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The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying

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The pandemic has exposed the bitter terms of our racial contract, which deems certain lives of greater value than others.

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American slavery began 400 years ago this month. This is referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s true origin.

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When Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term 30 years ago, it was a relatively obscure legal concept. Then it went viral.

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A Q&A by-and for-people with privilege who want to learn more about racial justice

Demonstrators hold signs at a Black Lives Matter protest in Birmingham, England, on June 4, 2020. Photo: Mike Kemp/In Pictures via Getty Images

For a while now, I have been part of a community of white anti-racist activists that are working on understanding our own relationship with racism and anti-blackness and...

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Answering White People's Most Commonly Asked Questions about the Black Lives Matter Movement

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Where do I donate for Black Lives Matter? Why is the uprising / protesting violent? Should I go protest? Won't I get Covid-19 if I protest? What should I say to my Black friends? What should I tell my kids about the protests? We answer 10 of white people's most commonly asked questions.

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Americans don't see me, or Ahmaud Arbery, running down the road-they see their fear.

Oakmont beckoned outdoor runners-even novices like me.

We were the second family to move into Oakmont, a new housing development seven miles west of the University of Florida, when I joined the faculty in 2015. My partner and I loved how our living space wrapped around a green-dotted, open-air indoor courtyard like homes we'd seen in West Africa and Latin America. Nothing compared to being outside inside our courtyard home.

Well, maybe being outside in Oakmont-running down its newly paved roads, gazing up at stately oak trees with moss draping down, staring down into the ponds, racing all the galloping or flying animals, all to the sweet melody of quietness. Few houses. No people. Just paved roads. Just nature's sight lines.

At first, I hardly worried about cars while exercising. But the vehicles started coming. Trees were cleared. Foundations laid. New houses framed-a fascinating new picture screening every day for my curiosity.

As I ran on by, I imagined how the framed-out houses were going to look completed. Or I imagined living in the jumbo dwellings. Or as I ran on by, I stared at the construction workers as they stared back at me.

But not on one particular day. That day, no construction workers were around this half-built wonder. No vehicles were in sight. There was just my curiosity on overdrive-pushing me into the house to feed my imagination. I did not need long. I never needed long.

Minutes later, my feet were pounding the pavement under the moss. I am Ahmaud Arbery.

Running from yesterday's acquittal, 2019. Acrylic on cotton canvas. 24" x 24" (Image courtesy of Chase Hall Studio)

On Sunday, February 23, around 1 p.m., Arbery had just peered into a half-built home, as I did so many times in Oakmont. He ran away under the falling moss near the coastal Georgia town of Brunswick. Up the block lived Gregory McMichael, a former police officer and investigator for the local district attorney, and his son, Travis. McMichael did not see a former high-school football standout who normally jogs around the neighborhood, as Arbery's family describes him. McMichael saw a black male "hauling ass" from the scene of a crime, as he told investigators.
Adam Serwer: The coronavirus was an emergency until Trump found out who was dying
Arbery could have been any "black male running down the street," as a 911 caller described him. He could have been anyone's brother, father, son, cousin, boyfriend, husband, co-worker, friend. He could have been me running down the street. As a black male-not to the people who know me or who know Arbery, but to the Americans who don't know me and think they do-I am Ahmaud Arbery. Those Americans think they know me when my curiosity gets the best of me. They think they know me when something has gone missing. They think they know me when they see me running down the road.

They don't see me wearing the same white T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers that they wore the other day. They don't see themselves in me. They certainly don't see their own innocence in me. They see only their own guilt in me-their villainous fear marking me as the villain.

They don't need to figure out who I am. All they see is what I am. A black male. And what I am pronounces who I am. A criminal. The embodiment of danger. The producer of fear.

Black males have been made into the fathers of fear. But the fears of black men are bastards. Broods we never wanted, but can't escape. All these bastards are coming after us, suspecting us continuously, terrorizing us constantly, and we can't escape. The black man can't escape the fear of the black man.

Gregory McMichael "stated he was in his front yard and saw the suspect from the break-ins 'hauling ass'" down the road, according to the police report. McMichael "stated there have been several Break-ins in the neighborhood and further the suspect was caught on surveillance video," the report said. But where is the surveillance video linking Arbery to a recent burglary? And McMichael's neighborhood had gone seven weeks without a reported burglary, a local police lieutenant recently told CNN. The last reported burglary was on January 1, when a 9-mm pistol was stolen from an unlocked truck outside the McMichaels' home.
Ibram X. Kendi: We're still living and dying in the slaveholders' republic
According to McMichael, he ran in his house and grabbed his son, Travis, and both grabbed their weapons. McMichael told police they armed themselves because they "didn't know if the male was armed or not." McMichael also told police he saw Arbery "the other night" stick his hand down his pants, which led him to believe he was armed. Arbery was not armed.

No one living knows what Arbery felt in his final moments. No one living knows what Arbery felt as he approached the white pickup truck parked on the two-lane road, blocking his way. No one living knows what he felt as he saw Gregory McMichael standing in the truck's bed and saw Travis McMichael standing outside the passenger door wielding a shotgun.

All I know is what I would have felt. If I were running under the falling moss, if two armed white men were coming after me in their pickup truck-and a third not far behind-then I would have felt the wrath of terror: racist terror.

And I know the feeling of racist terror. I know what it feels like when a white man- in my case a police officer -suspects me as an armed criminal and pursues me and clutches his gun when I'm just out running (errands). I was three years older than Arbery, who would have turned 26 on Friday. I lived, and Arbery died. Arbery could have lived, and I could have died.

And I could have been placed in a morgue near all those black bodies falling from COVID-19, at rates higher than any other racial group, in states from Georgia to Maine, from Michigan to South Carolina, from Ohio to South Dakota, according to the COVID Racial Data Tracker. We can't see the coronavirus like we can't see the fears that terrorize us, but we keep feeling their lethal effects.

I just don't think Americans fully realize how terrorizing it is to black males when we are falsely suspected as violent criminals. All Americans seem to be thinking about is their fear of us-not our fear of their fear. Black males fear racist fear because we know from experience what happens when the police are called, when the Klan is called, when faces are reddened, when purses or ropes or guns are clutched, when they cross the street away from us, or cross the street toward us clutching their police badges, or their badges of white masculinity.

It is terrifying to produce so much unwanted and unwarranted fear. And then we are harmed. And then we are killed. And then our killers claim self-defense. And then our killers cast us-the unarmed ones, the dead ones-as the aggressors, as Gregory McMichael cast Arbery in the police report, justifying his son pulling the trigger; as George Zimmerman's lawyers cast Trayvon Martin in a strikingly similar case.

If I was chased by armed white men on an afternoon jog, then I would have thought they were trying to lynch me. I might not have run past their pickup truck, especially if they had been pursuing me for some time, especially if one of them was standing outside the car holding a gun. I would have thought he had gotten out of the car to shoot me. I would have feared that if I ran past the car, he'd shoot me in the back. I would have felt the need to disarm him to save my life.

But then again, armed white men have fashioned a racist existence wherein I'm unable to stand my ground against their violence. When white men murder men like me, they call it self-defense. And they are believed. When men like me defend ourselves against violent white men, they call us the aggressors. And they are believed.

Self-defense, like the Second Amendment, like stand-your-ground laws, has been colonized by white men. These rights are not for black women such as Marissa Alexander or Catina Curley, nor for white women such as Francine Hughes or Jennifer Schlecht, who defend themselves against domestic abusers. They are not for Latinos fleeing state-sponsored xenophobia, Native warriors fighting off white invaders, or Asians warding off coronavirus hate. They are not for Muslims or Jews defending themselves against crusading neo-Nazis. The human instinct to defend one's right to life is considered divinely human in white men, and bestial in the rest of us. When I defend myself as a human, I am not seen as human. I am seen as a beast.

Arbery did not just die. His version of the events died with him. His ability to defend his right to live died with him.

But there are black men who have survived the terror of being wrongly suspected. There are black men who know what it feels like to be avoided like we are beasts, or to be "literally hunted" like we are beasts, to use the words of LeBron James. There are black men who know what it feels like to fear the fear.

But there are also black men who know what it feels like to have courage: to acknowledge our fears-and all the fears about us-and still muster the strength to do what's right in the face of this pandemic of fear. We can build a different existence for black men-for all feared peoples-as we all run under the moss draping down for Ahmaud Arbery.

We can build an existence wherein when people don't know us, they recognize that they don't know us. An existence wherein people see our tattoos, hair, flash, lyrics as our art. An existence wherein people see us as unarmed when we are unarmed. An existence wherein people see us as armed for self-defense. An existence wherein when people see us speeding recklessly down the road like Sean Reed, they see us in a mental-health crisis. An existence wherein when people see us wearing masks, they see us protecting ourselves and them from infection. An existence wherein when we are not wearing masks, people give us masks to wear out of care.

What I am-a black male-should not matter. Who I am should matter.

We can build an existence wherein the fearful stop fearing me, and terrorizing me with their fear. Wherein they strive to get to know who I am, to get to know Ahmaud Arbery.

Or they don't. They just wave. They just let him run on by.

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Americans don't see me, or Ahmaud Arbery, running down the road-they see their fear.

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Black and brown people's defiance is not the problem. Our compliance is not the solution.

Contributing writer at The Atlantic

Adam Maida / The Atlantic

Chicago Police Officer Eric E. Stillman chased a boy down an alleyway.

It was the early morning of March 29. In Minnesota, opening statements in the Derek Chauvin trial were coming in a few hours. Stillman had responded to reports of gunshots in Little Village, a predominantly Latino community on Chicago's West Side.

"Stop right now!" the officer yelled at Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old seventh grader at Gary Elementary School. "Hands. Show me your hands. Drop it. Drop it."

A video taken by Stillman's body camera shows Toledo apparently complying.

He appears to drop something.

He stops.

He turns around.

He shows his hands.

Stillman fires a single shot, killing Toledo.

Afterward, Stillman's attorney insisted that the fatal shooting was justified. "The police officer was put in this split-second situation where he has to make a decision," said Timothy Grace, a lawyer retained by the Fraternal Order of Police in Chicago.

But it was Stillman who put Toledo in a split-second situation where he had to make a decision. Toledo decided to do everything the officer asked him to. He complied, but he is not alive today.
Marissa Evans: The relentlessness of Black grief
For Black and brown people, this is the terror of American policing. When we do not comply, we die like Daunte Wright did. When we do comply, we die like Adam Toledo did.

Recommended Reading

Compliance will not save our lives. Compliance will not save us from being brutalized and debased like U.S. Army Second Lieutenant Caron Nazario was in Virginia. Even when we are forced into a compliant position-handcuffed and prone and kneed like George Floyd was, incarcerated like Sandra Bland was-we may end up dead.

Black and brown people are told in endless ways by fraternal orders of police and their powerful enablers: Comply and survive. The defense attorney for Chauvin has said this in countless ways during Chauvin's trial, and will likely say it again during his closing statement today: Floyd would have survived if he had complied.

"Daunte Wright, if he would have just complied. He was told he was under arrest," said Brian Peters, the executive director of Minnesota's largest police union. "He set off a chain of events that unfortunately led to his death."

After Nazario was hurt during a traffic stop, Windsor Police Chief R. D. Riddle said, "At the end of the day, I'm glad nobody got hurt. That situation ended in the best way it could have. I wish he would have complied a whole lot earlier."

A piece in Mississippi's Natchez Democrat over the summer declared: "Don't defund the police; retrain the people to comply." In 2019, the Houston Police Officers' Union circulated the slogan "Comply Don't Die. Live to Have Your Day in Court."

That is an old sentiment. A century ago, the Ku Klux Klan and its powerful enablers delivered a similar message to Black and brown people.

In 1925, Louise Little was expecting to deliver at any moment, when hooded horsemen carrying flickering torches rode up to her wood-frame farmhouse outside Omaha, Nebraska. The Little family had moved to a segregated white neighborhood from the overcrowded strip of blocks allotted to Black people-and Louise and her husband, Earl, had been audaciously organizing for Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association.

"Get that nigger out here, now!" one Klansman shouted, Les and Tamara Payne recount in The Dead Are Arising.

With Earl out of town preaching, an intrepid Louise came outside and faced the armed men. "The Klansmen shouted threats and warnings at her that we had better get out of town because 'the good Christian white people' were not going to stand for my father's 'spreading trouble' among the 'good' Negroes of Omaha," Malcolm X wrote on the first page of his autobiography. After Malcolm was born, on May 19, the Little family complied and left Omaha. Three months later, more than 30,000 northern Klansmen paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.

