash over me. I’ve received many death threats over the years, but none have shaken me like that day when the car was in front of my house after work. #2 Faith is the belief that certain outcomes will happen, and hope is the belief that certain outcomes can happen. When we hope in this manner, we choose optimism. We believe that perhaps the seemingly extraordinary miracle is within our reach. #3 Hope is the precursor to strategy. It powers our vision of what roles we must play in bringing about a desired goal, and it amplifies our efforts. We cannot surrender to luck, and we must not surrender to a blind faith that things will just get better. #4 Freedom is not only the absence of oppression, but also the presence of justice and joy. We are trying to create something new, and it is impossible to create something new in the absence of hope.

Never Silent

Never Silent PDF Author: Peter Staley
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1641601450
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
"Never Silent is a gorgeous book . . . Peter Staley has written an electrifying primer for anyone who's thinking/worrying/wondering about how to change/save the world." —Tony Kushner, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright of Angels in America 2022 Lambda Literary Award Finalist The previously untold stories of the life of the leading subject in David France's How To Survive A Plague, Peter Staley, including his continuing activism In 1987, somebody shoved a flyer into the hand of Peter Staley: massive AIDS demonstration, it announced. After four years on Wall Street as a closeted gay man, Staley was familiar with the homophobia common on trading floors. He also knew that he was not beyond the reach of HIV, having recently been diagnosed with AIDS-Related Complex. A week after the protest, Staley found his way to a packed meeting of the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power—ACT UP—in the West Village. It would prove to be the best decision he ever made. ACT UP would change the course of AIDS, pressuring the National Institutes of Health, the FDA, and three administrations to finally respond with research that ultimately saved millions of lives. Staley, a shrewd strategist with nerves of steel, organized some of the group's most spectacular actions, from shutting down trading on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to putting a giant condom over the house of Senator Jesse Helms. Never Silent is the inside story of what brought Staley to ACT UP and the explosive and sometimes painful years to follow—years filled with triumph, humiliation, joy, loss, and persistence. Never Silent is guaranteed to inspire the activist within all of us.

The Aesthetics of Global Protest

The Aesthetics of Global Protest PDF Author: Aidan McGarry
Publisher: Protest and Social Movements
ISBN: 9789463724913
Category : Aesthetics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Protestors across the world use aesthetics in order to communicate their ideas and ensure their voices are heard. This book looks at protest aesthetics, which we consider to be the visual and performative elements of protest, such as images, symbols, graffiti, art, as well as the choreography of protest actions in public spaces. Through the use of social media, protestors have been able to create an alternative space for people to engage with politics that is more inclusive and participatory than traditional politics. This volume focuses on the role of visual culture in a highly mediated environment and draws on case studies from Europe, Thailand, South Africa, USA, Argentina, and the Middle East in order to demonstrate how protestors use aesthetics to communicate their demands and ideas. It examines how digital media is harnessed by protestors and argues that all protest aesthetics are performative and communicative.

