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Tiffany N. Florvil examines the role of queer and straight women in shaping the contours of the modern Black German movement as part of the Black internationalist opposition to racial and gender oppression. Florvil shows the multifaceted contributions of women to movement making, including Audre Lorde’s role in influencing their activism; the activists who inspired Afro-German women to curate their own identities and histories; and the evolution of the activist groups Initiative of Black Germans and Afro-German Women. These practices and strategies became a rallying point for isolated and marginalized women (and men) and shaped the roots of contemporary Black German activism.Richly researched and multidimensional in scope, Mobilizing Black Germany offers a rare in-depth look at the emergence of the modern Black German movement and Black feminists’ politics, intellectualism, and internationalism.

A TIME AND WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A stunning personal manifesto on memory, family, and history that explores how we in America might—together—come to a new view of our shared past

“A vulnerable, honest look at a life lived in a country still struggling with its evils...Hopeful...Beautiful and haunting.” —Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author of Begin Again

In 2020, heartsick from constant assaults on Black life, Tracy K. Smith found herself soul-searching and digging into the historical archive for help navigating the “din of human division and strife.” With lyricism and urgency, Smith draws on several avenues of thinking—personal, documentary, and spiritual—to understand who we are as a nation and what we might hope to mean to one another.

To Free the Captives touches down in Sunflower, Alabama, the red-dirt town where Smith’s father’s family comes from, and where her grandfather returned after World War I with a hero’s record but difficult prospects as a Black man. Smith considers his life and the life of her father through the lens of history. Hoping to connect with their strength and continuance, she assembles a new terminology of American life.

Bearing courageous witness to the terms of Freedom afforded her as a Black woman, a mother, and an educator in the twenty-first century, Smith etches a portrait of where we find ourselves four hundred years into the American experiment. Weaving in an account of her growing spiritual practice, she argues that the soul is not merely a private site of respite or transcendence, but a tool for fulfilling our duties to each other, and a sounding board for our most pressing collective questions: Where are we going as a nation? Where have we been?

How the Word Is Passed meets Braiding Sweetgrass in a cultural and personal reclamation of Black history and Black botanical mastery, shared through the stories of long-lived trees.

The histories of trees in America are also the histories of Black Americans. Pecan trees were domesticated by an enslaved African named Antoine; sycamore trees were both havens and signposts for people trying to escape enslavement; poplar trees are historically associated with lynching; and willow bark has offered the gift of medicine. These trees, and others, testify not only to the complexity of the Black American narrative but also to a heritage of Black botanical expertise that, like Native American traditions, predates the United States entirely.

In When Trees Testify, award-winning plant biologist Beronda L. Montgomery explores the way seven trees―as well as the cotton shrub―are intertwined with Black history and culture. She reveals how knowledge surrounding these trees has shaped America since the very beginning. As Montgomery shows, trees are material witnesses to the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants.

Combining the wisdom of science and history with stories from her own path to botany, Montgomery talks to majestic trees, and in this unique and compelling narrative, they answer.

A vibrant new vision of food justice that celebrates Black food and recognizes the power of gathering to create sustainable, systemic change.

How can we create a world where everyone has enough? We can start by focusing less on lack and more on abundance.

In Gather, anthropologist Ashanté M. Reese argues for a new vision of food justice that centers the resilience of Black communities and argues that community nourishment deserves as much consideration as individual health. Highlighting four spaces of gathering―gardens, family reunions, repasts, and protests ―Reese offers rich, on–the–ground studies of the places and people who make up the food justice movement. From Black church networks and community farms to student protests, these studies illuminate ways we can challenge structures of power and nourish ourselves, body and soul. In a world of social isolation and unequal food systems, Gather offers a compelling argument for the beauty and political power of togetherness.

A concise history that uncovers the roots of this most pernicious American divide and makes an urgent call for reparations.

Why has the racial wealth gap between the median white households and median Black households remained stagnant over the past century, never narrowing below six to one? Leading expert on race and financial equality Mehrsa Baradaran attempts to answer this question in this sweeping yet accessible history. She shows how decades of the laws rooted in white supremacy―from slavery and the broken Reconstruction-era promise of “40 acres and a mule,” to the racist policies of the Jim Crow and New Deal eras―have restricted Black access to capital, credit, homeownership, and other mechanisms of wealth creation while subsidizing the rising economic fortunes of white families.