Two centuries ago, enslaved people from the Southwest to the Southeast were given the same message by slaveholders and their powerful enablers. "There should be a perfect understanding between the master and his slave," one South Carolina enslaver said in 1833. "The slave should know that his master is to govern absolutely, and he is to obey implicitly. That he is never for a moment to exercise his will or judgement in opposition to a positive order." As early as 1696, the Boston minister and enslaver Cotton Mather instructed enslaved Black people to "be orderly in every thing" and "all your pains will End in Everlasting Joyes," as he wrote in A Good Master Well Served. "But if you will not be such Orderly Servants," then "all the Sorrows that you see in this World, are but the Beginnings of Sorrows."

Enslaved people were habitually told to remember (and obey) the "good" masters. Violently policed people today are constantly told to remember (and obey) the good cops, as a writer in Forbes urged after Floyd's death last year. "The vast majority of law-enforcement officers are heroes," Senator Mitch McConnell said in September. Weeks later, the then-presidential candidate Joe Biden said, "I have worked with police in this country for many years. I know most cops are good, decent people. I know how they risk their lives every time they put that shield on."
Read: In one year, 57,375 years of life were lost to police violence
Police officers do risk their lives. But do I risk my life every time I pull over for an armed police officer? When I don't have my documents in my hand on the steering wheel and I comply and reach for them, an officer can shoot me dead like one did Philando Castile. Compliance is not a lifesaver. When I comply completely, like Toledo did, I feel lucky to survive police encounters.

There are good cops. Some of these good cops are related to me and loved by me. Some of these good cops are not related to me and let people like me live when we defy or comply.

But the question is not how many good or bad cops exist today. The questions we should be asking are: What are police officers empowered to do to me by policies and practices? Why are they given military training, weaponry, and near-total impunity? Have racist narratives trained them to fear my dark body?

These questions are not about any individual cop. These questions are not individual. These questions are institutional. The question is whether the institution of American policing is good.

The violent institution of American slavery-the concentrated patrolling of enslaved bodies on and off plantations-is an ancestor of the violent institution of American policing. And like its forebear, American policing is defended as good despite its unmatched amounts of lethal violence.

American police have killed more than 6,000 people since 2015. American police kill civilians at a much higher rate than law-enforcement officers in every other wealthy country do. American police kill 33.5 people out of every 10 million, which is more than three times the second-highest national rate: Canada's, at 9.8 out of every 10 million. In the United States, Black people are killed by the police at more than twice the rate of white people. Police are the sixth leading cause of death for young Black men, after cancer. More people die in police custody in the United States than in any other wealthy country. That's 12 deaths for every 100,000 arrests in the U.S., which is more than twice the second-highest national rate: Australia's, at five deaths per 100,000 arrests. Nearly a quarter of the people killed by police since 2015 had a mental illness. According to a Washington Post database, white Americans accounted for 59 percent of those with a mental illness who were killed, Black Americans 16 percent, and Latino Americans 13 percent.

All of this police violence has hardly made the United States one of the safest countries in the world, or even close to the safest. The U.S. is in the middle of the global pack of nations on crime and homicide rates; several nations in Africa and Latin America have both far less police and far less crime. According to a recent Washington Post analysis, the overall arrest rate for homicide cases in the nation's 50 largest cities is a mere 49 percent, and about two-thirds of those cities had a lower homicide-arrest rate in 2018 than in 2008. "Some cities, such as Baltimore and Chicago, solve so few homicides that vast areas stretching for miles experience hundreds of homicides with virtually no arrests," the Post reporters found.
Read: The problem with police-shooting videos
Despite being in the middle of the pack on crime statistics, despite not solving most homicides, despite having the highest rates of violence in the wealthy world, the U.S. still rewards its police. American state and local governments collectively spend nearly $118.8 billion on policing, according to the Speaking Security newsletter. Only the United States ($731.8 billion) and China ($261.1 billion) spend more on their militaries than the United States spends on its police forces. Deciding not to defund, disarm, and draw down the police is an extremist, wasteful, violent, and anti-American position.

Then again, the racist fear of the dangerous dark body governs-as it has since the days of slavery. As divided as many conservatives, moderates, and liberals are on other matters, they remain largely united by their fear of roaming dark bodies, and vulnerable to fearmongering by police officials, or by former President Donald Trump when he says, "Without police, there is chaos."

The American people can't see all the chaos that police cause: the police violence, the nonviolent and violent demonstrations against police violence, the police violence at the police-violence demonstrations. This is what the historian Elizabeth Hinton deftly documents and calls "the cycle" in her forthcoming book, America on Fire.

Centrists, liberals, and many progressives decried the building of Trump's border wall to keep out the "animals," "criminals," and "rapists" from "shithole" countries. But then, in their hypocrisy, many decried calls to remove the wall of American policing that they believe protects them from the animals and super-predators and rapists of color. Within their cloud of fear, they have come to believe that armed forces, powerful prosecutors, and prison cells somehow prevent and control violent crime better than providing jobs, resources, and opportunities to people who have been deprived of them. Within their cloud of fear, they have come to believe that police violence is caused by a lack of compliance, rather than seeing it as the violent son of American slavery.

When will the American people realize what cellphone videos keep showing them, what body cameras keep recording, what the graveyards of history keep reporting? Black and brown people's defiance is not the problem. Our compliance is not the solution.

Police defiance of our humanity is the problem. American defiance of our right to live is the problem. Political compliance-to abolish American policing as we know it-is the solution.

Police compliance with our humanity could be the solution, but I can't imagine the institution of American policing ever recognizing Breonna Taylor's human rights, Eric Garner's cries to breathe, or the life that a Latino seventh grader has to live. The institution of American policing has never systematically complied with my humanity, and it never will. To believe otherwise is to comply with an alternative history, with a fantasyland, with wishful thinking, with an American dream that is my American nightmare.

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ancestor of the violent institution of american policing

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vast majority of law-enforcement officers

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Black and brown people's defiance is not the problem. Our compliance is not the solution. Contributing writer at The Atlantic Chicago Police Officer Eric E. Stillman chased a boy down an alleyway. It was the early morning of March 29. In Minnesota, opening statements in the Derek Chauvin trial were coming in a few hours.

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Pundits and politicians have created their own definition for the term, and then set about attacking it.

The United States is not in the midst of a "culture war" over race and racism. The animating force of our current conflict is not our differing values, beliefs, moral codes, or practices. The American people aren't divided. The American people are being divided.

Republican operatives have buried the actual definition of critical race theory: "a way of looking at law's role platforming, facilitating, producing, and even insulating racial inequality in our country," as the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who helped coin the term, recently defined it. Instead, the attacks on critical race theory are based on made-up definitions and descriptors. "Critical race theory says every white person is a racist," Senator Ted Cruz has said. "It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people because of the color of their skin," said the Alabama state legislator Chris Pringle.

There are differing points of view about race and racism. But what we are seeing and hearing on news shows, in school-district meetings, in op-ed pages, in legislative halls, and in social-media feeds aren't multiple sides with differing points of view. There's only one side in our so-called culture war right now.
Conor Friedersdorf: Critical race theory is making both parties flip-flop
The Republican operatives, who dismiss the expositions of critical race theorists and anti-racists in order to define critical race theory and anti-racism, and then attack those definitions, are effectively debating themselves. They have conjured an imagined monster to scare the American people and project themselves as the nation's defenders from that fictional monster.

The evangelist Pat Robertson recently called critical race theory "a monstrous evil." And over the past year, that "monstrous evil" has supposedly been growing many legs. First, Republicans pointed to Black Lives Matter demonstrators. Three days after George Floyd's murder last year, President Donald Trump recast the largely peaceful demonstrators as violent and dishonorable "THUGS." By the end of July, Trump had framed them as "anarchists who hate our country."

Then "cancel culture" was targeted. At the Republican National Convention in August, Trump blasted "cancel culture" as seeking to coerce Americans "into saying what you know to be false and scare you out of saying what you know to be true."

Next came attacks on the 1619 Project and American history. "Despite the virtues and accomplishments of this Nation, many students are now taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but rather villains," read Trump's executive order on November 2, establishing the President's Advisory 1776 Commission.

And now the Black Lives Matter demonstrators, cancel culture, the 1619 Project, American history, and anti-racist education are presented to the public as the many legs of the "monstrous evil" of critical race theory that's purportedly coming to harm white children. The language echoes the rhetoric used to demonize desegregation after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, in 1954.

In the 1950s and '60s, the conservators of racism organized to keep Black kids out of all-white schools. Today, they are trying to get critical race theory out of American schools. "Instead of helping young people discover that America is the greatest, most tolerant, and most generous nation in history, [critical race theory] teaches them that America is systemically evil and that the hearts of our people are full of hatred and malice," Trump wrote in an op-ed on June 18.

After it was cited 132 times on Fox News shows in 2020, critical race theory became a conservative obsession this year. Its mentions on Fox News practically doubled month after month: It was referred to 51 times in February, 139 times in March, 314 times in April, 589 times in May, and 737 times in just the first three weeks of June. As of June 29, 26 states had introduced legislation or other state-level actions to "restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism," according to Education Week, and nine had implemented such bans.

I have been called the father of critical race theory, although I was born in 1982, and critical race theory was born in 1981. Over the past few months, I have seldom stopped to answer the critiques of critical race theory or of my own work, because the more I've studied these critiques, the more I've concluded that these critics aren't arguing against me. They aren't arguing against anti-racist thinkers. They aren't arguing against critical race theorists. These critics are arguing against themselves.
Read: The GOP's 'critical race theory' obsession
What happens when a politician falsely proclaims what you think, and then criticizes that proclamation? Is she really critiquing your ideas-or her own? If a writer decides what both sides of an argument are stating, is he really engaging in an argument with another writer, or is he engaging in an argument with himself?

Take the journalist Matthew Yglesias. In February, in The Washington Post, he wrote that I think that "any racial gap simply is racist by definition; any policy that maintains such a gap is a racist policy; and-most debatably-any intellectual explanation of its existence (sociological, cultural and so on) is also racist." But nowhere have I written that the racial gap is racist: The policies and practices causing the racial gap are racist. Nowhere have I stated that any intellectual explanation of the existence of a racial gap is racist. Only intellectual explanations of a racial gap that point to the superiority or inferiority of a racial group are racist.

Was Yglesias really arguing against me, or was he arguing against himself? What about the columnist Ross Douthat? In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, he did what GOP thinkers keep doing to Americans striving to construct an equitable and just society: re-create us as extremists, as monsters to be feared for speaking out against racism. Douthat accused me of "ideological extremism that embarrasses clever liberals," comparing me to the late Rush Limbaugh. I've spent my career writing evidence-based historical scholarship and demonstrating my willingness to be vulnerable; Limbaugh had no interest in being self-critical, and for decades attacked truth and facts and evidence.

Douthat claimed that I have a "Manichaean vision of public policy, in which all policymaking is either racist or antiracist, all racial disparities are the result of racism-and the measurement of any outcome short of perfect 'equity' may be a form of structural racism itself."

Where did he get perfect equity? In How to Be an Antiracist, I define racial equity as a state "when two or more racial groups are standing on a relatively equal footing." I proposed that an example of racial equity would be "if there were relatively equitable percentages" of racial groups "living in owner-occupied homes in the forties, seventies, or, better, nineties." By contrast, in 2014, 71 percent of white families lived in owner-occupied homes, compared with 45 percent of Latino families and 41 percent of Black families. That's racial inequity.

What we write doesn't matter to the people arguing with themselves. It doesn't matter that I consistently challenge Manichaean racial visions of inherently good or evil people or policy making. It doesn't matter that I don't write about policy making being good or evil, or that I write about the equitable or inequitable outcome of policies. It doesn't matter that I've urged us toward relative equity, and not toward perfect equity.

If you want to understand why I've made these arguments, you first need to recognize that for decades, right-wing thinkers and judges have argued that policies that lead to racial inequities are "not racist" or are "race neutral." That was the position of the conservative Supreme Court justices who recently upheld Arizona's voting-restriction policies. Those who wish to conserve racial inequity want us to focus on intent-which is hard to prove-rather than the outcome of inequity, which is rather easy to prove. Case in point: GOP state legislators are claiming that the 28 laws they've enacted in 17 states as of June 21 are about election security, even though voter fraud is a practically nonexistent problem. They claim that these laws aren't intended to make it harder for Black voters or members of other minority groups to cast ballots, even as experts find that's precisely what such laws have done in the past, and predict that's likely what these new laws will do as well.
Jarvis R. Givens: What's missing from the discourse about anti-racist teaching
These critics aren't just making up their claims as they go along. They are making up the sources of their criticism as they go along. Douthat argues that work like mine "extends structural analysis beyond what it can reasonably bear, into territory where white supremacy supposedly explains Asian American success on the SAT." Who is giving this explanation other than Douthat? I'm surely not. I point to other explanations, including the history of highly educated Asian immigrants and the concentration of score-boosting test-prep companies in Asian (and white) neighborhoods.

