Download or read book White Poverty How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy written by William J. Barber II and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2024-06-11 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A generational work with far-ranging social and political implications, White Poverty, promises to be one of the most influential books in recent years. One of the most pernicious and persistent myths in the United States is the association of Black skin with poverty. Though there are forty million more poor white people than Black people, most Americans, both Republicans and Democrats, continue to think of poverty—along with issues like welfare, unemployment, and food stamps—as solely a Black problem. Why is this so? What are the historical causes? And what are the political consequences that result? These are among the questions that the Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II, a leading advocate for the rights of the poor and the “closest person we have to Dr. King” (Cornel West), addresses in White Poverty, a groundbreaking work that exposes a legacy of historical myths that continue to define both white and Black people, creating in the process what might seem like an insuperable divide. Analyzing what has changed since the 1930s, when the face of American poverty was white, Barber, along with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, addresses white poverty as a hugely neglected subject that just might provide the key to mitigating racism and bringing together tens of millions of working class and impoverished Americans. Thus challenging the very definition of who is poor in America, Barber writes about the lies that prevent us from seeing the pain of poor white families who have been offered little more than their “whiteness” and angry social media posts to sustain them in an economy where the costs of housing, healthcare, and education have skyrocketed while wages have stagnated for all but the very rich. Asserting in Biblically inspired language that there should never be shame in being poor, White Poverty lifts the hope for a new “moral fusion movement” that seeks to unite people “who have been pitted against one another by politicians (and billionaires) who depend on the poorest of us not being here.” Ultimately, White Poverty, a ringing work that braids poignant autobiographical recollections with astute historical analysis, contends that tens of millions of America’s poorest earners, the majority of whom don’t vote, have much in common, thus providing us with one of the most empathetic and visionary approaches to American poverty in decades.
Download or read book American Routes written by Angel Adams Parham and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Routes provides a comparative and historical analysis of the migration and integration of white and free black refugees from nineteenth century St. Domingue/Haiti to Louisiana and follows the progress of their descendants over the course of two hundred years. The refugees reinforced Louisiana's tri-racial system and pushed back the progress of Anglo-American racialization by several decades. But over the course of the nineteenth century, the ascendance of the Anglo-American racial system began to eclipse Louisiana's tri-racial Latin/Caribbean system. The result was a racial palimpsest that transformed everyday life in southern Louisiana. White refugees and their descendants in Creole Louisiana succumbed to pressure to adopt a strict definition of whiteness as purity that conformed to standards of the Anglo-American racial system. Those of color, however, held on to the logic of the tri-racial system which allowed them to inhabit an intermediary racial group that provided a buffer against the worst effects of Jim Crow segregation. The St. Domingue/Haiti migration case foreshadows the experiences of present-day immigrants of color from Latin-America and the Caribbean, many of whom chafe against the strictures of the binary U.S. racial system and resist by refusing to be categorized as either black or white. The St. Domingue/Haiti case study is the first of its kind to compare the long-term integration experiences of white and free black nineteenth century immigrants to the U.S. In this sense, it fills a significant gap in studies of race and migration which have long relied on the historical experience of European immigrants as the standard to which all other immigrants are compared.
Download or read book White Trash written by Nancy Isenberg and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times Bestseller, with a new preface from the author “This estimable book rides into the summer doldrums like rural electrification. . . . It deals in the truths that matter.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times “This eye-opening investigation into our country’s entrenched social hierarchy is acutely relevant.”—O, The Oprah Magazine “White Trash will change the way we think about our past and present.” —T. J. Stiles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Custer’s Trials In her groundbreaking bestselling history of the class system in America, Nancy Isenberg, co-author of The Problem of Democracy, takes on our comforting myths about equality, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing—if occasionally entertaining—poor white trash. “When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win,” says Isenberg of the political climate surrounding Sarah Palin. And we recognize how right she is today. Yet the voters that put Trump in the White House have been a permanent part of our American fabric, argues Isenberg. The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement to today's hillbillies. They were alternately known as “waste people,” “offals,” “rubbish,” “lazy lubbers,” and “crackers.” By the 1850s, the downtrodden included so-called “clay eaters” and “sandhillers,” known for prematurely aged children distinguished by their yellowish skin, ragged clothing, and listless minds. Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature and scientific theories over four hundred years, Isenberg upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free society––where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics–-a widely popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for sterilization. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ’s Great Society; they haunt us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty. Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been at or near the center of major political debates over the character of the American identity. We acknowledge racial injustice as an ugly stain on our nation’s history. With Isenberg’s landmark book, we will have to face the truth about the enduring, malevolent nature of class as well.