In The Racial Wealth Gap, Baradaran outlines two tectonic forces that have driven apart the economic fortunes of white and Black families: wealth creation for white Americans, who have been systematically receiving financial subsidies in the century and a half since emancipation, and wealth destruction for Black Americans―either by vigilante violence or by official means, such as allowing Black banks to collapse or building highways through segregated Black communities. These forces, combined with the racist notion that Black communities fail to rise because of their own moral, intellectual, or economic shortcomings, have kept Black families behind their white counterparts, despite decades of civil rights activism and national economic growth―a deep injustice that can only be achieved through reparations.

An infuriating and compelling read, The Racial Wealth Gap offers a devastating analysis of one of America’s most pressing systemic issues.

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A fierce exposé of the resistance to believing Black people and its devastating effects throughout American history.

From Reconstruction to Redemption, from the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation to the execution of the Southern strategy, from 2020’s multiracial protests to the swift elimination of policies etching out a more inclusive society, Americans regularly experience periods of racial reckoning followed by walloping retrenchment.

In Black Evidence, political scientist Candis Watts Smith shows that this pattern is the result of an American habit: denying the truths about our society that Black people experience and remember. Smith then delivers a warning: the effects of this habit ripple out, dulling our ability to identify the signs of authoritarianism and heightening our tolerance for cruelty. Still, she shows how these same truths offer models to overcome our repeated predicament.

Through a curation of critical moments across four centuries, Smith invites us to review the evidence that has been obscured, distorted, and denied. She rigorously investigates the practices that turn Black witnesses into liars in the court room, Black patients into superbodies that don’t feel pain in health care settings, Black people into subhumans in scientific experiments, and Black children into superpredators. She reveals what happens when Black voices are subject to exclusion―their communities are terrorized, their memories are refuted, and their resistance is pathologized.

Written with compassion and tempered optimism, Black Evidence prescribes a cure and encourages readers to practice the skills needed to build a truly multiracial democracy: confront our past, acknowledge the damage of inequality in our present, and listen to the voices of those who experience the problems we wish to solve for an equitable future.

A centennial celebration of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and its vital role in the development of Black Studies

In 1926, the Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile Arturo Schomburg's collection of four thousand books, pamphlets, papers, and prints arrived at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library. The collection contained works in many languages and formats, offering an unparalleled look into the richness and global reach of Black history. One hundred years later, Schomburg's collection remains a central feature of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, now the world's premier archive for study of the African diaspora, housing more than 11 million items, and a vibrant site of Black intellectual life.

This volume not only contextualizes the life and work of Schomburg and chronicles the history of the institution that bears his name but also includes a list of books and pamphlets in Schomburg's initial "seed collection," the fruit of a multiyear research effort to reconstruct this early Black Studies archive. Framing this list are essays and reflections written by an interdisciplinary group of scholars on the development of the Black intellectual tradition, both in Schomburg's time and today.

The author and director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library Publishing Project gives voice to long silent African Americans from the past, allowing them to tell their own stories that shed new light on critical moments in the Black Freedom Struggle, challenging what we think we know about Black history.

History is at its best when new findings and perspectives challenge old ideas and notions about the past, and even overturn common wisdom.

What if a former enslaved man in Galveston, Texas, witnessed the first Juneteenth and told a completely different story from what most of us know about that day? Why were slave ships most prone to rebellion, including those carrying the most African women? How has Islam found its way into R&B, soul, jazz, and other American popular music? Who was Benjamin Banneker, really?

In A High Price for Freedom, historian Clyde W. Ford addresses these and other questions, amplifying little-known voices from the African American past. In this wide-ranging, impeccably researched book, Ford begins with the 1656 court case of a woman named Elizabeth Key, who won a verdict for her freedom against her would-be enslaver—a victory that would forever change the nature, brutality, and course of American slavery.

Ford examines a range of topics, from the role of women in fomenting slave revolts to an in-depth look at how Selma was not really about voting rights or even Martin Luther King, Jr, but about a twenty-six-year-old Black man named Jimmie Lee Jackson who was killed by an Alabama state trooper. As he laying dying in the only hospital that would treat Black people in February 1965, Jimmie Lee whispered to his nurse, a Catholic nun, “Sister, isn’t this a high price for freedom?”

