Race Rebels

By Robin D. G. Kelley,

Book cover of Race Rebels : Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class

Book description

Many black strategies of daily resistance have been obscured--until now. Race rebels, argues Kelley, have created strategies of resistance, movements, and entire subcultures. Here, for the first time, everyday race rebels are given the historiographical attention they deserve, from the Jim Crow era to the present.

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Race Rebels as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This book is a brilliant collection of essays highlighting “race rebels,” where Kelley looks outside of traditional politics and organized movements to find Black resistance to forces such as white supremacy, labor exploitation, and war. Kelley focuses in on the everyday lives of working-class Black men and women, highlighting a “hidden transcript” of expression and resistance in things like music, language, dance, and choice of dress.  He elevates the political potential found in these cultural elements, urging historians to see these “style politics” in the social and economic contexts which give rise to them, for they are powerful and worthy…

Kelley’s expansive definition of political activism uncovers various forms of resistance to racism that were often overlooked, from telling jokes and stories that subtly critiqued white supremacy in the Jim Crow era, to joining the Lincoln Brigade’s fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, to urban uprisings and hip-hop culture that drew attention to continued inequities in the late twentieth century. Kelley shows that working-class African Americans were not passive recipients of middle-class leadership but sophisticated thinkers and participants in their own right in the movements for racial and economic justice. This book is essential reading for anyone seeking…

From Greta's list on race and class in the United States.

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