Download or read book Not Quite White written by Matt Wray and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-03 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: White trash. The phrase conjures up images of dirty rural folk who are poor, ignorant, violent, and incestuous. But where did this stigmatizing phrase come from? And why do these stereotypes persist? Matt Wray answers these and other questions by delving into the long history behind this term of abuse and others like it. Ranging from the early 1700s to the early 1900s, Not Quite White documents the origins and transformations of the multiple meanings projected onto poor rural whites in the United States. Wray draws on a wide variety of primary sources—literary texts, folklore, diaries and journals, medical and scientific articles, social scientific analyses—to construct a dense archive of changing collective representations of poor whites. Of crucial importance are the ideas about poor whites that circulated through early-twentieth-century public health campaigns, such as hookworm eradication and eugenic reforms. In these crusades, impoverished whites, particularly but not exclusively in the American South, were targeted for interventions by sanitarians who viewed them as “filthy, lazy crackers” in need of racial uplift and by eugenicists who viewed them as a “feebleminded menace” to the white race, threats that needed to be confined and involuntarily sterilized. Part historical inquiry and part sociological investigation, Not Quite White demonstrates the power of social categories and boundaries to shape social relationships and institutions, to invent groups where none exist, and to influence policies and legislation that end up harming the very people they aim to help. It illuminates not only the cultural significance and consequences of poor white stereotypes but also how dominant whites exploited and expanded these stereotypes to bolster and defend their own fragile claims to whiteness.
Download or read book Forbidden Neighbors written by Charles Abrams and published by HarperCollins Publishers. This book was released on 1955 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social research study of racial segregation and racial discrimination against minority groups in housing neighbourhood patterns in the USA - covers living conditions and housing needs of immigrants (incl. Migrant workers), race relations and racial conflict in suburban and urban areas (incl. Slums), social implications of urban renewal, racial policy and legal aspects, etc. References.
Download or read book Hard White written by Richard C. Fording and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book analyzes data from a variety of sources to understand the mainstreaming of racism today. The book puts this research in a historical context. Today with issues of globalization, immigration and demographic diversification achieving greater public salience, racism is more likely to manifest itself more in the form of a generalized ethnocentrism that expresses "outgroup hostility" toward a diverse set of groups, including Latinos and Muslims as well as African Americans. Both changes in structure and agency have facilitated the mainstreaming of racism today. Changes in the "political opportunity structure," as witnessed by the rise of the Tea Party Movement, facilitated the mainstreaming of white extremists into the Republican Party and lay the basis for an electoral politics focused on giving voice to white people more generally acting on their outgroup hostility. Changes in the political structure were matched by the appearance of a charismatic leader in the person of Donald Trump who made great use of a transformed media landscape to stoke white people's outgroup hostility. Trump won the presidency most strategically deploying his demagoguery to mobilize white non-voters in swing states, with the end result greatly accelerating the mainstreaming racism and placing it at the center of policymaking in the White House. With the extensive empirical evidence provided, this book documents how the mainstreaming of racism today began before Trump started to run for the presidency but then increased under his leadership and it likely to be a troubling presence in U.S. politics for some time to come. The findings provided create the basis for suggestions on how to push racism back to the margins of American politics"--