Eye-opening, enlightening, and often counterintuitive, this fascinating history includes compelling, heartrending, and factual accounts about people and events in the African American past that teach us things we never learned and challenge the stories we thought we knew.

This book is also freely available online as an open-access digital edition:

https://manifold.ecds.emory.edu/projects/finding-god-in-all-the-black-places

(https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/rup-wp-v2/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/28132142/9781978839809.pdf)

In Finding God in All the Black Places, Beretta E. Smith-Shomade contends that Black spirituality and Black church religiosity are the critical crux of Black popular culture. She argues that cultural, community, and social support live within the Black church and that spirit, art, and progress are deeply entwined and seal this connection. Including the work of artists such as Mary J. Blige, D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, Prince, Spike Lee, and Oprah Winfrey, the book examines contemporary Black television, film, music and digital culture to demonstrate the role, impact, and dominance of spirituality and religion in Black popular culture. Smith-Shomade believes that acknowledging and comprehending the foundations of Black spirituality and Black church religiosity within Black popular culture provide a way for viewers, listeners, and users not only to endure but also to revitalize.

An inspiring memoir from a legendary activist and political prisoner that “reminds us of the sheer joy that comes from resisting civic wrongs” (Truthout).

In 1968, Safiya Bukhari witnessed an NYPD officer harassing a Black Panther for selling the organization’s newspaper on a Harlem street corner. The young pre-med student felt compelled to intervene in defense of the Panther’s First Amendment right; she ended up handcuffed and thrown into the back of a police car.

The War Before traces Bukhari’s lifelong commitment as an advocate for the rights of the oppressed. Following her journey from middle-class student to Black Panther to political prisoner, these writings provide an intimate view of a woman wrestling with the issues of her time—the troubled legacy of the Panthers, misogyny in the movement, her decision to convert to Islam, the incarceration of outspoken radicals, and the families left behind. Her account unfolds with immediacy and passion, showing how the struggles of social justice movements of the past have paved the way for the progress—and continued struggle—of today.

With a preface by Bukhari’s daughter, Wonda Jones, a forward by Angela Y. Davis, and edited by Laura Whitehorn, The War Before is a riveting look at the making of an activist and the legacy she left behind.

From a star of the climate justice movement, a fresh, radical perspective for real climate action and “an indispensable toolkit for a new generation of activists” (Naomi Klein). 

For too long, representations of climate action in the mainstream media have been white-washed, green-washed and diluted to be made compatible with capitalism. In It’s Not That Radical, Loach addresses head-on the issues at the root of the climate crisis.

As Loach shows, we are living in an economic system which pursues profit above all else; harmful, oppressive systems that heavily contribute to the climate crisis, and environmental consequences that have been toned down to the masses. Tackling the climate crisis requires us to visit the roots of poverty, capitalist exploitation, police brutality, and legal injustice. Climate justice offers the real possibility of huge leaps towards racial equality and collective liberation as it aims to dismantle the very foundations of these issues.

Written with candor and hope, It's Not That Radical will galvanize readers to take action, offering a practical and transformative appraisal of our circumstances to help mobilize a majority for the future of our planet.

What began as an effort to prevent the neglect and potential loss of hundreds of African objects at the University of Texas at Austin has evolved into one of the most significant collections on campus. The art collections at Black Studies were born from the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies’ Art and Archive Initiative, under the leadership of Cherise Smith, Omi L. Jones, and Edmund T. Gordon.

Today Black Studies at the University of Texas boasts approximately 900 objects from sub-Saharan Africa, over 200 contemporary works from African American and Afro-Caribbean artists, and more than 100 pieces jointly held with other collecting entities on campus, adding a diverse richness to the overall collections. Collecting Black Studies gathers and presents these holdings—including costumes, jewelry, paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and photography—and prominently features five Black artists whose work is particularly significant. Scholars and curators examine how John Biggers, Michael Ray Charles, Christina Coleman, Angelbert Metoyer, and Deborah Roberts—artists with deep relationships to Texas—contributed to the Black Studies collections, to art history, and to the culture of our state and beyond.

Focusing on Black Americans' participation in world’s fairs, Emancipation expositions, and early Black grassroots museums, Negro Building traces the evolution of Black public history from the Civil War through the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Mabel O. Wilson gives voice to the figures who conceived the curatorial content: Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, A. Philip Randolph, Horace Cayton, and Margaret Burroughs. Originally published in 2012, the book reveals why the Black cities of Chicago and Detroit became the sites of major Black historical museums rather than the nation's capital, which would eventually become home for the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016.