White supremacy does explain why more than three-quarters of the perpetrators of anti-Asian hate crimes and incidents before and during the pandemic have been white. Asian American success as measured by test scores, education, and income should not erase the impact of structural racism on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. This group now has the highest income inequality of any racial group in the United States. Asian Americans in New York experienced the highest surge of unemployment of any racial group during the pandemic. Do the critics of critical race theory want us to think of the AAPI community as not just a "model minority," but a model monolith? Showcasing AAPIs to maintain the fiction of a postracial society ends up erasing Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

Critical race theory has been falsely labeled as anti-Asian. Helen Raleigh, an Asian American entrepreneur, defined critical race theory as a "divisive discriminatory ideology that judges people on the basis of their skin color" in Newsweek. "It is my practice to ignore critics who have not read the work and who are not interested in honest exchange," responded one of the three Asian American founders of critical race theory, Mari Matsuda, a law professor at the University of Hawaii. "But I do want to say this for the record: Asian Americans are at the center of CRT analysis and have been from the start."

How should thinkers respond to monstrous lies? Should we mostly ignore the critics as Matsuda has, as I have? Because restating facts over and over again gets old. Reciting your own work over and over again to critics who either haven't read what they are criticizing or are purposefully distorting it gets old. And talking with people who have created a monologue with two points of view, theirs and what they impute to you, gets old.

But democracy needs dialogue. And dialogue necessitates seeking to know what a person is saying in order to offer informed critiques.

As a scholar, I know that nothing is more useful than criticism to improve my scholarship. As a human being, I know that nothing is more constructive than criticism to improve my humanity. I've chronicled how criticism and critics have been a driving force on my journey to be anti-racist, to confront my own racist, sexist, homophobic, and classist ideas-and their intersections. Constructive criticism often hurts, but like painful medical treatments, it can be lifesaving; it can be nation-saving.

But what's happening now is something entirely different and destructive-not constructive. This isn't a "culture war." This isn't even an "argument." This isn't even "criticism." This is critics arguing with themselves.

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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actual definition of critical race theory

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alabama state legislator chris pringle.there

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intellectual explanation of its existence

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intellectual explanation of the existence of a racial gap

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There Is No Debate Over Critical Race Theory

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Pundits and politicians have created their own definition for the term, and then set about attacking it.

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King's nightmare of racism is being presented as his dream.

About the author: Ibram X. Kendi is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and the director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. He is the author of several books, including the National Book Award-winning Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in Ameri ca and How to Be an Antiracist.

Early on the evening of October 23, 2019, I took a tour of the Lorraine Motel. I'd been to Memphis, Tennessee, several times before, and I'd come back to speak at the National Civil Rights Museum, which encompasses the motel. But until that October, I'd never been able to bring myself to visit the site of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.

I saw what King saw moments before he saw no more. His second-floor room had been preserved. Walking into there was like walking into 1968. I saw the antique dishes from the motel's kitchen. I saw two beds: one for King, unmade, and one for his friend Ralph Abernathy. On April 4, 1968, King had been feeling under the weather.

The night before he was killed, King addressed striking Black sanitation workers in Memphis. "If something isn't done, and in a hurry," he said, "to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed."
From the King issue: The whitewashing of King's assassination
I walked out of Room 306, as King did, around 6 p.m. From the balcony, I looked down on a white 1959 Dodge Royal and a white 1968 Cadillac. King looked down to talk with some friends in the parking lot. He turned to walk back into his room. A bullet smashed into his neck. I stood on the concrete square where King's life fell. I looked to where King's associates pointed in the sniper's direction.

I did not say anything during the tour. A guide spoke, but I couldn't hear him. My silence kept screaming in my solemnness. I would grieve in silence (and later in words).

The second assassination of King began days after the first assassination. Almost a third of Americans polled in April 1968 felt that King himself was to blame for his assassination, felt that he had "brought it on himself." When King was killed, he was one of the most hated people in the United States. Nearly half of Black Americans and three-quarters of white Americans disapproved of him when he stepped out onto that motel balcony. Death threats were a fact of his life.

King's first assassins professed to hate him half a century ago. His second assassins profess to revere him. Death threats to King's legacy are now sold as love songs to his legacy. King is adored in death, literally. King is still hated in life.

Take the small Ohio crowd that gathered for a political rally last month. A white woman held a sign that read EDUCATE DON'T INDOCTRINATE. Another sign said SAVE THE DIVISION FOR MATH CLASS. Another person held a large poster of King.
Read: Martin Luther King Jr. saw three evils in the world
Josh Mandel, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, spoke to the crowd. "What the liberals are doing by advancing the cause of critical race theory-they are stomping on the grave of Martin Luther King," said Mandel, whose internal poll shows him leading the Republican primary race.

"Martin Luther King once said that he had a dream that his grandkids would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," Mandel added. "But what you have going on in the government schools by these liberals and the media, by the secular left, by the radical left, they're trying to make everything about skin color."

The sniper shots aimed at King's body of work sound this way almost every time. His modern-day assassins endlessly recite King's "dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character"-as if that was all King said during his 1963 March on Washington speech. They disregard the lines before and after it, when King lamented that his dream was being thwarted by "vicious racists" in places "sweltering with the heat of oppression." They disregard King's paraphrase of his iconic "dream" line in 1965: that "one day all of God's Black children will be respected like his white children." They disregard King's recognition that the civil-rights movement did not end racism, leading him to tell an NBC News correspondent on May 8, 1967, that the "dream that I had [in 1963] has at many points turned into a nightmare." (Ironically, it was this nightmare of post-civil-rights racial inequality that caused legal scholars in the 1970s to develop critical race theory in law schools, particularly to study and reveal the law's role in the maintenance of inequality.)

King's modern-day assassins disregard everything he said about education. "Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance," King wrote in 1967. "It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn."

They disregard King's worry about the effects of not teaching Black history, including white people internalizing notions of superiority and Black people internalizing notions of inferiority. "The history books, which have almost completely ignored the contribution of the Negro in American history, have only served to intensify the Negroes' sense of worthlessness and to augment the anachronistic doctrine of white supremacy," King wrote in 1967.

But all of this disregarding of King's words has not been the worst of it. The distortions are what's truly lethal to his legacy, such as the claim that King's dream was for his four little children to live in a nation where despite numerous racial disparities, no one judges racism or mentions skin color and everyone judges only character, because a hierarchy of character is apparently causing the inequities. King's nightmare of racism is being presented as King's dream.
Ibram X. Kendi: Our new postracial myth
Those who distort King's dream are now also distorting critical race theory, and distorting CRT to distort King. "Critical race theory is a Marxist doctrine that rejects the vision ofMartin Luther King Jr.," Donald Trump said at a Michigan campaign rally last October. In July, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said, "Critical race theory goes against everything Martin Luther King has ever told us, don't judge us by the color of our skin, and now they're embracing it."

It is wrong to present King, who continuously spoke out against racism, as someone who stood against people speaking out against racism. It is wrong to claim that teachers educating their students about past and present racism "are stomping on the grave of Martin Luther King," to quote Mandel. But people such as Trump, McCarthy, and Mandel aren't simply stomping on King's grave themselves. These self-professed admirers of King are digging a new grave, and burying King's body of work within it.

Texas state Senator Bryan Hughes said in July that he was aggrieved by educators teaching "the inverse of what Dr. King taught us." But this same legislator proposed a bill weeks earlier that would have removed King's "I Have a Dream" speech and "Letter From Birmingham Jail" from the Texas state curriculum. This year, the Tennessee group Moms for Liberty attempted to ban Frances E. Ruffin's book Martin Luther King Jr. and the March on Washington. Pennsylvania's Central York School District banned Brad Meltzer's I Am Martin Luther King, Jr. Two years ago, the Columbia County School District in Georgia banned Nic Stone's Dear Martin. There's no contradiction in these elected officials and parents banning books about a historical figure they claim to adore when they adore this historical figure only now that he is dead.

King's adult children have spent the past year defending their father's legacy. In the latest instance, Bernice King invited Josh Mandel, in response to his Ohio rally speech, "to study my father's teachings in full and in context. He was not a drum major for a colorblind society, but for justice."

"Spare me your lectures," Mandel shot back.

"I don't see liberals stomping on my father's grave," Martin Luther King III tweeted at Mandel. "I see a GOP effort to whitewash history."

"You have no idea what you're talking about," Mandel tweeted.

Mandel then addressed both of them together on Twitter. "You guys are just charlatans who use CRT to pervert his legacy and make money. He was a leader among leaders who brought people together and tore down racial barriers."

When President Ronald Reagan marked the first federally recognized Martin Luther King Jr. Day, in January 1986, he saluted "all those who have continued to work for brotherhood, for justice, for racial harmony-for a truly color-blind America where all people are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. To them I say, never, never abandon the dream."

Reagan abandoned government efforts to eliminate racial inequities, and constantly evoked King to justify his abandonment. King, though, had been clear about how to achieve his dream. "If we are going to make the American dream a reality, we are challenged to work in an action program to get rid of the last vestiges of segregation and discrimination," King said in his 1965 "American Dream" speech. "This problem isn't going to solve itself."

But Reagan Republicans then and Trump Republicans today have disparaged these anti-racist action programs to eliminate racial disparities as "racist," as "reverse discrimination," as handing out "special privileges" or "special treatment," all of which they claim King opposed.

"It is, however, important to understand that giving a man his due may often mean giving him special treatment," King wrote in his 1967 book, Where Do We Go From Here. "I am aware of the fact that this has been a troublesome concept for many liberals, since it conflicts with their traditional ideal of equal opportunity and equal treatment of people according to their individual merits."

Fifty-four years later, this remains a troublesome concept for many Americans who declare that they adore King. "Identity politics values people by characteristics like race, sex, and sexual orientation and holds that new times demand new rights to replace the old," Trump's 1776 Commission report stated in January. "This is the opposite of King's hope that his children would 'live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.'"
Read: The first white president
The 1776 Commission tried to turn King into an advocate of "color-blind civil rights." But King had already written back in 1967: "This is a day which demands new thinking and the reevaluation of old concepts. A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, in order to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis."

Historians and writers have called attention again and again and again to the "misappropriation" of King, the misunderstanding of King, the stealing of King, the attempts to "defang" King, the "watering down" of King, the "whitewashing" of King by the conservators of racial inequity. As the distortions of King have intensified over the years, so too has the language denouncing them.

And yet, the second assassination is about King and hardly about King at all. If Mandel is an avatar of the snipers, then King is an avatar of history. The second assassination of King is the latest assassination of history. The war on science, on expertise, on facts, on journalism, on democracy necessitates a concomitant war on history. And the war on history is the war on education-as history is essentially educational. If an anti-racist King can be turned into a color-blind conservator of racism, then anyone and anything from history can be assassinated. Pro-slavery Founding Fathers can be recast as having been "against slavery." Racist Confederate rebels can be recast as "not racist" heroes deserving of monuments in town squares.

Assassinating the reality of the past assassinates the reality of the present (and creates a new simulated reality). In this simulated reality, critical race theory can be warped into being like Jim Crow. Anti-American insurrectionists who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6 can be presented as pro-American patriots. Education can be turned into indoctrination, and indoctrination can be turned into education. Teaching children that there's nothing special about their skin color can be turned into teaching children to hate their skin color. People organizing and writing against racism can be portrayed as "race politics profiteers," as Mandel sadistically framed Bernice King.

It's been a year. I've raged. But rage has not been my overwhelming emotion as I've witnessed the assassinations of reality, of history, of King. I've largely felt grief, like I did at the Lorraine Motel two years ago. Grief-as I long for the wisdom of evidence and history to guide our policy decisions. Grief-as I long for King to live through his body of anti-racist words. Grief-as I realize that the assassins of his legacy will stop at nothing until those words are dead, until every trace of the dreamer of a multiracial democracy is gone.