Download or read book The Third Reconstruction written by William J. Barber (II) and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the summer of 2013, Moral Mondays gained national attention as tens of thousands of citizens protested the extreme makeover of North Carolina's state government and over a thousand people were arrested in the largest mass civil disobedience movement since the lunch counter sit-ins of 1960. Every Monday for 13 weeks, Rev. Dr. William J. Barber led a revival meeting on the state house lawn that brought together educators and the unemployed, civil rights and labor activists, young and old, documented and undocumented, gay and straight, black, white and brown. News reporters asked what had happened in state politics to elicit such a spontaneous outcry. But most coverage missed the seven years of coalition building and organizing work that led up to Moral Mondays and held forth a vision for America that would sustain the movement far beyond a mass mobilization in one state. A New Reconstruction is Rev. Barber's memoir of the Forward Together Moral Movement, which began seven years before Moral Mondays and extends far beyond the mass mobilizations of 2013. Drawing on decades of experience in the Southern freedom struggle, Rev. Barber explains how Moral Mondays were not simply a reaction to corporately sponsored extremism that aims to re-make America through state legislatures. Moral Mondays were, instead, a tactical escalation in the Forward Together Moral Movement to draw attention to the anti-democratic forces bent on serving special interests to the detriment of the common good"--
Download or read book Buzz Books2024 Spring Summer written by and published by Publishers Lunch. This book was released on 2024-01-16 with total page 1050 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buzz Books 2024: Spring/Summer is the 24th volume in our popular sampler series. This Buzz Books presents passionate readers with an insider’s look at nearly sixty of the buzziest books due out this season. Such major bestselling authors as Ally Condie, Christina Dodd, and Emiko Jean are featured, along with literary figures like Mateo Askaripour, Abi Daré, Alison Espach, Peter Nichols and more. Buzz Books has had a particularly stellar track record with highlighting the most talented, exciting and diverse debut authors, and this edition is no exception. Rita Bullwinkel, editor at large for McSweeney’s and deputy editor of The Believer, offers a novel on women boxer, while Lily Samson’s title has already been preempted by Sony Pictures Television. One YA and two nonfiction authors make their adult fiction debuts: Kristen Perrin, Mary Annaïse Heglar and Kate Young, respectively. Among others are Essie Chambers, Katelyn Doyle, Alejandro Puyana, and Rachel Rueckert. Our robust nonfiction section covers such important subjects as suicide and combating racist biases; several memoirs about harrowing childhoods and illnesses; and a biography of the first Asian-American woman pilot to fly during World War II. Finally, we present early looks at new work from young adult authors, including the New York Times bestselling Tracey Baptiste and Morgan Matson. The YA titles also represent more diversity than ever, with Aboriginal, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Malaysian and Trinidadian novelists. And be sure to look out for Buzz Books 2024: Fall/Winter, coming in May, for next season’s most talked about books.
Download or read book Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade written by Ana Lucia Araujo and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-11-02 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slavery and the Atlantic slave trade are among the most heinous crimes against humanity committed in the modern era. Yet, to this day no former slave society in the Americas has paid reparations to former slaves or their descendants. Ana Lucia Araujo shows that these calls for reparations have persevered over a long and difficult history. She traces the ways in which enslaved and freed individuals have conceptualized the idea of reparations since the 18th century in petitions, correspondence, pamphlets, public speeches, slave narratives, and judicial claims. Taking the reader through the era of slavery, emancipation, post-abolition, and the present day and drawing on the voices of various of enslaved peoples and their descendants, the book illuminates the multiple dimensions of the demands of reparations. This new edition boasts a new chapter on the global impact of the Black Lives Matter movement, the seismic effect of the killing of George Floyd, calls for university reparations and the dismantling of statues. Updated throughout, this edition includes primary sources, further readings, and many illustrations.