Winner of the 2022 Modern Language Association First Book Prize

Winner of the 2022 Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award, presented by the Caribbean Philosophical Association

"Hold tight. The way to go mad without losing your mind is sometimes unruly." So begins La Marr Jurelle Bruce's urgent provocation and poignant meditation on madness in black radical art. Bruce theorizes four overlapping meanings of madness: the lived experience of an unruly mind, the psychiatric category of serious mental illness, the emotional state also known as "rage," and any drastic deviation from psychosocial norms. With care and verve, he explores the mad in the literature of Amiri Baraka, Gayl Jones, and Ntozake Shange; in the jazz repertoires of Buddy Bolden, Sun Ra, and Charles Mingus; in the comedic performances of Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle; and in the protest music of Nina Simone, Lauryn Hill, and Kendrick Lamar, among many others. These artists activate madness as content, form, aesthetic, strategy, philosophy, and energy in an enduring black radical tradition. Joining this tradition, Bruce mobilizes what he calls "mad methodology"—where madness informs and animates ways of reading, ways of thinking, ways of feeling, ways of telling, ways of being, and ways of life. Ultimately, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind is both a study and an act of critical, ethical, radical madness.

Porter's work analyzes the important developments and individuals in African American painting and sculpture from the pre-Civil War period to World War II. "James A. Porter was an art historian, educator, curator, and visual artist. He is first remembered by academics as an art historian who taught some of the best minds and visual artists who studied at Howard University during the span of his teaching career. "A pioneer in establishing the field of African American art history," writes Jeffreen M. Hayes, who rightly declares that:

James A. Porter was instrumental as the first scholar to provide a systematic, critical analysis of African American artists and their works of art. An artist himself, he provided a unique and critical approach to the analysis of the work. Dedicated to educating and writing about African American artists, Porter set the foundation for artists and art historians to probe and unearth the necessary skills essential to their artistic and scholarly endeavors. The canon is borne from Porter's determination to document and view African American art in the context of American art."

PRE-ORDER.  WILL SHIP ON January 20, 2026.

A bold manifesto arguing that there is a clear precedent for paying reparations to atone for America’s original sin of slavery, offering a compelling legal strategy to achieve this goal—from the acclaimed author of The Whiteness of Wealth.

The idea of reparations is not a new or original one; it is one that is baked into American history.

When the District of Columbia Emancipation Act of 1862 went into effect, wealthy slaveowners like Margaret Barber were compensated for the loss of their enslaved workers. Barber received $9,000—an equivalent to $250,000 today. When a group of Italian immigrants were lynched in 1892, President Harrison compensated Italy a total of $25,000 for their deaths—an equivalent to almost $766,000 today. The Indian Claims Commission, an arm of the federal government, paid Indigenous Americans $818 million for underhandedly stealing their land in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—an equivalent to almost $350 billion today.

Dorothy A. Brown addresses the glaring question: if reparations can be achieved for others, why not for Black Americans? If lynching can be remedied for Italian immigrants, and slaveholders compensated for losses associated with abolition and emancipation, then the government’s failure to provide such remedies to Black communities harmed by similar violence, loss, and destruction is long overdue. The fight for reparations is truly a fight for the soul of America, to produce the country our founding fathers idealized but never achieved.

Getting to Reparations makes a logical and necessary case for reparations for Black Americans. It lays out a path as to how we might achieve this, built on the frameworks used throughout U.S. history by the government to pay restitution. It is now time to do the same for America's Black population.

Black performance theory is a rich interdisciplinary area of study and critical method. This collection of new essays by some of its pioneering thinkers—many of whom are performers—demonstrates the breadth, depth, innovation, and critical value of black performance theory. Considering how blackness is imagined in and through performance, the contributors address topics including flight as a persistent theme in African American aesthetics, the circulation of minstrel tropes in Liverpool and in Afro-Mexican settlements in Oaxaca, and the reach of hip-hop politics as people around the world embrace the music and dance. They examine the work of contemporary choreographers Ronald K. Brown and Reggie Wilson, the ways that African American playwrights translated the theatricality of lynching to the stage, the ecstatic music of Little Richard, and Michael Jackson's performance in the documentary This Is It. The collection includes several essays that exemplify the performative capacity of writing, as well as discussion of a project that re-creates seminal hip-hop album covers through tableaux vivants. Whether deliberating on the tragic mulatta, the trickster figure Anansi, or the sonic futurism of Nina Simone and Adrienne Kennedy, the essays in this collection signal the vast untapped critical and creative resources of black performance theory.