I remember leaving the Lorraine Motel's museum that night. I walked past the old cars in the parking lot to view the large historical inscription opposite King's motel room. I looked up at his motel room, and looked down at the biblical passage that reads:

They said one to another,

Behold, here cometh the dreamer ...

Let us slay him ...

And we shall see what will become of his dreams.

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pennsylvania’s central york school district

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The Second Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

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King's nightmare of racism is being presented as his dream. About the author: Ibram X. Kendi is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and the director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research.

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The idea that “anti-racist” is a code word for “anti-white” is the claim of avowed extremists.

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Lesson of the Day: ‘Critical Race Theory: A Brief History’ (Published 2021)

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In this lesson, students will look at the spread across the country of legislation opposed to critical race theory. Then, they will consider the impact of these bills on their own schools and learning.

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As the first trained Black nurse in America, Mahoney devoted her life to creating opportunities in the profession for people of all races.

Mary Eliza Mahoney in 1879. She worked her way into a rigorous nursing program and was one of few students to succeed. Credit... Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
In 1878, about 40 candidates applied for the nursing program at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston. Only nine were admitted, and after 16 demanding months, only three of them are believed to have graduated. One who did earn a diploma was Mary Eliza Mahoney, widely regarded as the first trained Black nurse in America.

At the time, domestic service was virtually the only job opportunity for a Black woman; indeed, the hospital initially employed Mahoney as a maid. But she persevered, spending 16 hours a day, seven days a week ironing, scrubbing and cleaning before she worked her way into the nursing program.

"She cooked, washed and scrubbed and - she got in," a family friend, identified only as Miss Hawley, was quoted as saying in The American Journal of Nursing in 1954. "A woman doctor wanted her there, and that was the only influence she had."

At just five feet tall and 90 pounds, Mahoney was a slight but hardworking student. The program's standards were high, and few succeeded; of the 40 or so applicants in 1878, nine withdrew, 13 were considered unsuitable and nine of 18 who had been accepted for trial failed to be admitted. Mahoney's sister, Ellen, attempted to complete the program as well but failed the final exam.

Mahoney's guiding motto was, "Work more and better the coming year than the previous year."

After she graduated, she became a private nurse, caring primarily for wealthy white patients whom she regarded as family. Many requested her care. "I owe my life to that dear soul," one patient was quoted as saying in the 1954 journal article.

Her success opened doors for future generations of Black women in nursing, and she would devote the rest of her career to making the profession more accessible, particularly through her role as one of the first Black members of the Nurses Associated Alumnae of the United States and Canada, now the American Nurses Association. (A survey published in The Journal of Nursing Regulation found that 6.7 percent of nurses in the nation in 2020 were Black.)

Mary Ella Chayer, a former professor of nursing at the Teachers College at Columbia University, wrote of Mahoney in 1954: "This nurse was an outstanding student of her time, an expert and tender practitioner, an exemplary citizen, and an untiring worker in both local and national organizations. She was a sound builder for the future, a builder of foundations on which others to follow may safely depend."

The New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston, where Mahoney studied, was the first to formally train nurses in medical, obstetrical, surgical and pediatric services. Credit... New York Public Library

Mary Eliza Mahoney was born in 1845 in Dorchester, Mass., which was later annexed by Boston. She was the oldest of three children of Charles and May Jane (Stewart) Mahoney, who were believed to have been enslaved in North Carolina before being freed.

Mahoney entered the first grade at age 10, attending the Phillips School after it became one of the first desegregated public schools in Boston.

Mahoney was 17 when the German-born physician Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska founded the New England Hospital for Women and Children with the goal of providing women with the opportunities and skills needed in the medical profession, which at the time was typically reserved for men. It was the second hospital in America to be run by women - its entire staff was composed of women - and the first to formally train nurses in medical, obstetric, surgical and pediatric services.

Mahoney went on to register with the Nurses Directory at the Massachusetts Medical Library, again becoming the first Black person to do so. But, by her account, she decided against a career in public nursing to avoid facing discrimination and instead worked independently.

In 1908 she helped start the National Association for Colored Graduate Nurses, formed in response to the exclusion of Black nurses by other national organizations. She gave the welcoming address at the group's first national convention in Boston in 1909. Two years later, the association gave Mahoney a lifetime membership and named her its national chaplain.

Between 1911 and 1912, Mahoney was the supervisor of the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn.

A longtime advocate for women's suffrage, she contributed to another history-making event when women won the right to vote in 1920; at 76, she was one of the first women to register.

She learned she had breast cancer in 1923, and died at the New England Hospital on Jan. 4, 1926. She was 80.

In the almost 100 years since her death, Mahoney has been the recipient of numerous accolades. In 1936, the Colored Graduate Nurses association created the Mary Mahoney Award, given to a nurse or group of nurses who promote integration in the profession. Though the association ceased operating in 1951, the award is still presented today by the American Nurses Association.

In 1973, one of the recipients, Helen Sullivan Miller, led a campaign to have a memorial erected at Mahoney's grave site in Everett, Mass., with backing from the A.N.A. and Chi Eta Phi, a national sorority for professional and student nurses. Mabel Staupers, another award recipient, designed the stone.

Mahoney was inducted into the A.N.A.'s Hall of Fame in 1976 and into the Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1993.

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Overlooked No More: Mary Eliza Mahoney, Who Opened Doors in Nursing

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As the first trained Black nurse in America, Mahoney devoted her life to creating opportunities in the profession for people of all races. This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

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Black Feminism & the Movement for Black Lives: Barbara Smith, Reina Gossett, Charlene Carruthers

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Dr. Robin DiAngelo discusses 'White Fragility'

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"How Studying Privilege Systems Can Strengthen Compassion": Peggy McIntosh at TEDxTimberlaneSchools

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Allegories on race and racism | Camara Jones | TEDxEmory

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How to Outsmart Your Own Unconscious Bias

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The human brain is a remarkable achievement in evolution. Unfortunately, the brain activity that kept the human species alive for millions of years is the same brain activity that keeps us from achieving equality today. Author, speaker and CEO, Valerie Alexander, explains how the human brain instinctively reacts when encountering the unexpected, like saber-toothed tigers or female tech execs, and proposes that if we have the courage to examine our own behavior when faced with the unfamiliar, we can take control of our expectations, and by doing so, change the world.

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Listen to ‘1619,’ a Podcast From The New York Times (Published 2020)

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An audio series on how slavery has transformed America, connecting past and present through the oldest form of storytelling.

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Show About Race Podcast with Anna Holmes, Baratunde Thurston, Raquel Cepeda, and Tanner Colby. Plus special guests!

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Intersectionality Matters! is a podcast hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory.

Intersectionality Matters! is a podcast hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory.

If I could only reply to others reviews

At _2020Unties_if that's even right but I always check out reviews to get a pulse on what a podcast is so I can listen an make my own decisions...but I haven't even heard this one yet an was blown away by the complaint that this podcast only talks on black people and black and white issues and how it's disappointing that it doesn't represent the country....welp did you see the title an the description of this podcast before you listened or made that wild statement???
Reading is fundamental...

Always informative.

I always learn a lot.

Powerfully informative

This podcast is compelling and very important. Every single episode presents a lesson on how we mitigate the disease of racism and achieve true liberation. Exceptional!

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‎Intersectionality Matters! on Apple Podcasts

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Intersectionality Matters! is a podcast hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory.

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Momentum: A Race Forward Podcast | Race Forward

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Art and Culture As The Ultimate Form of Resistance, with Ralph Remington

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Episode One: The Book of Statuses (Published 2020)

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From Serial and The New York Times: “Nice White Parents” looks at the 60-year relationship between white parents and the public school down the block.

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The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

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Welcome to Pod for the Cause, The Leadership Conference's new podcast!

We've joined the airwaves to help spark conversation and activism on some of the most critical issues of today. From the courts to immigration, we're seeing unprecedented attacks on the values we hold near and dear. At Pod for the Cause, we're going to tackle these issues and more. Our friends in the movement will be stopping by to have these conversations, and they promise to be real, straightforward and honest. This podcast was created for those of you wanting to effect change, who understand the importance of restoring our democracy and want to engage in deep conversation around the issues. So check out the first episode of Pod for the Cause, and subscribe below!

Ashley Allison is the executive vice president of campaigns and programs at The Leadership Conference - a coalition of more than 200 civil and human rights organizations serving as the strategic hub of the resistance. Ashley brings more than a decade of outreach, community organizing, and campaign experience to the movement, along with an expertise in crisis management, coalition building, and strategic planning. She finds inspiration through any form of dance (especially African dance) and yoga. In her dreams, she is an Olympic runner, but in real life, she's lucky to log two miles a week.

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Pod For The Cause - The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

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Welcome to Pod for the Cause, The Leadership Conference's new podcast! We've joined the airwaves to help spark conversation and activism on some of the most critical issues of today. From the courts to immigration, we're seeing unprecedented attacks on the values we hold near and dear.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Welcome to Pod for the Cause, The Leadership Conference's new podcast!

We've joined the airwaves to help spark conversation and activism on some of the most critical issues of today. From the courts to immigration, we're seeing unprecedented attacks on the values we hold near and dear. At Pod for the Cause, we're going to tackle these issues and more. Our friends in the movement will be stopping by to have these conversations, and they promise to be real, straightforward and honest. This podcast was created for those of you wanting to effect change, who understand the importance of restoring our democracy and want to engage in deep conversation around the issues. So check out the first episode of Pod for the Cause, and subscribe below!

Ashley Allison is the executive vice president of campaigns and programs at The Leadership Conference - a coalition of more than 200 civil and human rights organizations serving as the strategic hub of the resistance. Ashley brings more than a decade of outreach, community organizing, and campaign experience to the movement, along with an expertise in crisis management, coalition building, and strategic planning. She finds inspiration through any form of dance (especially African dance) and yoga. In her dreams, she is an Olympic runner, but in real life, she's lucky to log two miles a week.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Pod For The Cause - The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Welcome to Pod for the Cause, The Leadership Conference's new podcast! We've joined the airwaves to help spark conversation and activism on some of the most critical issues of today. From the courts to immigration, we're seeing unprecedented attacks on the values we hold near and dear.

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Just what is going on with white people? Police shootings of unarmed African Americans. Acts of domestic terrorism by white supremacists. The renewed embrace of raw, undisguised white-identity politics. Unending racial inequity in schools, housing, criminal justice, and hiring. Some of this feels new, but in truth it's an old story.

Why? Where did the notion of "whiteness" come from? What does it mean? What is whiteness for?

Scene on Radio host and producer John Biewen took a deep dive into these questions, along with an array of leading scholars and regular guest Dr. Chenjerai Kumanyika, in this fourteen-part documentary series, released between February and August 2017. The series editor is Loretta Williams.

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Just what is going on with white people? Police shootings of unarmed African Americans. Acts of domestic terrorism by white supremacists. The renewed embrace of raw, undisguised white-identity politics. Unending racial inequity in schools, housing, criminal justice, and hiring. Some of this feels ne

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I don't know why the book cover is in French for the image but the link takes you to the book in English.

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How to Be an Antiracist — Ibram X. Kendi

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From the National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning comes a refreshing approach that will radically reorient America on the urgent issues of race, justice, and equality.

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" Brittney Cooper is a national treasure. This book is just so good." -Rebecca Traister

"Rigorous, honest, heartfelt, compassionate, and challenging." -Mychal Denzel Smith

"I was waiting for an author who wouldn't forget, ignore, or erase us black girls as they told their own story and that of the race and the nation. She has come-in Brittney Cooper." -Melissa Harris Perry

"Cooper may be the boldest young feminist writing today." -Michael Eric Dyson

Pre-Order Your Copy Today!

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ELOQUENT RAGE | BRITTNEY COOPER | St. Martin's Publishing Group

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" Brittney Cooper is a national treasure. This book is just so good." -Rebecca Traister "Rigorous, honest, heartfelt, compassionate, and challenging." -Mychal Denzel Smith "I was waiting for an author who wouldn't forget, ignore, or erase us black girls as they told their own story and that of the race and the nation.

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" Heavy by Kiese Laymon brings awareness that the work of liberation done in Jackson, Mississippi long before young Laymon's birth, was ultimately not done, or was not done well enough. Or was perhaps impossible to do. Which I sometimes felt was true. The suffering of his childhood! Seven years we spent dreaming a childhood for him, for all black children (and ultimately white ones too, in that state) that would have a foundation not just in a first rate education but in an intimacy with joy. Didn't happen, as this harshly honest memoir attests. And what of his mother? Caught between the needs of creativity, love, mothering, pushing the race forward, and surviving in a land where not one of us was safe; and her desperation, fear of falling backward, dread that her only son might become another Emmett Till.