Download or read book The Color of Law A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America written by Richard Rothstein and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller • Notable Book of the Year • Editors' Choice Selection One of Bill Gates’ “Amazing Books” of the Year One of Publishers Weekly’s 10 Best Books of the Year Longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction An NPR Best Book of the Year Winner of the Hillman Prize for Nonfiction Gold Winner • California Book Award (Nonfiction) Finalist • Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History) Finalist • Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize This “powerful and disturbing history” exposes how American governments deliberately imposed racial segregation on metropolitan areas nationwide (New York Times Book Review). Widely heralded as a “masterful” (Washington Post) and “essential” (Slate) history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law offers “the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation” (William Julius Wilson). Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods. A groundbreaking, “virtually indispensable” study that has already transformed our understanding of twentieth-century urban history (Chicago Daily Observer), The Color of Law forces us to face the obligation to remedy our unconstitutional past.
Download or read book Teaching White Supremacy written by Donald Yacovone and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2023-10-24 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful exploration of the past and present arc of America’s white supremacy—from the country’s inception and Revolutionary years to its 19th century flashpoint of civil war; to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and today’s Black Lives Matter. “The most profoundly original cultural history in recent memory.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University “Stunning, timely . . . an achievement in writing public history . . . Teaching White Supremacy should be read widely in our roiling debate over how to teach about race and slavery in classrooms." —David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of American History, Yale University; author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom Donald Yacovone shows us the clear and damning evidence of white supremacy’s deep-seated roots in our nation’s educational system through a fascinating, in-depth examination of America’s wide assortment of texts, from primary readers to college textbooks, from popular histories to the most influential academic scholarship. Sifting through a wealth of materials from the colonial era to today, Yacovone reveals the systematic ways in which this ideology has infiltrated all aspects of American culture and how it has been at the heart of our collective national identity. Yacovone lays out the arc of America’s white supremacy from the country’s inception and Revolutionary War years to its nineteenth-century flashpoint of civil war to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and today’s Black Lives Matter. In a stunning reappraisal, the author argues that it is the North, not the South, that bears the greater responsibility for creating the dominant strain of race theory, which has been inculcated throughout the culture and in school textbooks that restricted and repressed African Americans and other minorities, even as Northerners blamed the South for its legacy of slavery, segregation, and racial injustice. A major assessment of how we got to where we are today, of how white supremacy has suffused every area of American learning, from literature and science to religion, medicine, and law, and why this kind of thinking has so insidiously endured for more than three centuries.
Download or read book North to Paradise written by Ousman Umar and published by AmazonCrossing. This book was released on 2022-03 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inspiring true story of one man's treacherous boyhood journey from a rural village in Ghana to the streets of Barcelona--and the path that led him home. Ousman Umar is a shaman's son born in a small village in Ghana. Though his mother died giving birth, he spent a contented childhood working the fields, setting traps in the jungle, and living off the land. Still, as strange and wondrous flying machines crisscrossed the skies overhead, Ousman dreamed of a different life. And so, when he was only twelve years old, he left his village and began what would be a five-year journey to Europe. Every step of the way, as he traveled across the Sahara Desert, through the daunting metropolises of Accra, Tripoli, Benghazi, and Casablanca, and over the Mediterranean Sea aboard a packed migrant dinghy, Ousman was handed off like merchandise by a loose network of smugglers and in the constant, foreboding company of "sinkers" other migrants who found themselves penniless and alone on their way north, unable to continue onward or return home. But on a path rife with violence, exploitation, and racism, Ousman also encountered friendship, generosity, and hope. North to Paradise is a visceral true story about the stark realities of life along the most dangerous migrant route across Africa; it is also a portrait of extraordinary resilience in the face of unimaginable challenges, the beauty of kindness in strangers, and the power of giving back.