Contributors. Melissa Blanco Borelli, Daphne A. Brooks, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Nadine George-Graves, Anita Gonzalez, Rickerby Hinds, Jason King, D. Soyini Madison, Koritha Mitchell, Tavia Nyong'o, Carl Paris, Anna B. Scott, Wendy S. Walters, Hershini Bhana Young

In an other, Sharon Patricia Holland offers a new theorization of the human animal/divide by shifting focus from distinction toward relation in ways that acknowledge that humans are also animals. Holland centers ethical commitments over ontological concerns to spotlight those moments when Black people ethically relate with animals. Drawing on writers and thinkers ranging from Hortense Spillers, Sara Ahmed, Toni Morrison, and C. E. Morgan to Jane Bennett, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway, Holland decenters the human in Black feminist thought to interrogate blackness, insurgence, flesh, and femaleness. She examines MOVE’s incarnation as an animal liberation group; uses sovereignty in Morrison’s A Mercy to understand blackness, indigeneity, and the animal; analyzes Charles Burnett’s films as commentaries on the place of animals in Black life; and shows how equestrian novels address Black and animal life in ways that rehearse the practices of the slavocracy. By focusing on doing rather than being, Holland demonstrates that Black life is not solely likened to animal life; it is relational and world-forming with animal lives.

PRE-ORDER: ON SALE DATE: February 3, 2026

A reissue of Greg Tate's classic, out-of-print collection of essays, with a new introduction by Hanif Abdurraqib and a new foreword by Questlove.

From one of the most original, creative, and provocative culture critics comes an eye-opening collection of essays and tales about American music and culture.

Under the guise of writing about a single subject, Greg Tate’s essays in Flyboy in the Buttermilk branch out from his usual and explore social, pop cultural, political, and economic subjects. Taking on a wide diversity of topics―from the rise of hip-hop; the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat; the music of Miles Davis, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Bad Brains, and many others; to the crisis of the Black intellectual and the irony of the GOP recruiting Black Americans― Tate writes in a brave and distinctive voice that is angry, joyous, anxious, and funny.

In every piece of this collection, Tate offers informed insight into where America is going and why.

Africans to Spanish America expands the Diaspora framework that has shaped much of the recent scholarship on Africans in the Americas to include Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Cuba, exploring the connections and disjunctures between colonial Latin America and the African Diaspora in the Spanish empires. While a majority of the research on the colonial Diaspora focuses on the Caribbean and Brazil, analysis of the regions of Mexico and the Andes opens up new questions of community formation that incorporated Spanish legal strategies in secular and ecclesiastical institutions as well as articulations of multiple African identities. Editors Sherwin K. Bryant, Rachel Sarah O'Toole, and Ben Vinson III arrange the volume around three themes: identity construction in the Americas; the struggle by enslaved and free people to present themselves as civilized, Christian, and resistant to slavery; and issues of cultural exclusion and inclusion. Across these broad themes, contributors offer probing and detailed studies of the place and roles of people of African descent in the complex realities of colonial Spanish America.

Contributors are Joan C. Bristol, Nancy E. van Deusen, Leo J. Garofalo, Herbert S. Klein, Charles Beatty-Medina, Karen Y. Morrison, Rachel Sarah O'Toole, Frank "Trey" Proctor III, and Michele Reid-Vazquez.

Considering the development and ongoing influence of Black thought

From 1900 to the present, people of African descent living in the United States have drawn on homegrown and diasporic minds to create a Black intellectual tradition engaged with ideas on race, racial oppression, and the world. This volume presents essays on the diverse thought behind the fight for racial justice as developed by African American artists and intellectuals; performers and protest activists; institutions and organizations; and educators and religious leaders. By including both women’s and men’s perspectives from the U.S. and the Diaspora, the essays explore the full landscape of the Black intellectual tradition. Throughout, contributors engage with important ideas ranging from the consideration of gender within the tradition, to intellectual products generated outside the intelligentsia, to the ongoing relationship between thought and concrete effort in the quest for liberation.