Did we fail you, Beautiful Son, because we did not fight long enough, there where you were born? Did not love strongly enough? Did not die from bullets and bombs, broken hearts, depression and soul wounds sufficiently enough? But you have come through, anyway. So did we fail completely? In you I see the soul of black folk. As DuBois thought we might. Now that your inner mirror is clear, I know you see this too. There is a purpose to all this suffering. In fact, as an elder, I can begin to see suffering as a birth. A birth of soul. A growth of it. Now the old hymns and spirituals begin to make sense, though most need liberating from a context they have outgrown. Thank you for HEAVY." -Alice Walker

"We are in a time of hollow platitudes, scratched on white posterboards. Things such as "Love Wins" pepper the sky during protests, but few ask when love alone has won anything that has felt like prolonged justice. What resonates most sharply in Heavy is how Laymon's love does not resolve itself. The book ends with Laymon apologizing to his mother for all he's written, and all he's brought to light. "I wanted to write a lie. You wanted to read a lie," is a sentiment expressed both at the start of the book and start of the final paragraph. There's an underlying argument here: that we've arrived at the point we have as a country in part because of lies we've told ourselves about what America means. People have allowed the symbols of love to steer them away from honesty. In Heavy, the story begins messy, and ends messy, and in between we learn why the mess was worth fighting through, and fighting for. That love, by itself, often loses. It is the love that edges to its antithesis, weighed down by secrets, lies, complexities, bitterness, rage that can save us, even if a reader, a writer, or a nation is ashamed to admit that truth. The love that requires one to peel back its worst layers and still see the person-or the polis-waiting underneath is the one that echoes."- Hanif Abdurraqib, 4Columns

"Heavy is one of the most important and intense books of the year because of the unyielding, profoundly original and utterly heartbreaking way it addresses and undermines expectations for what exactly it's like to possess and make use of a male black body in America... the book thunders as an indictment of hope, a condemnation of anyone ever looking forward." -Nathan Deuel, Los Angeles Times

"He's simply one of the most talented writers in America." -Anna DeVries, New York

"Staggering... Laymon lays out his life with startling introspection. Heavy is comforting in its familiarity, yet exacting in its originality. It's a tapestry of heart and heartache about a struggling, gifted single mother and the son who loves, fears, and protects her... That tumultuous, but deeply loving mother-son relationship is this book's centerpiece. Appropriately, Laymon writes the book as a letter to his mom. This could come off gimmicky; instead it gives his memoir the intimacy of a secret shared, and the immediacy of real time... Heavy provokes fear, wanting, love, and humor. It's Mary J. Blige on the car radio and a cool, grainy glass of Tang, telling lies with your friends, having sex and mistaking it for love. Laymon subtitled his book, 'An American Memoir,' and that's more than a grandiose proclamation. He is a son of this nation whose soil is stained with the blood and sweat of his ancestors. In a country both deserving of his love and hate, Laymon is distinctly American. Like the woman who raised him and the woman who raised her, he carries that weight, finding uplift from sorrow and shelter from the storms that batter black bodies." -Renée Graham, Boston Globe

"Extraordinary... Heavy covers grim territory, but reads too intimately to look away... Heavy is raw but controlled: a refined, warm, generously poetic literary work. Laymon elicits tears through crushing honesty, summons centuries of trauma through a survey of the present. What does it mean to tell an American story? This memoir argues, persuasively, that doing so reveals what we're so rarely willing to see. That one person's truth reflects all of ours." -David Canfield, Entertainment Weekly

"Laymon's work is known for its honesty and courage, as well as for the way he reckons with his own past and our collective national one. In Heavy, he takes the stuff of his life and renders it on the page...we're just lucky that Laymon shows us a path toward reckoning." -Abigail Bereola, The Paris Review

"How do you love authentically when lies feel so familiar? That's the question Kiese Laymon explores in his devastating personal story...Deeply personal...Laymon writes with a fearless intimacy and bracing honesty, indicting the treatment of black people in the U.S. The book's a high-water mark for both personal narrative and social criticism." -Cady Lang, TIME

"One of the most dynamic memoirs of the year, this coming-of-age tale packs themes of race, class, politics, sexuality, self-esteem, and family into a magnificently unique - and often unsettling - package. Laymon's challenging tale of growing up black and obese amid white privilege, with a mother who pushed him to his breaking point, is exemplary." -The Boston Globe

"Laymon's memoir is a reckoning, pulling from his own experience growing up poor and black in Jackson, Mississippi, and tracking the most influential relationships, for better or worse, of his life: with his brilliant but struggling single mother, his loving grandma, his body and the ways he nurtures and punishes it, his education and creativity, and the white privilege that drives the world around him...with shrewd analysis, sharp wit, and great vulnerability - Laymon forces the reader to fully consider the effects of the nation's inability to reconcile its pride and ambition with its shameful history." -Arianna Rebolini, Buzzfeed

"With echoes of Roxane Gay and John Edgar Wideman, Laymon defiantly exposes the "aches and changes" of growing up Black in this raw, cathartic memoir reckoning with his turbulent Mississippi childhood, adolescent obesity, and the white gaze." -Oprah Magazine

"Weight is both unavoidably corporeal and a load-bearing metaphor in this novelist-essayist's sharp and (self-) lacerating memoir... Every action has a reaction, and every success its cost, as Laymon thrives in some respects but succumbs to addictions (food most of all). Race, class, and the scars of sexual violence are front-and-center, a constant pressure and threat, but its effects are registered at ground level, a space too complex and for pop sociology." -Boris Kachka, New York

"Highly anticipated...a staggering opus on growing up as a husky black boy in the 1980s South. Much of the book pays homage to his complicated mother, a brilliant academic who disciplined with physical violence. It is a heartbreaking narrative on black bodies: how we hurt them, protect them, and try to heal them." -Bri Kovan, Elle

"Laymon provocatively meditates on his trauma growing up as a black man, and in turn crafts an essential polemic against American moral rot." -Entertainment Weekly

"[A] tender, thorny, remarkable memoir... [Laymon] weaves a rich and elegantly colloquial self-interrogation in the service of a larger interrogation of the country he lives in. It takes in how deeply and variously his body has been marked by shame and trauma, by sexual and physical abuse, by the compulsive soothings and punishings of food and starvation and obsessive exercise, his anorexia often invisible to others because of their inability to see a tall black man as in any way vulnerable." -Lidija Haas, Harper's

"Visceral...Black bodies take up space in America, and Laymon reminds us that this geography is as much psychic as physical... Heavy is conceived as a letter to [Laymon's mother], following in the tradition of black intellectuals imagining their most heartfelt, terrifyingly intimate manifestos about America to their black relatives, from James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me. Like Baldwin and Coates, Laymon refuses to lie about America's broken promises to itself, and it won't offer easy comfort or redemption narratives. America's failures regarding its African-American citizens, Laymon tells his mom, are the country's fault lines writ large, and he's not at all sure we can close the gaps...In addressing Heavy to one particular black woman, Laymon manages to touch on all of the nation's wounds, his finger trembling as they poke the bloody gashes, but poking them nevertheless." -Walter Biggins, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Kiese... chronicles the profound challenges of living in a black body. This is an important book." -Bookish

"Finally! This memoir has been mentioned as 'forthcoming' at the end of every Kiese Laymon interview or magazine article for a few years, and I've been excited about it the entire time. Laymon has written one novel and one essay collection about America and race. This memoir focuses on Laymon's own body-in the personal sense of how he treats it and lives in it, and in the larger sense of the heavy burden of a black body in America." -The Millions

"Laymon's memoir about his struggles with body issues growing up as a black man in Mississippi... promises profound historical and political commentary." -Victor La Valle, Traveler

"Kiese Laymon is one of the most dazzling, inventive, affecting essayists working today, and his memoir lives up to the dizzyingly high expectations set for it... Laymon is fearless in his willingness to go to the darkest, the most tender, the most raw spaces of his life, and of our shared lives in the fragile experiment that is America. His writing will shock and comfort you, make you realize you are not alone, and stun you with its insights about desire, need, and love." -Kristin Iversen, Nylon

"Kiese Laymon's intense, layered Heavy is a provocatively personal look at racism and oppression in America... Heavy is unsparingly honest in the pain it depicts. But the book, despite its title, isn't without some levity. Laymon's prose positively sings, helped by the humanity and humor he brings to this astonishing memoir."

"Kiese Laymon writes about his experience being a black man in the United States in Heavy: An American Memoir. The title says it all when it comes to the type of stories he shares. He doesn't shy away from hard topics, including oppression, sexual violence, and his difficult relationship with his mother." -Stephanie Topacio Long, Bustle

"In Heavy, Laymon has written a memoir that feels like a body blow... Laymon's reputation as a writer grows with each piece he produces. Heavy will cement his reputation as one of America's best writers." -Lorraine Berry, Signature Reads

"In this stylish and complex memoir, Laymon... presents bittersweet episodes of being a chubby outsider in 1980s Mississippi... Laymon laces the memoir with clever, ironic observations about secrets, sexual trauma, self-deception, and pure terror related to his family, race, Mississippi, friends, and a country that refuses to love him and his community... His evolution is remarkable, from a 'hard-headed' troubled teen to an intellectually curious youth battling a college suspension for a pilfering a library book to finally journeying to New York to become a much-admired professor and accomplished writer. Laymon convincingly conveys that difficult times can be overcome with humor and self-love, as he makes readers confront their own fears and insecurities." -Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Pyrotechnic... Far more than just the physical aspect, the weight he carries also derives from the burdens placed on him by a racist society, by his mother and his loving grandmother, and even by himself. At times, the author examines his complicated romantic and sexual relationships, and he also delves insightfully into politics, literature, feminism, and injustice, among other topics. A dynamic memoir that is unsettling in all the best ways." -Kirkus (starred review)

"Emphatic and unsparing... His expansive intellect and fluid prose bear up to haunting family secrets and American deceptions with deep, potent wells of beauty, humor, and empathy." -Kirkus (profile)

"Spectacular memoir... Laymon applies his book's title to his body and his memories; to his inheritance as a student, a teacher, a writer, an activist, a black man, and his mother's son-but also to the weight of truth, and writing it. So artfully crafted, miraculously personal, and continuously disarming, this is, at its essence, powerful writing about the power of writing." -Booklist (starred review)

"Laymon breaks down what it means to be a large black boy growing up in Mississippi, exploring the politics and policing of black male bodies, the heartache of black excellence and white privilege, the conflict that comes with loving an abusive parent and stepping away to save yourself. As beautiful as it is heartbreaking...This powerful, passionate narrative is hopeful but real, like a confessional with no sugarcoating. If you care about black lives and black experience, this is a must-read." -Library Journal (starred review)

"Heavy... promises to light the world on fire." -Publishers Weekly

"A personal narrative that illuminates national failures, Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable, an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family that begins with a confusing childhood-and continues through twenty-five years of haunting implosions and long reverberations." -The Rumpus

"Laymon's essays have attracted much attention: this set of reflections, in which he attempts 'to name secrets and lies that he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding,' has been long awaited." -The Guardian
Advance Literary Praise
"Oh my god. Heavy is Astonishing. Difficult. Intense. Layered. Wow. Just wow." -Roxane Gay, author of Hunger

" Heavy is an act of truth telling unlike any other I can think of in American literature, partly due to Laymon's uniquely gifted mind-his ability to pursue the ways we lie to each other while also loving each other, or, not, and the humility he brings to bear while doing so, this consistently brings us back to life, to what matters in this world. Heavy is a gift to us, if we can pick it up-a moral exercise and an intimate history that is at the same time a story about America." - Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

"Kiese Laymon is our most important urgent fiercest voice. To read Kiese Laymon is to be in awe." -Junot Diaz, author of Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

"What I have always loved about Kiese Laymon is that he is as beautiful a person as he is a writer. What he manages to do in the space of a sentence is unparalleled, and that's because no one else practices the art of revision as an act of love quite like Kiese. He loves his mother, his grandmama, Mississippi, black folks, his students, his peers, and anyone else willing to embrace his love enough to give us this gorgeous memoir, Heavy. This reckoning with trauma, terror, fear, sexual violence, abuse, addiction, family, secrets, lies, truth, and the weight of the nation and his body would be affecting in less capable hands, but with Kiese at the helm it is nothing short of a modern classic. These sentences that he so painstakingly crafted are some the most arresting ever printed in the English language. Kiese's heart and humor shine through, and we are blessed to have such raw humanity rendered in prose that begs for repeat readings. We do not deserve Heavy. We do not deserve Kiese. That he is generous enough to share is testament to his commitment to helping us all heal." -Mychal Denzel Smith, author of Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching

