Here are 100 books that Racial Formation in the United States fans have personally recommended if you like
Racial Formation in the United States.
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I'm Associate Professor of Economics at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, USA. My expertise is in conflict, war, and peace economics. I'm deeply motivated to understand the broader impacts of violent conflicts in low-income countries with the hope that doing so will pave the way for us to live in a more harmonious world. Recently, I've been interested in economics of cultural heritage destruction during violent conflicts. My aim is to understand patterns of heritage destruction in the past such that we can incorporate heritage destruction in atrocity forecasting models of today. I'm just as passionate to teach what I have learned over the years and what I'm curious to explore in the future.
In this book we learn that our actions are shaped by that of others or by our expectation of what others will do.
If, for example, a white neighbor leaves the neighborhood upon seeing a minority family move in, other white neighbors are likely to follow suit if they expect more white neighbors to move out and more minorities to move in. If a critical mass of white neighbors adopts this behavior, the result is a segregated neighborhood.
Applied this idea to the study of mass atrocities, we understand mass participation in mass atrocities as not a result of moral failure, but a social phenomenon driven by imitating nature and belonging need of the humankind. This understanding humanizes the mass perpetrators of an atrocity and opens space for reconciliation.
"Schelling here offers an early analysis of 'tipping' in social situations involving a large number of individuals." -official citation for the 2005 Nobel Prize
Micromotives and Macrobehavior was originally published over twenty-five years ago, yet the stories it tells feel just as fresh today. And the subject of these stories-how small and seemingly meaningless decisions and actions by individuals often lead to significant unintended consequences for a large group-is more important than ever. In one famous example, Thomas C. Schelling shows that a slight-but-not-malicious preference to have neighbors of the same race eventually leads to completely segregated populations.
I am an engaged scholar fighting racism. As a person of color, an Asian American raised in Chinatown and a low-income Black neighborhood, the fight is personal. My parents and those before them suffered from and struggled against discriminatory immigration laws that fractured and separated family members. My research and publications as a university professor are tools for exposing and redressing racial injustices, producing and sharing knowledge that leads to reconciliation and restorative justice.
Renowned geographer Soja presents an intriguing interpretation of the underlying forces shaping the urban landscape.
Using a blend of critical and postmodern theories, he reconceptualizes the meaning, organization, and use of space in the production of societal inequality within capitalist societies, including but not limited to race.
Equally important to me is the discussion about the system’s inherent contradictions and the phenomenon of active resistance against repression.
Contemporary critical studies have recently experienced a significant spatial turn. In what may eventually be seen as one of the most important intellectual and political developments in the late twentieth century, scholars have begun to interpret space and the embracing spatiality of human life with the same critical insight and emphasis that has traditionally been given to time and history on the one hand, and social relations and society on the other. Thirdspace is both an enquiry into the origins and impact of the spatial turn and an attempt to expand the scope and practical relevance of how we think…
I am an engaged scholar fighting racism. As a person of color, an Asian American raised in Chinatown and a low-income Black neighborhood, the fight is personal. My parents and those before them suffered from and struggled against discriminatory immigration laws that fractured and separated family members. My research and publications as a university professor are tools for exposing and redressing racial injustices, producing and sharing knowledge that leads to reconciliation and restorative justice.
Schlosberg covers the environment as an important sphere for societal inequalities, including those along racial lines.
People of color bear a disproportionate share of air, water, and land pollution and risk being left behind as the United States transitions to renewable energy in response to climate change.
Much of the inequality is anchored in stratified places. The author not only summarizes the existing literature on this, but also provides a very useful overview of the major justice paradigms as it applies to the environment.
This book will appeal to anyone interested in environmental politics, environmental movements, and justice theory.
The basic task of this book is to explore what, exactly, is meant by 'justice' in definitions of environmental and ecological justice. It examines how the term is used in both self-described environmental justice movements and in theories of environmental and ecological justice. The central argument is that a theory and practice of environmental justice necessarily includes distributive conceptions of justice, but must also embrace notions of justice based in recognition, capabilities, and participation. Throughout, the goal is the development of a broad, multi-faceted, yet…
I am an engaged scholar fighting racism. As a person of color, an Asian American raised in Chinatown and a low-income Black neighborhood, the fight is personal. My parents and those before them suffered from and struggled against discriminatory immigration laws that fractured and separated family members. My research and publications as a university professor are tools for exposing and redressing racial injustices, producing and sharing knowledge that leads to reconciliation and restorative justice.
This book provides a grand sociological theoretical framework to explain how society creates and maintains persistent inequality through grouping.