Expansive in scope and interdisciplinary in practice, The Black Intellectual Tradition delves into the ideas that animated a people’s striving for full participation in American life.

Contributors: Derrick P. Alridge, Keisha N. Blain, Cornelius L. Bynum, Jeffrey Lamar Coleman, Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, Stephanie Y. Evans, Aaron David Gresson III, Claudrena N. Harold, Leonard Harris, Maurice J. Hobson, La TaSha B. Levy, Layli Maparyan, Zebulon V. Miletsky, R. Baxter Miller, Edward Onaci, Venetria K. Patton, James B. Stewart, and Nikki M. Taylor

Three extraordinary and impassioned nonfiction works by Richard Wright, one of America's premier literary giants of the twentieth century, together in one volume, with an introduction by Cornel West.

“The time is ripe to return to [Wright’s] vision and voice in the face of our contemporary catastrophes and hearken to his relentless commitment to freedom and justice for all.” — Cornel West (from the Introduction)

Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos is Richard Wright’s chronicle of his trip to Africa’s Gold Coast before it became the free nation of Ghana. It speaks eloquently of empowerment and possibility, freedom and hope, and resonates loudly to this day.

The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference is a vital piece arguing for the removal of the color barrier and remains one of the key commentaries on the question of race in the modern era. “Truth-telling will perhaps always be unpopular and suspect, but in The Color Curtain . . . Wright did not hesitate to tell the truth as he saw it” (Amritjit Singh, Ohio University).

White Man, Listen! is a stirring assortment of Wright’s essays on race, politics, and other social concerns close to his heart. It remains a work that “deserves to be read with utmost seriousness, for the attitude it expresses has an intrinsic importance in our times” (New York Times).

Winner of the 2017 American Book Award

Flores Forbes, a former leader in the Black Panther Party, has been free from prison for twenty-five years. Unfortunately that makes him part of a group of black men without constituency who are all but invisible in society. That is, the “invisible” group of black men in America who have served their time and not gone back to prison.

Today the recidivism rate is around 65%. Almost never mentioned in the media or scholarly attention is the plight of the 35% who don’t go back, especially black men. A few of them are hiding in Ivy League schools’ prison education programs—they don’t want to be known—but most of them are recruited by the one billion dollar industry reentry employee programs that allow the US to profit from their life and labor. Whereas, African Americans consist of only 12% of the population in the US, black males are incarcerated at much higher rates. The chances of these formerly convicted men to succeed after prison—to matriculate as leading members of society—are increasingly slim. The doors are closed to them.

Invisible Men is a book that will crack the code on the stigma of incarceration. When Flores Forbes was released from prison, he made a plan to re-invent himself but found it impossible. His involvement in a plan to kill a witness who was testifying against Huey P. Newton, the founder of the Black Panther Party, had led to his incarceration. While in prison he earned a college degree using a Pell Grant, with hope this would get him on the right track and a chance at a normal life. He was released but that’s where his story and most invisible men’s stories begin.

This book will weave Flores’ knowledge, wisdom, and experience with incarceration, sentencing reform, judicial inequity, hiding and re-entry into society, and the issue of increasing struggles and inequality for formerly incarcerated men into a collection of poignant essays that finally give invisible men a voice and face in society.

The unique social, cultural, and political life of the incomparable LeBron James
 
LeBron James is the hero in two very American tales: one, a success story the nation loves; the other, the latest installment in an ongoing chronicle of American antiblackness. He’s the poor boy from a “broken” home who makes good. He’s also the poor Black boy from a “broken” home who makes good, then at the apex of his career finds “n*****” spray-painted across the gate to his home.
 
James has lived in the public eye ever since high school when his extraordinary athletic skills subjected his every action, every statement, every fashion choice to intense public scrutiny that tells us less about James himself and more about a nation still wrestling with many social inequities. He uses his celebrity not to transcend Blackness, but to give it a place of cultural prominence, and the backlash he receives exposes the frictions between Blackness and a country not fully comfortable with its presence. As a result, James’s story is a revelatory narrative of how much Blackness is loved, hated, misunderstood, and just plain cool in an America that has changed and yet not changed at all.