"Kiese Laymon has done nothing less than write the autobiography of the first generation of African-Americans born after the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and the Black Power ethos of the 1970s. His story of grappling with love and violence and language and our bodies is this generation's story, and it is as moving and heartbreaking and heartwarming as you would expect. And then some." - Courtney Baker, author of Humane Insight

"On the low, many in these United States of America imagine that to be black means that whiteness, whether in its feigned supremacy or brutal imaginings, should be the center of every black story. But nah, that's meager. In Heavy, the Kiese Laymon remembers how people who loved each other or might of loved each other, nearly shattered everything around them with hurt and then struggled to piece it all back together. Kiese crafts the most honest and intimate account of growing up black and southern since Richard Wright's Black Boy. Circumventing the myths about blackness, he writes something as complex and fragile as who we is. An insider's look into the making of a writer, Heavy is part memoir and part look into the books that turned a kid into a story teller. Heavy invites us into a black South that remembers that we loved each other through it all. In "Nikki-Rosa," Nikki Giovanni wrote that 'black love is black wealth.' This book is the weight of black love, and might we all be wealthy by daring to open up to it." - Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of A Question of Freedom

" Heavy heaves, sings, hums, and runs all night to make it clear that there's an alternative, that Black history's first premise is mutuality. That mutuality isn't perfect, ain't safe, it's dangerous, in fact, and Heavy moves in a terrible and beautiful and so gentle proximity to that-at crucial times our primary-danger, the ones we love and who love us the most. I was with Kiese the whole damn heavy-floating way, word for word in laughter and tears, in recognition, refraction and revelation. But, way more than any of those, sentence by sentence, I was with Kiese in thanks." -Ed Pavlic, author of Another Kind of Madness

"In Heavy, Kiese Laymon asks how to survive in a body despite the many violences that are inflicted upon it: the violence of racism, of misogyny, of history - the violence of a culture that treats the bodies of black men with fear and suspicion more often than with tenderness and attentive care. In prose that sears at the same time as it soars, Kiese Laymon breaks the unbearable silence each of these violences, in their peculiar cruelty, has imposed. Permeated with humility, bravery, and a bold intersectional feminism, Heavy is a triumph. I stand in solidarity with this book, and with its writer." - Lacy Johnson, author of The Other Side and The Reckonings

"How appropriate Kiese Laymon's stunning memoir is titled, Heavy. Not only are the stains and hurt highlighted here, heavy, but also the writer's capacity to revive graveyards of ghosts who haunt and seemingly will continue to haunt the protagonist. Laymon is a fearless writer, our writer, who's willing to expose and explore his most vulnerable interiors so that we might get closer to our truths. This is a southern book for backroads and cornbread, for Cadillacs and collard greens, for big mamas and moonshine. Heavy is full of our beautiful and ugly histories, and a declaration of how we might seek redemption. The colorful and complicated characters here speak a blues and poetry that is both nostalgic and familiar. This is the book we need right now. We should all be thankful for this ultramodern weighty testament of heartache, catharsis, and utter brilliance." - Derrick Harriell, author of Stripper in Wonderland and Ropes

"You do not just read Kiese Laymon's work. It does a reading of you too-one that unburies the stories you thought you would never be able to tell truthfully, and reminds you of your voice to tell them. Heavy marks this quality in its highest definition yet. Written with as much devastating poignance as a humor only the Black South could inspire, Heavy asks readers not just to observe Laymon's courageous journey to understand even the most frightening complexities of life in an anti-Black, sexist, fatphobic society, but to embark on it with him. In doing so, Laymon's gorgeous wordsmithing moves us beyond simple binaries of pleasure and pain, joy and trauma, toward a deeper love for communities too often flattened into one dimension. Heavy is a book for the ages." -Hari Zyad, author of Black Boy Out of Time

"Heavy is beautiful, lyrical, painful, and really brave. It is both exigent and timeless. Laymon's use of juxtaposition-of the political and personal, the many stories of dishonesty and history, violence, everything-is all-world." -Nafissa Thompson-Spires, author of Heads of the Colored People

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" Heavy by Kiese Laymon brings awareness that the work of liberation done in Jackson, Mississippi long before young Laymon's birth, was ultimately not done, or was not done well enough. Or was perhaps impossible to do. Which I sometimes felt was true. The suffering of his childhood!

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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou: 9780812980028 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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Maya Angelou's debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Her life story is told in the documentary film And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS's American Masters. Here is a book...

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" Invisible No More deserves a standing ovation. It's a passionate, incisive critique of the many ways in which women and girls of color are systematically erased or marginalized in discussions of police violence. The stories told here will haunt, inspire, and challenge you to reimagine justice by moving the experience of Black women and girls from the margins to the center."
-Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
"With Invisible No More, Andrea Ritchie has produced a work of great scope and depth, tightly documented and deeply moving. Ritchie spans multiple centuries, nations, issues, and identity lenses to lay bare the effects of violent policing on women of color. She authentically and skillfully centers Black women while seeding the ground for alliances among women of color....Most importantly, she introduces us to a generation of fighters we can follow, support, and lift up."
-Rinku Sen, executive director, Race Forward
" Invisible No More is more than a book about police accountability; it is an important read that interrogates policing practices at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and ability."
-Monique W. Morris, author of Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools -Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
"This is a terrifying book, not only because it exposes the startling number of Black women whose lives were cut short by state-sanctioned violence or the fatal consequences of policing Black women's bodies. What is most disturbing is how little we know about these women and their stories. But thanks to Andrea Ritchie's thorough research and raw storytelling-capturing both the horrors and the resistance-we can finally begin to #sayhername and end the state's war on women of color once and for all."
-Margaret Huang, executive director, Amnesty International -Barbara Ransby, historian, activist, author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, and president of the National Women's Studies Association (2016-2018)
"...a powerful call to action to all who care about women..."
-Aishah Shahidah Simmons, producer/writer/director, NO! The Rape Documentary
" Invisible No More is the most recent book by the brilliant Black feminist legal scholar, writer, and activist Andrea Ritchie, in which she maps the brutal history of police violence against Black, Indigenous, and other women of color in what is now the United States....From settler colonial atrocities, to the school-to-prison pipeline, to the experiences of transgender women, Ritchie confronts us with a set of realities too vivid to ignore. ....will anger, educate, and inspire you to act."
-Rashad Robinson, executive director, Color of Change
"Andrea Ritchie's meticulous documentation and masterful writing emphasize why it is imperative that we examine the roles of race, gender, gender identity, and sexuality when we talk about and work on eradicating racial profiling, police brutality, mass incarceration, and other forms of state-sanctioned violence in the United States. Invisible No More is an invaluable organizing resource..."
-Urvashi Vaid, attorney and author of Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class, and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics -Andrea Smith, author of Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide
"...a powerful affirmation of why our movement has to be rooted in exposing and advocating for Black women and girls who experience state brutality. ...Ritchie has created the opportunity to do more than amplify police violence against Black women and to enable Color of Change and other movement organizations to also identify the intervention points where we can make real change happen in order to create a just and safe society for all Black people, especially cis and trans women and girls."
-Dean Spade, author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law
"Ritchie is at once eloquent and forensic in centering the experience of Black women ...to build an urgent argument to reconstitute the policing function itself."
-Opal Tometi, cofounder of Black Lives Matter and executive director of Black Alliance for Just Immigration
"...deeply challenges both antipolicing and antiviolence movements to expand the scope of their work to address how policing operates through gender, race, disability, and colonialism. ...A crucial and paradigm-shifting book."
-Kirsten West Savali, senior writer and editor, TheRoot.com
"...a vital contribution to our understanding of policing and criminalization, exposing how women, trans, and gender-nonconforming people are targeted. ...The tool we need in this exact moment, as grassroots resistance to police violence grows alongside an increasing emboldenment of racist law enforcement."
-Paulina Helm-Hernandez, former co-director, Southerners on New Ground
"Ritchie moved me from page one with layered, thoughtful, and well-researched storytelling describing the multiple ways women of color are impacted by criminalization, begging the question of how their stories have been neglected and calling on all of us to make them visible. ...if heeded, will undoubtedly transform the course of history."
-Beth E. Richie, author of Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America's Prison Nation
"Ritchie draws from her experiences as an organizer, researcher, activist, agitator, immigrant, and survivor to paint a tear- and blood-splattered portrait that illustrates with depth and clarity the shared struggles of women of color in the United States...Ritchie speaks unapologetically from the margins, tackling white supremacy, police brutality, gender, and class with a deft hand and a full heart. ...Ritchie's work is invaluable to me as a journalist, and with this book, she continues to show that writing is resistance and that if liberation is our true goal, then Black women and girls can be invisible no more."
-Coya White-Hat Artichoker (Lakota), founding member, First Nations Two Spirit Collective
" Invisible No More is not only a hard testament to the true nature of policing ...but also to our foremothers' relentless resistance..."

"With a profound sense of urgency and deep compassion, combining her keen instincts as a legal scholar and her work as an antiviolence activist, Andrea Ritchie brings long overdue attention to the policing of Black women and other women of color such that their stories are indeed invisible no more."

"Reading this book is hard but critically important-and essential for our political education. The stories and timeline are both well researched and needed, and they taught me things I wasn't aware of and am grateful to learn. If Andrea Ritchie hadn't documented these histories, I'm afraid no one else would have."

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" Invisible No More deserves a standing ovation. It's a passionate, incisive critique of the many ways in which women and girls of color are systematically erased or marginalized in discussions of police violence. The stories told here will haunt, inspire, and challenge you to reimagine justice by moving the experience of Black women and girls from the margins to the center."

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" Just Mercy is every bit as moving as To Kill a Mockingbird, and in some ways more so. . . . [It] demonstrates, as powerfully as any book on criminal justice that I've ever read, the extent to which brutality, unfairness, and racial bias continue to infect criminal law in the United States. But at the same time that [Bryan] Stevenson tells an utterly damning story of deep-seated and widespread injustice, he also recounts instances of human compassion, understanding, mercy, and justice that offer hope. . . . Just Mercy is a remarkable amalgam, at once a searing indictment of American criminal justice and a stirring testament to the salvation that fighting for the vulnerable sometimes yields." -David Cole, The New York Review of Books

"A searing, moving and infuriating memoir . . . Bryan Stevenson may, indeed, be America's Mandela. For decades he has fought judges, prosecutors and police on behalf of those who are impoverished, black or both. . . . Injustice is easy not to notice when it affects people different from ourselves; that helps explain the obliviousness of our own generation to inequity today. We need to wake up. And that is why we need a Mandela in this country." -Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times

"Unfairness in the justice system is a major theme of our age. . . . This book brings new life to the story by placing it in two affecting contexts: [Bryan] Stevenson's life work and the deep strain of racial injustice in American life. . . . You don't have to read too long to start cheering for this man. Against tremendous odds, Stevenson has worked to free scores of people from wrongful or excessive punishment, arguing five times before the Supreme Court. . . . The book extols not his nobility but that of the cause, and reads like a call to action for all that remains to be done. . . . The message of the book, hammered home by dramatic examples of one man's refusal to sit quietly and countenance horror, is that evil can be overcome, a difference can be made. Just Mercy will make you upset and it will make you hopeful. . . . Stevenson has been angry about [the criminal justice system] for years, and we are all the better for it." -Ted Conover, The New York Times Book Review

"Not since Atticus Finch has a fearless and committed lawyer made such a difference in the American South. Though larger than life, Atticus exists only in fiction. Bryan Stevenson, however, is very much alive and doing God's work fighting for the poor, the oppressed, the voiceless, the vulnerable, the outcast, and those with no hope. Just Mercy is his inspiring and powerful story." -John Grisham

"Bryan Stevenson is one of my personal heroes, perhaps the most inspiring and influential crusader for justice alive today, and Just Mercy is extraordinary. The stories told within these pages hold the potential to transform what we think we mean when we talk about justice." -Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

"A distinguished NYU law professor and MacArthur grant recipient offers the compelling story of the legal practice he founded to protect the rights of people on the margins of American society. . . . Emotionally profound, necessary reading." -Kirkus Reviews (starred review, KirkusPrize Finalist)

"A passionate account of the ways our nation thwarts justice and inhumanely punishes the poor and disadvantaged." -Booklist (starred review)

"From the frontlines of social justice comes one of the most urgent voices of our era. Bryan Stevenson is a real-life, modern-day Atticus Finch who, through his work in redeeming innocent people condemned to death, has sought to redeem the country itself. This is a book of great power and courage. It is inspiring and suspenseful-a revelation." -Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns

"Words such as important and compelling may have lost their force through overuse, but reading this book will restore their meaning, along with one's hopes for humanity." -Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Mountains Beyond Mountains

"Bryan Stevenson is America's young Nelson Mandela, a brilliant lawyer fighting with courage and conviction to guarantee justice for all. Just Mercy should be read by people of conscience in every civilized country in the world to discover what happens when revenge and retribution replace justice and mercy. It is as gripping to read as any legal thriller, and what hangs in the balance is nothing less than the soul of a great nation." -Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

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Just Mercy (Movie Tie-In Edition) by Bryan Stevenson: 9780593133934 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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" Just Mercy is every bit as moving as To Kill a Mockingbird, and in some ways more so. . . . [It] demonstrates, as powerfully as any book on criminal justice that I've ever read, the extent to which brutality, unfairness, and racial bias continue to infect criminal law in the United States.

