My own collusion with white supremacy and anti-Blackness is a lifelong journey I mitigate for my soul’s redemption. I am a Mississippi-born redneck, alcoholic, psychotherapist, San Francisco Bay Area queer, higher education administrator with a Critical Race Theory doctorate. I first learned democracy by watching my Mississippi parents risk their lives and mine in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Three-Fifths Magazine recently published “My First English: The Vernacular of the KKK.” My book, “Twelve Steps for White America” won the BookFest 1st Place Gold Medal for “Society and Social Sciences: Race Culture Class and Religion.” I work to live in a USA where race no longer predicts outcomes.
I wrote...
Twelve Steps for White America: For a United States of America
Democracy has not failed, as we have yet to try it. Inspired by James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time, William Watson delivers a national treatment plan for White America (including white Americans) that diagnoses our problem in Rigged Advantage Theory.
Following a relatable and inspiring Southern story-telling tradition, each chapter/step first presents lessons learned from Watson’s 37 years of recovery from alcoholism. Watson then applies recovery’s problem-solving principles to our promise as a multi-racial nation. For a USA where race no longer predicts outcomes, Steps 1-4 lead to Truth, Steps 5-8 lead to Reconciliation, and Steps 9-12 lead to Renewal. Imagine that we heal our past. We redeem our present. We ensure our best days are ahead of us.
I love it when a book comes along that is both accessible and rich with content!
This book continues enriching the “how did we get here” conversation from their previous book, How Democracies Die. I argue that minority rule is an extension of the plantation economy that persists into the present.
This book took me deeply into minority rule, how it is structured, and how it threatens us today. It provided me with a more finely honed framework to not only understand the past but equip my survival in the present.
I could read only this book and be more educated about the history of race in America than 99% of the population.
This was a thrill ride of gripping prosecution that tied me up and couldn’t let me go until I was finished. Listening to King read the book was overwhelming since King’s considerable erudition is unapologetically attached to his lived experience of Black genocide.
Every white American (and all of White America) must read this book. Reconciliation and renewal starts with truth. If I was exhausted reading it, what must it be like for Black America to live it?
The 400-Year Holocaust: White America’s Legal, Psychopathic, and Sociopathic Black Genocide - and the Revolt Against Critical Race Theory examines and discusses factions of the legal history of anti-blackness and Whiteness through colonialism and the United States, and its impacts on present-day America. It centers anti-blackness as the core tenet of "racism" in White America and amplifies its relationship to the inherent "value" of Whiteness (i.e., White identity, White culture, White institutions, etc.). The text repositions and critically examines four core White American economic, moral, socio-cultural, and ideological institutions: human sex trafficking, rape, pedophilia, and violence (murder). Furthermore, it positions…
Battalora’s teaching that whiteness was created in colonial America to divide the masses and ensure that white elites dominate is central to my Rigged Advantage Theory.
I love how rich this short book is for informing where “white” came from. Imagine if white people understood that King James (of Bible fame) was NOT white but that “white” was made up to prevent my 1st ancestor in the new world (an indentured servant) from ever aligning his potential for political power with enslaved people to VOTE in a multi-racial democracy. This drama persists!
Birth of a White Nation is a fascinating book on race in America that begins with an exploration of the moment in time when "white people," as a separate and distinct group of humanity, were invented through legislation and the enactment of laws. The book provides a thorough examination of the underlying reasons as well as the ways in which "white people" were created. It also explains how the creation of this distinction divided laborers and ultimately served the interests of the elite. The book goes on to examine how foundational law and policy in the U.S. were used to…
If you think it is crazy how evangelicals can support a politician who seemingly counters the very teachings of Jesus, you’ve got to read this book. I love the writing in this book! That should not be surprising since the author is an outstanding political reporter who also has an insider advantage as the son of a preacher.
LBJ lost the South for a generation, and Tim Alberta explains what happened next!
The award-winning journalist and staff writer for The Atlantic follows up his New York Times bestseller American Carnage with this timely, rigorously reported, and deeply personal examination of the divisions that threaten to destroy the American evangelical movement.
Evangelical Christians are perhaps the most polarizing—and least understood—people living in America today. In his seminal new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, journalist Tim Alberta, himself a practicing Christian and the son of an evangelical pastor, paints an…
Heather Richardson is one of our best historians. I love her brilliance, and I love that she knows the material well enough to explain it simply to the novice.
I read her previous book, and this next one didn't disappoint. If I could only read one book on how the USA has come to this, Democracy Awakening would be it. I recommend it for anyone who would finally like to try democracy in a USA where race no longer predicts outcomes!
In Democracy Awakening, American historian Heather Cox Richardson examines how, over the decades, an elite minority have made war on American ideals. By weaponising language and promoting false history, they are leading Americans into authoritarianism and creating a disaffected population.
Many books tell us what has happened over the last five years. In Democracy Awakening, Richardson wrangles America's meandering and confusing news feed into a coherent story to explain how America got to this perilous point, what we should pay attention to, and what the future of democracy holds.
I am adopted. For most of my life, I didn’t identify as adopted. I shoved that away because of the shame I felt about being adopted and not truly fitting into my family. But then two things happened: I had my own biological children, the only two people I know to date to whom I am biologically related, and then shortly after my second daughter was born, my older sister, also an adoptee, died of a drug overdose. These sequential births and death put my life on a new trajectory, and I started writing, out of grief, the history of adoption and motherhood in America.
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, I am uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption.
The history of adoption, reframed through the voices of adoptees like me, and mothers who have been forced to relinquish their babies, blows apart old narratives about adoption, exposing the fallacy that adoption is always good.
In this story, I reckon with the pain and unanswered questions of my own experience and explore broader issues surrounding adoption in the United States, including changing legal policies, sterilization, and compulsory relinquishment programs, forced assimilation of babies of color and Indigenous babies adopted into white families, and other liabilities affecting women, mothers, and children. Now is the moment we must all hear these stories.
Who Is a Worthy Mother?: An Intimate History of Adoption
Nearly every person in the United States is affected by adoption. Adoption practices are woven into the fabric of American society and reflect how our nation values human beings, particularly mothers. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women's reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, Rebecca C. Wellington is uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption. Wellington's timely-and deeply researched-account amplifies previously marginalized voices and exposes the social and racial biases embedded in the United States' adoption industry.…
Interested in
the upper class,
romantic love,
and
murder?
10,000+ authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them.
Browse their picks for the best books about
the upper class,
romantic love,
and
murder.