The Afro-Latin@ Reader focuses attention on a large, vibrant, yet oddly invisible community in the United States: people of African descent from Latin America and the Caribbean. The presence of Afro-Latin@s in the United States (and throughout the Americas) belies the notion that Blacks and Latin@s are two distinct categories or cultures. Afro-Latin@s are uniquely situated to bridge the widening social divide between Latin@s and African Americans; at the same time, their experiences reveal pervasive racism among Latin@s and ethnocentrism among African Americans. Offering insight into Afro-Latin@ life and new ways to understand culture, ethnicity, nation, identity, and antiracist politics, The Afro-Latin@ Reader presents a kaleidoscopic view of Black Latin@s in the United States. It addresses history, music, gender, class, and media representations in more than sixty selections, including scholarly essays, memoirs, newspaper and magazine articles, poetry, short stories, and interviews.

While the selections cover centuries of Afro-Latin@ history, since the arrival of Spanish-speaking Africans in North America in the mid-sixteenth-century, most of them focus on the past fifty years. The central question of how Afro-Latin@s relate to and experience U.S. and Latin American racial ideologies is engaged throughout, in first-person accounts of growing up Afro-Latin@, a classic essay by a leader of the Young Lords, and analyses of U.S. census data on race and ethnicity, as well as in pieces on gender and sexuality, major-league baseball, and religion. The contributions that Afro-Latin@s have made to U.S. culture are highlighted in essays on the illustrious Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile Arturo Alfonso Schomburg and music and dance genres from salsa to mambo, and from boogaloo to hip hop. Taken together, these and many more selections help to bring Afro-Latin@s in the United States into critical view.

Contributors: Afro–Puerto Rican Testimonies Project, Josefina Baéz, Ejima Baker, Luis Barrios, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Adrian Burgos Jr., Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Adrián Castro, Jesús Colón, Marta I. Cruz-Janzen, William A. Darity Jr., Milca Esdaille, Sandra María Esteves, María Teresa Fernández (Mariposa), Carlos Flores, Juan Flores, Jack D. Forbes, David F. Garcia, Ruth Glasser, Virginia Meecham Gould, Susan D. Greenbaum, Evelio Grillo, Pablo “Yoruba” Guzmán, Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Tanya K. Hernández, Victor Hernández Cruz, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, Lisa Hoppenjans, Vielka Cecilia Hoy, Alan J. Hughes, María Rosario Jackson, James Jennings, Miriam Jiménez Román, Angela Jorge, David Lamb, Aida Lambert, Ana M. Lara, Evelyne Laurent-Perrault, Tato Laviera, John Logan, Antonio López, Felipe Luciano, Louis Pancho McFarland, Ryan Mann-Hamilton, Wayne Marshall, Marianela Medrano, Nancy Raquel Mirabal, Yvette Modestin, Ed Morales, Jairo Moreno, Marta Moreno Vega, Willie Perdomo, Graciela Pérez Gutiérrez, Sofia Quintero, Ted Richardson, Louis Reyes Rivera, Pedro R. Rivera , Raquel Z. Rivera, Yeidy Rivero, Mark Q. Sawyer, Piri Thomas, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Nilaja Sun, Sherezada “Chiqui” Vicioso, Peter H. Wood

A sweeping look back at the protest movements that changed America from activist and NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, with personal and historical insights into lessons they can teach us today

For many, it can feel like change takes too long, and it might seem that we have not moved very far. But political activist Kareem Abdul-Jabbar believes that public protest is a vital part of affecting change, even if that change doesn’t come “right now.”

In We All Want to Change the World, he examines the activism of people of all ages, ethnicities, and socio-economic backgrounds that helped change America, documenting events from the Free Speech Movement through the movement for civil rights, the fight for women’s and LGBTQ rights, and, of course, the protests against the Vietnam War. At a time in our history when we are witnessing protests across campuses, within the labor movement, and following the killing of George Floyd, Abdul-Jabbar reminds us that protests are a lifeblood of our history:

“Protest movements, even peaceful ones, are never popular at first. . . . But there is a reason protest gatherings have been so frequent throughout history: They are effective. The United States exists because of them.”

Part history lesson and part personal reminiscences of his own activism, We All Want to Change the World will resonate with anyone who recognizes the need for social change and is willing to do the work to make it happen.