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When Layla F. Saad ran a free month-long Instagram challenge during the summer of 2018, she had no idea it would become an international cultural movement.

Thousands of people from around the world were galvanized by the #meandwhitesupremacy challenge, examining and owning responsibility for the ways in which they uphold white supremacy.

Over 80,000 people downloaded her guide to the movement, Me and White Supremacy Workbook in the space of just six months. And now, that guide is a NYT, USA Today, WSJ and Amazon bestseller.

Me and White Supremacy: A 28-Day Challenge to Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor leads readers through a journey of understanding their white privilege and participation in white supremacy, so that they can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on black, indigenous and people of color, and in turn, help other white people do better, too. The book goes beyond the original workbook by adding more historical and cultural contexts, sharing moving stories and anecdotes, and includes expanded definitions, examples, and further resources.

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Over 80,000 people downloaded her guide to the movement, Me and White Supremacy Workbook in the space of just six months. And now, that guide is a NYT, USA Today, WSJ and Amazon bestseller.

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White American women are no monolith. Yet, as Women's March National organizer Jenna Arnold has learned over the past few years criss-crossing the US in conversations with white women about their identity and role in the country, we do possess common characteristics- ones that get in the way of us becoming more engaged as citizens. We're so focused on checking off our to-do lists, or so afraid of getting it wrong, or so busy trying to sidestep conflict, that we are actively avoiding the urgent conversations we need to have.

Jenna has uplifted marginalized voices embodying a crucial sentiment of Malcolm X's: it is white people's responsibility to bring other well-intended white people to the social justice work of our time. Raising Our Hands is the urgent answer to our request.

Angela Rye

Political analyst and commentator

The author is distributing her proceeds to organizations focused on supporting marginalized communities. Some include:

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In these pages of Raising Our Hands, Jenna peels back the history that's intentionally been kept out of our textbooks and the cultural norms that are holding us back, so we can finally start really listening to the marginalized voices and doing our part to work toward equity.

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New York Times Bestseller * Winner of the 2015 WOMEN'S WAY Book Prize * Goodreads Best of 2014 Semi-Finalist * Books for a Better Life Award Finalist * Lambda Literary Award Finalist * Time Magazine "30 Most Influential People on the Internet" * American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book

In her profound and courageous New York Times bestseller, Janet Mock establishes herself as a resounding and inspirational voice for the transgender community-and anyone fighting to define themselves on their own terms.

With unflinching honesty and moving prose, Janet Mock relays her experiences of growing up young, multiracial, poor, and trans in America, offering readers accessible language while imparting vital insight about the unique challenges and vulnerabilities of a marginalized and misunderstood population. Though undoubtedly an account of one woman's quest for self at all costs, Redefining Realness is a powerful vision of possibility and self-realization, pushing us all toward greater acceptance of one another-and of ourselves-showing as never before how to be unapologetic and real.

This book is my truth and personal history. I have recalled facts, from events to people, to the best of my ability. When memory failed me, I did not seek answers in imagination. I sought clarity through conversations with those who've shared experiences with me. When my recollection of events varied from theirs, I sided with my memory and used their voice, often direct quotes, to contextualize events.
Many people featured in the book gave me permission to use their names; others I changed or labeled with an initial to protect their privacy, whether they were guilty, innocent, indifferent, or somewhere in between.
As for terminology, I prefer to use trans over transgender or transsexual when identifying myself, although I don't find either offensive.I do not use real or genetic or biological or natural to describe the sex,body, or gender of those who are not trans. Instead, I've used cis, aterm applied to those who are not trans and therefore less likely toexperience the misalignment of their gender identity and assigned sex at birth-a matter we do not control, yet one that continues to frame who is normalized or stigmatized.
Finally, though I highlight some of the shared experiences of trans women and women of color throughout this book, it was not written with the intent of representation. There is no universal women's experience. We all have stories, and this is one personal narrative out of untold thousands, and I am aware of the privilege I hold in telling my story. Visit JanetMock.com for more information, resources, and writings.

Janet Mock is a writer, TV host, and advocate tackling stigma through storytelling. With a Master's in journalism from New York University, the Honolulu native began her career as an editor at People.com and went on to write cover stories for Marie Claire, Interview, and The Advocate as well as essays for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Lenny. She produced HBO's The Trans List, hosts the podcast Never Before, and serves as a columnist for Allure. Called a "fearless new voice" and "trailblazing leader" who "changed my way of thinking" by Oprah Winfrey, Janet was a featured speaker at the historic Women's March on Washington. She is the author of Surpassing Certainty and the New York Times bestseller Redefining Realness. Find out more at JanetMock.com.

"Far too many assume that Janet Mock's story is primarily about her body. This book is irrefutable evidence that Janet must be understood through her intellect, spirit, and wit. Janet does what only great writers of autobiography accomplish-she tells a story of the self, which turns out to be a reflection of all humanity. You will be changed by this book."

- Melissa Harris-Perry, Wake Forest University Professor and host of MSNBC's "Melissa Harris-Perry"

"Courageous! Told with a spirit of raw honesty that moves beyond confession to redemptive revelation, this book is a life map for transformation-for changing minds. A heart-rending autobiography of love, longing, and fulfillment."

- bell hooks, feminist, social activist, and author of All About Love

"Janet Mock's groundbreaking book is testimony to the remarkable progress trans people have achieved over the last decade-- and shines a bright light on the work that still needs to be done. Mock's clear, lucid prose will open hearts and minds, and further the goals of equality and justice--not just for trans people, but for everyone. Redefining Realness is loving, searing, and true."

- Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of She's Not There and Stuck in the Middle With You

"Janet Mock's honest and sometimes searing journey is a rare and important look into la vida liminal, one that she manages to negotiate remarkably well, with grace, humor, and fierce grit. Mock doesn't only redefine what realness means to her, but challenges us to rethink our own perceptions of gender and sexuality, feminism and sisterhood, making this book a transcendent piece of American literature."

- Raquel Cepeda, author of Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina

"An eye-opening and unapologetic story that is much greater than mere disclosure.... An enlightening, much-needed perspective on transgender identity."

- Kirkus Reviews

"Mock defies the historically apolitical confines of the transgender memoir, and draws bright lines connecting her experiences to the larger realm of social justice, with a keen political eye that uses her individual experience to elucidate the wider condition of trans women of color in the U.S. Her vivid prose arouses every sense.... Although the book is ostensibly one woman's coming-of-age story, Mock fulfills grander purposes here; in coming to terms with her own difficult journey she also uses that experience didactically, as if to take the uninitiated, non-transgender reader with her, most certainly achieving 'realness.'"

- Publishers Weekly

"...intelligent and educational.... Recommended for lovers of memoirs and for readers with sincere interest in the subject matter."

- Library Journal

"A classic feminist coming-of-age story that's worthy of your mantel. . . . Her memoir recounts a life that is both hardscrabble and hard-fought, making for a must-read book that is at turns riveting and wonderfully emotionally nuanced."

- The Advocate

"Pardon the hyperbole, but Janet Mock may be the best person ever. . . . A beautiful, powerful memoir."

- Rookie

"A fiery success."

- The Atlantic

"The beauty of Mock's memoir is that it is both personal and universal; her story is her own, but it also transcends the specificity of her life narrative to touch all of us."

- Lambda Literary

"Mock's grace in handling complexity is matched by her frankness, and she talks race, class, and intersectional politics without ever sounding polemical."

- The Rumpus

"Mock's compelling memoir entrancingly chronicles the story of a multiracial trans woman's becoming within a society that is still widely antagonistic to the non-White, non-male, transgender, and economically challenged among us. . . . Mock has written herself into herstory. And she has done so with clarity and poetic brilliance."

- The Feminist Wire

"Janet Mock shares that which society tells us to keep secret . . . and uses it not only to strengthen herself, and empower other girls but also to educate."

- For Books' Sake

"A memoir that takes the coming-of-age narrative to both a higher and deeper level."

- Slate

"It's fully intersectional, deliciously activist, wonderfully unapologetic, brazen, and beautiful. I love Mock's book because, like the best feminist reads, it's really about the insight that telling stories can be a revolutionary act."

- Laura Ciolkowski, Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference and Adjunct Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University

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New York Times Bestseller * Winner of the 2015 WOMEN'S WAY Book Prize * Goodreads Best of 2014 Semi-Finalist * Books for a Better Life Award Finalist * Lambda Literary Award Finalist * Time Magazine "30 Most Influential People on the Internet" * American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book In

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"An eye-opener"-"[ Sister Outsider is] another indication of the depth of analysis that black women writers are contributing to feminist thought." -Barbara Christian, PhD, author of Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers

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Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde: 9781580911863 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature. "[Lorde's] works will...

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A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK!

"So precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry." - The New York Times

"A profoundly successful work of fiction. . . . Taut and understated, harsh in its detachment, sympathetic in its truth . . . it is an experience." - The Detroit Free Press

"This story commands attention, for it contains one black girl's universe." - Newsweek

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The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison: 9780307278449 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK! "So precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry." - The New York Times "A profoundly successful work of fiction. . . . Taut and understated, harsh in its detachment, sympathetic in its truth .

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"Sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle . . . all presented in searing, brilliant prose that James Baldwin gives us no matter what form he is working in." -The New York Times Book Review

"Basically the finest essay I've ever read. It's technically two essays but it feels like one. [James] Baldwin refused to hold anyone's hand. He was both direct and beautiful all at once. He did not seem to write to convince you. He wrote beyond you." -Ta-Nehisi Coates, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the National Book Award winner Between the World and Me

"It was as if I sat on my porch steps with a wise father, a kind, present uncle, who said this to me. Told me I was worthy of love. Told me I was worth something in the world. Told me I was a human being." -Jesmyn Ward, editor of The Fire This Time and author of the National Book Award winner Sing, Unburied, Sing

"So eloquent in its passion and so scorching in its candor that it is bound to unsettle any reader." -The Atlantic

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The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin: 9780679601517 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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"Sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle . . . all presented in searing, brilliant prose that James Baldwin gives us no matter what form he is working in." -The New York Times Book Review "Basically the finest essay I've ever read. It's technically two essays but it feels like one.

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"One of the most influential books of the last 20 years."
-Chronicle of Higher Education

"Two years after Obama's election, Alexander put the entire criminal justice system on trial, exposing racial discrimination from lawmaking to policing to the denial of voting rights to ex-prisoners. This bestseller struck the spark that would eventually light the fire of Black Lives Matter."
- Ibram X. Kendi, The New York Times

"[ The New Jim Crow] transformed forever the way thinkers and activists view the phenomenon of mass incarceration."
-Slate

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homepage "One of the most influential books of the last 20 years." -Chronicle of Higher Education "Two years after Obama's election, Alexander put the entire criminal justice system on trial, exposing racial discrimination from lawmaking to policing to the denial of voting rights to ex-prisoners.

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A world dominated by America and driven by cheap oil, easy credit, and conspicuous consumption is unraveling before our eyes. In this powerful, deeply humanistic book, Grace Lee Boggs, a legendary figure in the struggle for justice in America, shrewdly assesses the current crisis-political, economical, and environmental-and shows how to create the radical social change we need to confront new realities. A vibrant, inspirational force, Boggs has participated in all of the twentieth century's major social movements-for civil rights, women's rights, workers' rights, and more. She draws from seven decades of activist experience, and a rigorous commitment to critical thinking, to redefine "revolution" for our times. From her home in Detroit, she reveals how hope and creativity are overcoming despair and decay within the most devastated urban communities. Her book is a manifesto for creating alternative modes of work, politics, and human interaction that will collectively constitute the next American Revolution.