Download or read book How Democracy Ends written by David Runciman and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2018-05-10 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Scintillating ... thought-provoking ... one of the very best of the great crop of recent books on the subject.' Andrew Rawnsley, Observer Democracy has died hundreds of times, all over the world. We think we know what that looks like: chaos descends and the military arrives to restore order, until the people can be trusted to look after their own affairs again. However, there is a danger that this picture is out of date. Until very recently, most citizens of Western democracies would have imagined that the end was a long way off, and very few would have thought it might be happening before their eyes as Trump, Brexit and paranoid populism have become a reality. David Runciman, one of the UK's leading professors of politics, answers all this and more as he surveys the political landscape of the West, helping us to spot the new signs of a collapsing democracy and advising us on what could come next.
Download or read book Reckoning with History written by Jim Downs and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reckoning with History brings together original essays from a diverse group of historians who consider how writing about the past can engage with the urgent issues of the present. The contributors—all former students of the distinguished Columbia University historian Eric Foner—explore the uses and politics of history through key episodes across a wide range of struggles for freedom. They shed new light on how different groups have defined and fought for freedom throughout American history, as well as the ways in which the ideal of freedom remains unrealized today. Covering a broad range of topics, these essays offer insight into how historians practice their craft in different ways and illuminate what it means to be a socially and politically engaged historian.
Download or read book Blood Done Sign My Name written by Timothy B. Tyson and published by Crown. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “riveting”* true story of the fiery summer of 1970, which would forever transform the town of Oxford, North Carolina—a classic portrait of the fight for civil rights in the tradition of To Kill a Mockingbird *Chicago Tribune On May 11, 1970, Henry Marrow, a twenty-three-year-old black veteran, walked into a crossroads store owned by Robert Teel and came out running. Teel and two of his sons chased and beat Marrow, then killed him in public as he pleaded for his life. Like many small Southern towns, Oxford had barely been touched by the civil rights movement. But in the wake of the killing, young African Americans took to the streets. While lawyers battled in the courthouse, the Klan raged in the shadows and black Vietnam veterans torched the town’s tobacco warehouses. Tyson’s father, the pastor of Oxford’s all-white Methodist church, urged the town to come to terms with its bloody racial history. In the end, however, the Tyson family was forced to move away. Tim Tyson’s gripping narrative brings gritty blues truth and soaring gospel vision to a shocking episode of our history. FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD “If you want to read only one book to understand the uniquely American struggle for racial equality and the swirls of emotion around it, this is it.”—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel “Blood Done Sign My Name is a most important book and one of the most powerful meditations on race in America that I have ever read.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer “Pulses with vital paradox . . . It’s a detached dissertation, a damning dark-night-of-the-white-soul, and a ripping yarn, all united by Tyson’s powerful voice, a brainy, booming Bubba profundo.”—Entertainment Weekly “Engaging and frequently stunning.”—San Diego Union-Tribune
Download or read book From Poverty to Power written by Duncan Green and published by Oxfam. This book was released on 2008 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a look at the causes and effects of poverty and inequality, as well as the possible solutions. This title features research, human stories, statistics, and compelling arguments. It discusses about the world we live in and how we can make it a better place.
Download or read book The Wages of Whiteness written by David R. Roediger and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An enduring history of how race and class came together to mark the course of the antebellum US and our present crisis. Roediger shows that in a nation pledged to independence, but less and less able to avoid the harsh realities of wage labor, the identity of "white" came to allow many Northern workers to see themselves as having something in common with their bosses. Projecting onto enslaved people and free Blacks the preindustrial closeness to pleasure that regimented labor denied them, "white workers" consumed blackface popular culture, reshaped languages of class, and embraced racist practices on and off the job. Far from simply preserving economic advantage, white working-class racism derived its terrible force from a complex series of psychological and ideological mechanisms that reinforced stereotypes and helped to forge the very identities of white workers in opposition to Blacks. Full of insight regarding the precarious positions of not-quite-white Irish immigrants to the US and the fate of working class abolitionism, Wages of Whiteness contributes mightily and soberly to debates over the 1619 Project and critical race theory.