Throughout his esteemed career, William Cross has tried to reconcile how Black men he met in the barber shop “seemed so normal,” but the portrayal in college textbooks of Black people in general—and the Black working class in particular—is self-hating and pathological. In Black Identity Viewed from a Barber’s Chair, Cross revisits his ground-breaking model on Black identity awakening known as Nigrescence, connects W. E. B. DuBois’s concept of double consciousness to an analysis of how Black identity is performed in everyday life, and traces the origins of the deficit perspective on Black culture to scholarship dating back to the 1930s. He follows with a critique showing such deficit and Black self-hatred tropes were always based on extremely weak evidence.

Black Identity Viewed from a Barber’s Chair ends with a new understanding of the psychology of slavery that helps explain why and how, during the first twelve years of emancipation, countless former slaves exhibited amazing psychological, political, and cultural independence. Once free, their previously hidden psychology became public.

His booksets out to disrupt and agitate as Cross attempts to more accurately capture the humanity of Black people that has been overlooked in previous research.

Black Gurl Reliable does the original work of curating Black girls’ and women’s experiences and experiential knowledge, indexing sociocultural tactics (schooling) that foreclose Black girl aliveness, while advancing embodiment as a key ingredient of Black mattering. Elevating Black Girlhood Studies as an ethos, narratives presented offer redress to inequities and hauntings of race-gender structures of dominance and position Black girls and girlhood as more than lamentation and what happens to the body. Hill solicits the strength and utility of arts-based methods in capturing identity, performance, and experimental design for ephemerality and improvisation. Hill makes clear Black feminism’s insistence that knowledge and possibility are produced through the body.

As a means of mitigating the deleterious effects of schooling on Black girls’ and women’s bodies and making legible the insights and knowledge produced from schooling experiences, Hill introduces the concept of Transgressngroove. This living feminist practice explores the relationships between Black girlhood, education, and the body, as researched for over a decade through workshops, consulting, classrooms, personal development, and other teaching/learning spaces.

How American architecture can address systemic anti-Black racism: a creative challenge in 10 case studies

A New York Times critics' pick | Best Art Books 2021

Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America is an urgent call for architects to accept the challenge of reconceiving and reconstructing our built environment rather than continue giving shape to buildings, infrastructure and urban plans that have, for generations, embodied and sustained anti-Black racism in the United States.

The architects, designers, artists and writers who were invited to contribute to this book―and to the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art for which it serves as a “field guide”―reimagine the legacies of race-based dispossession in 10 American cities (Atlanta; Brooklyn, New York; Kinloch, Missouri; Los Angeles; Miami; Nashville; New Orleans; Oakland; Pittsburgh; and Syracuse) and celebrate the ways individuals and communities across the country have mobilized Black cultural spaces, forms and practices as sites of imagination, liberation, resistance, care and refusal.

A broad range of essays by the curators and prominent scholars from diverse fields, as well as a portfolio of new photographs by the artist David Hartt, complement this volume’s richly illustrated presentations of the architectural projects at the heart of MoMA’s groundbreaking exhibition.

The root of all inequality is the process of othering – and its solution is the practice of belonging

We all yearn for connection and community, but we live in a time when calls for further division along the well-wrought lines of religion, race, ethnicity, caste, and sexuality are pervasive. This ubiquitous yet elusive problem feeds on fears – created, inherited – of the "other." While the much-touted diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are undeniably failing, and activists narrowly focus on specific and sometimes conflicting communities, Belonging without Othering prescribes a new approach that encourages us to turn toward one another in unprecedented and radical ways.

The pressures that separate us have a common root: our tendency to cast people and groups in irreconcilable terms – or the process of "othering." This book gives vital language to this universal problem, unveiling its machinery at work across time and around the world. To subvert it, john a. powell and Stephen Menendian make a powerful and sweeping case for adopting a paradigm of belonging that does not require the creation of an "other." This new paradigm hinges on transitioning from narrow to expansive identities – even if that means challenging seemingly benevolent forms of community-building based on othering.

As the threat of authoritarianism grows across the globe, this book makes the case that belonging without othering is the necessary, but not the inevitable, next step in our long journey toward creating truly equitable and thriving societies. The authors argue that we must build institutions, cultivate practices, and orient ourselves toward a shared future, not only to heal ourselves, but perhaps to save our planet as well. Brimming with clear guidance, sparkling insights, and specific examples and practices, Belonging without Othering is a future-oriented exploration that ushers us in a more hopeful direction.