Grace Lee Boggs, the recipient of many human rights and lifetime achievement awards, is an activist, writer, and speaker. She is celebrated in the National Women's Hall of Fame. Boggs is the coauthor, with James Boggs, of Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century and the author of Living for Change: An Autobiography. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she is 95 years old.

Scott Kurashige is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan and author of The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles.

Foreword by Danny Glover
Preface to the 2012 Edition
Acknowledgments
Introduction by Scott Kurashige

1. These Are the Times to Grow Our Souls
2. Revolution as a New Beginning
3. Let's Talk about Malcolm and Martin
4. Detroit, Place and Space to Begin Anew
5. A Paradigm Shift in Our Concept of Education
6. We Are the Leaders We've Been Looking For

Notes
Afterword: In Conversation with Immanuel Wallerstein
Index

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A world dominated by America and driven by cheap oil, easy credit, and conspicuous consumption is unraveling before our eyes. In this powerful, deeply humanistic book, Grace Lee Boggs, a legendary figure in the struggle for justice in America, shrewdly assesses the current crisis--political, economical, and environmental--and shows how to create the radical social change we need to confront new realities.

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"A landmark piece of nonfiction . . . sure to hold many surprises for readers of any race or experience....A mesmerizing book that warrants comparison to The Promised Land, Nicholas Lemann's study of the Great Migration's early phase, and Common Ground, J. Anthony Lukas's great, close-range look at racial strife in Boston....[Wilkerson's] closeness with, and profound affection for, her subjects reflect her deep immersion in their stories and allow the reader to share that connection." --Janet Maslin, The New York Times

" The Warmth of Other Suns is a brilliant and stirring epic, the first book to cover the full half-century of the Great Migration... Wilkerson combines impressive research...with great narrative and literary power. Ms. Wilkerson does for the Great Migration what John Steinbeck did for the Okies in his fiction masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath; she humanizes history, giving it emotional and psychological depth."--John Stauffer, Wall Street Journal

"[A] massive and masterly account of the Great Migration....A narrative epic rigorous enough to impress all but the crankiest of scholars, yet so immensely readable as to land the author a future place on Oprah's couch." --David Oshinsky, The New York Times Book Review (Cover Review)

"[A] deeply affecting, finely crafted and heroic book. . . .Wilkerson has taken on one of the most important demographic upheavals of the past century--a phenomenon whose dimensions and significance have eluded many a scholar--and told it through the lives of three people no one has ever heard of....This is narrative nonfiction, lyrical and tragic and fatalist. The story exposes; the story moves; the story ends. What Wilkerson urges, finally, isn't argument at all; it's compassion. Hush, and listen." --Jill Lepore, The New Yorker

" The Warmth of Other Suns is epic in its reach and in its structure. Told in a voice that echoes the magic cadences of Toni Morrison or the folk wisdom of Zora Neale Hurston's collected oral histories, Wilkerson's book pulls not just the expanse of the migration into focus but its overall impact on politics, literature, music, sports -- in the nation and the world."--Lynell George, Los Angeles Times

"One of the most lyrical and important books of the season."--David Shribman, Boston Globe

"[An] extraordinary and evocative work."-- The Washington Post

"Mesmerizing. . ."-- Chicago Tribune

"Scholarly but very readable, this book, for all its rigor, is so absorbing, it should come with a caveat: Pick it up only when you can lose yourself entirely." --O, The Oprah Magazine

"[An] indelible and compulsively readable portrait of race, class, and politics in 20th-century America. History is rarely distilled so finely." Grade: A -- Entertainment Weekly

"An astonishing work. . . . Isabel Wilkerson delivers! . . . With the precision of a surgeon, Wilkerson illuminates the stories of bold, faceless African-Americans who transformed cities and industries with their hard work and determination to provide their children with better lives."
"Isabel Wilkerson's majestic The Warmth of Other Suns shows that not everyone bloomed, but the migrants--Wilkerson prefers to think of them as domestic immigrants--remade the entire country, North and South. It's a monumental job of writing and reporting that lives up to its subtitle: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration." --USA Today

"[A] sweeping history of the Great Migration. . . . The Warmth of Other Suns builds upon such purely academic works to make the migrant experience both accessible and emotionally compelling." --NPR.org

" The Warmth of Other Suns is a beautifully written, in-depth analysis of what Wilkerson calls "one of the most underreported stories of the 20th century. . . A masterpiece that sheds light on a significant development in our nation's history." --The San Jose Mercury News

" The Warmth of Other Suns is a beautifully written book that, once begun, is nearly impossible to put aside. It is an unforgettable combination of tragedy and inspiration, and gripping subject matter and characters in a writing style that grabs the reader on Page 1 and never let's go. . . . Woven into the tapestry of [three individuals] lives, in prose that is sweet to savor, Wilkerson tells the larger story, the general situation of life in the South for blacks. . . . If you read one only one book about history this year, read this. If you read only one book about African Americans this year, read this. If you read only one book this year, read this." --The Free Lance Star, Fredericksburg, Va.

"Atruly auspicious debut. . . . The author deftly intersperses [her characters'] stories with short vignettes about other individuals and consistently provides the bigger picture without interrupting the flow of the narrative...Wilkerson's focus on the personal aspect lends her book a markedly different, more accessible tone. Her powerful storytelling style, as well, gives this decades-spanning history a welcome novelistic flavor. An impressive take on the Great Migration." -- Kirkus, Starred Review

"[A] magnificent, extensively researched study of the great migration... The drama, poignancy, and romance of a classic immigrant saga pervade this book, hold the reader in its grasp, and resonate long after the reading is done."
-- Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"Not since Alex Haley's Roots has there been a history of equal literary quality where the writing surmounts the rhythmic soul of fiction, where the writer's voice sings a song of redemptive glory as true as Faulkner's southern cantatas."-- The San Francisco Examiner

"Profound, necessary and an absolute delight to read." --Toni Morrison

" The Warmth of Other Suns is a sweeping and yet deeply personal tale of America's hidden 20th century history - the long and difficult trek of Southern blacks to the northern and western cities. This is an epic for all Americans who want to understand the making of our modern nation." --Tom Brokaw

"A seminal work of narrative nonfiction. . . . You will never forget these people." --Gay Talese

"With compelling prose and considered analysis, Isabel Wilkerson has given us alandmark portrait of one of the most significant yet little-noted shifts in American history: the migration of African-Americans from the Jim Crow South to the cities of the North and West. It is a complicated tale, with an infinity of implications for questions of race, power, politics, religion, and class--implications that are unfolding even now. This book will be long remembered, and savored." --Jon Meacham

"Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns is an American masterpiece, a stupendous literary success that channels the social sciences as iconic biography in order to tell a vast story of a people's reinvention of itself and of a nation--the first complete history of the Great Black Migration from start to finish, north, east, west." --David Levering Lewis

"Isabel Wilkerson's book is amasterful narrative of the rich wisdom and deep courage of a great people. Don't miss it!" --Cornel West

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The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

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In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life.

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The epic tale of Janie Crawford, whose quest for identity takes her on a journey during which she learns what love is, experiences life's joys and sorrows, and come home to herself in peace. Her passionate story prompted Alice Walker to say, "There is no book more important to me than this one."

When first published in 1937, this novel about a proud, independent black woman was generally dismissed by male reviewers. Out of print for almost thirty years, but since its reissue in paperback edition by the University of Illionois Press in 1978, Their Eyes Were Watching God has become the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.

With haunting sympathy and piercing immediacy, Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of Janie Crawford's evolving selfhood through three marriages. Light-skinned, long-haired, dreamy as a child, Janie grows up expecting better treatment than she gets until she meets Tea Cake, a younger man who engages her heart and spirit in equal measure and gives her the chance to enjoy life without being a man's mule or adornment. Though Jaine's story does not end happily, it does draw to a satisfying conclusion. Janie is one black woman who doesn't have to live lost in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or foolish romantic dreams, instead Janie proclaims that she has done "two things everbody's got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin' fuh theyselves."
Click here to listen to an audio excerpt

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Praise for Their Eyes Were Watching God

There is no book more important to me than this one."

- Alice Walker on Their Eyes Were Watching God

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Their Eyes Were Watching God | Zora Neale Hurston

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The epic tale of Janie Crawford, whose quest for identity takes her on a journey during which she learns what love is, experiences life's joys and sorrows, and come home to herself in peace. Her passionate story prompted Alice Walker to say, "There is no book more important to me than this one."

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4th Edition. 2015.
Albany, NY: SUNY (State University of New York) Press, 2015. Co-edited with Gloria Anzaldúa.
Updated and expanded edition of the foundational text of women of color feminism. 35 years later!
Originally released in 1981, This Bridge Called My Back is a testimony to women of color feminism as it emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, the collection explores, as coeditor Cherríe Moraga writes, "the complex confluence of identities-race, class, gender, and sexuality-systemic to women of color oppression and liberation."

Reissued here, nearly thirty-five years after its inception, the fourth edition contains an extensive new introduction by Moraga, along with a previously unpublished statement by Gloria Anzaldúa. The new edition also includes visual artists whose work was produced during the same period as Bridge, including Betye Saar, Ana Mendieta, and Yolanda López, as well as current contributor biographies. Bridge continues to reflect an evolving definition of feminism, one that can effectively adapt to, and help inform an understanding of the changing economic and social conditions of women of color in the United States and throughout the world.

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Reprints of out-of-print works-in whole or part-can be accessed through Moraga's literary representative Stuart Bernstein.

Find an independent bookstore near you where you may purchase Moraga titles.

For a list of Moraga titles available to purchase online through Amazon, visit Moraga's Author Page at Amazon.com.

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Originally from San Gabriel, California, Cherríe Moraga is the co-editor of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color with Gloria Anzaldúa. She is a Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara, where she co-directs Las Maestras Center for Xicana Indigenous Thought & Art Practice.

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A groundbreaking work that exposes the twisted origins of affirmative action.
When Affirmative Action Was White demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created in a deeply discriminatory manner. This was no accident. With the United States still in an era of legal segregation, the powerful southern wing of the Democratic Party provided the framework for Social Security, the GI Bill, and landmark labor laws that helped create the foundations of the modern middle class. Through mechanisms that specifically excluded maids and farmworkers and through laws that kept administration in local hands, the gap between blacks and whites actually widened despite postwar prosperity. The publication of this deeply disturbing work promises to create a national debate on the meaning of affirmative action and the responsibility of government.

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A groundbreaking work that exposes the twisted origins of affirmative action.When Affirmative Action Was White demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created in a deeply discriminatory manner. This was no accident.

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Kerry Washington | American Son | Official Trailer | Netflix

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Trailer

Blindspotting

Carlos López Estrada Daveed Diggs, Rafael Casal, Janina Gavankar, Jasmine Cephas Jones Jul 27th, 2018 Collin must make it through his final three days of probation for a chance at a new beginning. He and his troublemaking childhood best friend, Miles, work as movers, and when Collin witnesses a police shooting, the two men's friendship is tested as they grapple with identity and their changed realities in the rapidly-gentrifying neighborhood they grew up in.
Blindspotting is directed by Carlos López Estrada and was released on Jul 27th, 2018.

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Production details

Director Carlos López Estrada's Comedy & Drama movie Blindspotting is produced by Summit Entertainment & Snoot Entertainment & was released 2018-07-20.
Costs: $0 Box Office Results: $0 Length/Runtime: 95 min

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Blindspotting: Netflix, DVD, Amazon Prime release dates & trailers

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Carlos López Estrada Daveed Diggs, Rafael Casal, Janina Gavankar, Jasmine Cephas Jones Jul 27th, 2018 Collin must make it through his final three days of probation for a chance at a new beginning.

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Clemency [Official Trailer] – In Theaters December 27, 2019

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Dear White People Official Trailer #1 (2014) - Comedy HD

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Fruitvale Station -- Official Trailer 2013 -- Regal Cinemas [HD]

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IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK | Official Trailer

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King In The Wilderness Official Trailer (2018) | HBO

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See You Yesterday | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix

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Selma Official Trailer #1 (2015) - Oprah Winfrey, Cuba Gooding Jr. Movie HD

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The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution - Official Trailer

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The Hate U Give | Official Trailer [HD] | 20th Century FOX

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