What Truth Sounds Like

What Truth Sounds Like PDF Author: Michael Eric Dyson
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250199425
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Named a 2018 Notable Work of Nonfiction by The Washington Post NOW A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Winner, The 2018 Southern Book Prize NAMED A BEST/MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2018 BY: Chicago Tribune • Time • Publisher's Weekly A stunning follow up to New York Times bestseller Tears We Cannot Stop The Washington Post: "Passionately written." Chris Matthews, MSNBC: "A beautifully written book." Shaun King: “I kid you not–I think it’s the most important book I’ve read all year...” Harry Belafonte: “Dyson has finally written the book I always wanted to read...a tour de force.” Joy-Ann Reid: A work of searing prose and seminal brilliance... Dyson takes that once in a lifetime conversation between black excellence and pain and the white heroic narrative, and drives it right into the heart of our current politics and culture, leaving the reader reeling and reckoning." Robin D. G. Kelley: “Dyson masterfully refracts our present racial conflagration... he reminds us that Black artists and intellectuals bear an awesome responsibility to speak truth to power." President Barack Obama: "Everybody who speaks after Michael Eric Dyson pales in comparison.” In 2015 BLM activist Julius Jones confronted Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton with an urgent query: “What in your heart has changed that’s going to change the direction of this country?” “I don’t believe you just change hearts,” she protested. “I believe you change laws.” The fraught conflict between conscience and politics – between morality and power – in addressing race hardly began with Clinton. An electrifying and traumatic encounter in the sixties crystallized these furious disputes. In 1963 Attorney General Robert Kennedy sought out James Baldwin to explain the rage that threatened to engulf black America. Baldwin brought along some friends, including playwright Lorraine Hansberry, psychologist Kenneth Clark, and a valiant activist, Jerome Smith. It was Smith’s relentless, unfiltered fury that set Kennedy on his heels, reducing him to sullen silence. Kennedy walked away from the nearly three-hour meeting angry – that the black folk assembled didn’t understand politics, and that they weren’t as easy to talk to as Martin Luther King. But especially that they were more interested in witness than policy. But Kennedy’s anger quickly gave way to empathy, especially for Smith. “I guess if I were in his shoes...I might feel differently about this country.” Kennedy set about changing policy – the meeting having transformed his thinking in fundamental ways. There was more: every big argument about race that persists to this day got a hearing in that room. Smith declaring that he’d never fight for his country given its racist tendencies, and Kennedy being appalled at such lack of patriotism, tracks the disdain for black dissent in our own time. His belief that black folk were ungrateful for the Kennedys’ efforts to make things better shows up in our day as the charge that black folk wallow in the politics of ingratitude and victimhood. The contributions of black queer folk to racial progress still cause a stir. BLM has been accused of harboring a covert queer agenda. The immigrant experience, like that of Kennedy – versus the racial experience of Baldwin – is a cudgel to excoriate black folk for lacking hustle and ingenuity. The questioning of whether folk who are interracially partnered can authentically communicate black interests persists. And we grapple still with the responsibility of black intellectuals and artists to bring about social change. What Truth Sounds Like exists at the tense intersection of the conflict between politics and prophecy – of whether we embrace political resolution or moral redemption to fix our fractured racial landscape. The future of race and democracy hang in the balance.

The Struggles of John Brown Russwurm

The Struggles of John Brown Russwurm PDF Author: Winston James
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814742904
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
John Brown Russwurm (1799-1851) was an educator, abolitionist, editor, government official, emigrationist and colonizationist in the Pan-African movement. His life was one of "firsts" : first African American graduate of Maine's Bowdoin College; co-founder of Freedom's Journal, America's first newspaper to be owned, operated, and edited by African Americans; and, following his emigration to Africa, first black governor of the Maryland section of Liberia. Despite his accomplishments, Russwurm struggled internally with the perennial Pan-Africanist dilemma of whether to go to Africa or stay and fight in the United States, and his ordeal was the first of its kind to be experienced and resolved before the public eye.

The Truths We Hold

The Truths We Hold PDF Author: Kamala Harris
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525560726
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The #1 New York Times bestseller From Vice President Kamala Harris, one of America's most inspiring political leaders, comes a book about the core truths that unite us and how best to act upon them. "A life story that genuinely entrances." —Los Angeles Times “An engaging read that provides insights into the influences of [Harris’s] life...Revealing and even endearing.” —San Francisco Chronicle The daughter of immigrants and civil rights activists, Vice President Kamala Harris was raised in an Oakland, California, community that cared deeply about social justice. As she rose to prominence as one of the political leaders of our time, her experiences would become her guiding light as she grappled with an array of complex issues and learned to bring a voice to the voiceless. In The Truths We Hold, she reckons with the big challenges we face together. Drawing on the hard-won wisdom and insight from her own career and the work of those who have most inspired her, she communicates a vision of shared struggle, shared purpose, and shared values as we confront the great work of our day.

The Purpose of Power

The Purpose of Power PDF Author: Alicia Garza
Publisher: One World
ISBN: 0525509682
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
An essential guide to building transformative movements to address the challenges of our time, from one of the country’s leading organizers and a co-creator of Black Lives Matter “Excellent and provocative . . . a gateway [to] urgent debates.”—Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, The New Yorker NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY Time • Marie Claire • Kirkus Reviews In 2013, Alicia Garza wrote what she called “a love letter to Black people” on Facebook, in the aftermath of the acquittal of the man who murdered seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin. Garza wrote: Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter. With the speed and networking capacities of social media, #BlackLivesMatter became the hashtag heard ’round the world. But Garza knew even then that hashtags don’t start movements—people do. Long before #BlackLivesMatter became a rallying cry for this generation, Garza had spent the better part of two decades learning and unlearning some hard lessons about organizing. The lessons she offers are different from the “rules for radicals” that animated earlier generations of activists, and diverge from the charismatic, patriarchal model of the American civil rights movement. She reflects instead on how making room amongst the woke for those who are still awakening can inspire and activate more people to fight for the world we all deserve. This is the story of one woman’s lessons through years of bringing people together to create change. Most of all, it is a new paradigm for change for a new generation of changemakers, from the mind and heart behind one of the most important movements of our time.

The Matter of Black Lives

The Matter of Black Lives PDF Author: Jelani Cobb
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 006301761X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 883

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Book Description
A collection of The New Yorker‘s groundbreaking writing on race in America—including work by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hilton Als, Zadie Smith, and more—with a foreword by Jelani Cobb This anthology from the pages of the New Yorker provides a bold and complex portrait of Black life in America, told through stories of private triumphs and national tragedies, political vision and artistic inspiration. It reaches back across a century, with Rebecca West’s classic account of a 1947 lynching trial and James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind” (which later formed the basis of The Fire Next Time), and yet it also explores our current moment, from the classroom to the prison cell and the upheavals of what Jelani Cobb calls “the American Spring.” Bringing together reporting, profiles, memoir, and criticism from writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Elizabeth Alexander, Hilton Als, Vinson Cunningham, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Malcolm Gladwell, Jamaica Kincaid, Kelefa Sanneh, Doreen St. Félix, and others, the collection offers startling insights about this country’s relationship with race. The Matter of Black Lives reveals the weight of a singular history, and challenges us to envision the future anew.

Inheritance

Inheritance PDF Author: Baynard Woods
Publisher: Legacy Lit
ISBN: 9780306924200
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In this unflinching, honest narrative, an award-winning journalist discovers his family's heritage as slave owners in the South and grapples openly with his whiteness to inspire others to do the same. "Bracing, candid, and rueful." --Kirkus Baynard Woods thought he had escaped the backwards ways of the South Carolina he grew up in, a world defined by country music, NASCAR, and the confederacy. He'd fled the South long ago, transforming himself into a politically left-leaning writer and educator. Then he was accused of discriminating against a Black student at a local university. How could I be racist? he wondered. Whiteness was a problem, but it wasn't really his problem. He taught at a majority Black school and wrote essays about education and Civil Rights. But it was his problem. Working as a reporter, it became clear that white supremacy was tearing the country apart. When a white kid from his hometown massacred nine Black people in Charleston, Woods began to delve into his family's history--and the ways that history has affected his own life. When he discovered that his family--both the Baynards and the Woodses--collectively claimed ownership of more than 700 people in 1860, Woods realized his own name was a confederate monument. Along with his name, he had inherited privilege, wealth, and all the lies that his ancestors passed down through the generations. In this gripping and perceptive memoir, Woods takes us along on his journey to understand how race has impacted his life. Unflinching and uninhibited, Inheritance explores what it means to reckon with whiteness in America today and what it might mean to begin to repair the past.