The author does not anchor his explanation in individual biases and discriminatory acts, which are manifestations of larger fundamental structures and dynamics. The division and organization of the population into categories produce systemic group advantages and enable hierarchical exploitation.
Several organizational mechanisms within and between groups make categorical inequality durable. Race is one of the fundamental ways society is fragmented into enduring and unequal groups.
Charles Tilly, in this eloquent manifesto, presents a powerful new approach to the study of persistent social inequality. How, he asks, do long-lasting, systematic inequalities in life chances arise, and how do they come to distinguish members of different socially defined categories of persons? Exploring representative paired and unequal categories, such as male/female, black/white, and citizen/noncitizen, Tilly argues that the basic causes of these and similar inequalities greatly resemble one another. In contrast to contemporary analyses that explain inequality case by case, this account is one of process. Categorical distinctions arise, Tilly says, because they offer a solution to pressing…
As a youngster growing up in the segregated South, I didn’t have access to books about Black history, culture, and experiences. Although I attended all-Black schools, the curriculum and the books in our libraries were mostly selected by an all-White school board. So, I didn’t know that much about the history of my own people. I would not begin to learn that until I attended college. When I married and had children of my own, my wife and I still had problems finding a variety of books for children and young readers for our own children to read. So, we started our own publishing company to address the need for these books.
The description of this book lays it all out for the readers. It says, “This is NOT a history book.
This is a book about the here and now. A book to help us better understand why we are where we are. A book about race. What a journey it takes the readers on, exploring the construct of race in this country.
In this important and compelling young readers adaptation of his National Book Award-winning title, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, writing with award-winning author Jason Reynolds, chronicles the story of anti-black, racist ideas over the course of American history.
Racist ideas in our country did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Instead, they were developed by some of the most brilliant minds in history to justify and rationalise the nation's deeply entrenched discriminatory policies. But while racist ideas have always been easy to fabricate and distribute, they can also be discredited. In shedding light on the history of racist ideas in America,…
We are two historians who have been writing together for about a decade now, first on project related to race relations after WWI, then on a book about debates over the enlistment age in nineteenth century America. Rebecca teaches at UCSD while Frances works at the University of Sydney in Australia, but we regularly meet online to write together and talk about our favorite new books.
Who gets to claim “childhood innocence” and the protections that come with this designation? Certainly not Black children in nineteenth-century America, according to Robin Bernstein. They were instead pictured as “pickaninnies”—comic figures who felt no pain, whatever mischief befell them. This book won a slew of awards for good reason: reading the racial ‘scripts’ in seemingly innocuous cultural products like children’s picture books, dolls, and knickknacks, Bernstein reveals how race-making hides in plain sight.
2013 Book Award Winner from the International Research Society in Children's Literature
2012 Outstanding Book Award Winner from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education
2012 Winner of the Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize presented by the New England American Studies Association
2012 Runner-Up, John Hope Franklin Publication Prize presented by the American Studies Association
2012 Honorable Mention, Distinguished Book Award presented by the Society for the Study of American Women Writers
Dissects how "innocence" became the exclusive province of white children, covering slavery to the Civil Rights era
Beginning in the mid nineteenth century in America, childhood became synonymous…
I am a historian of the slave trade and slavery in the Rio de la Plata region (today’s Argentina and Uruguay) who then turned to the study of the traffic of captive Africans in the whole Spanish Americas. Yet, my love remains in the Rio de la Plata, what I call the “cold Caribbean.” Exciting books on the history of Africans and their descendants examine this region within the framework of Atlantic History, racial capitalism, gender, and the connections between twentieth-century Black culture and politics. As these recommendations are limited to English-language books, readers should note that much more has been published on this subject in Spanish and Portuguese.
George Reid Andrews is one of the founders of Afro-Latin American Studies. In Blackness in the White Nation, he combines the study of Afro-Uruguayan music and performance of candombe, the African-based rhythm that Uruguay shares with Argentina (as these countries share tango too), with the history of Afro-Uruguayan political mobilization in the twentieth century. Andrews guides readers into this story by telling them about his experience of learning candombe, and marching playing the drums on the streets of Montevideo, which makes this story unique. We learn how a country who depicts itself as predominantly populated by descendants of Europeans, appropriated African-based music and dance as a national rhythm.
Uruguay is not conventionally thought of as part of the African diaspora, yet during the period of Spanish colonial rule, thousands of enslaved Africans arrived in the country. Afro-Uruguayans played important roles in Uruguay's national life, creating the second-largest black press in Latin America, a racially defined political party, and numerous social and civic organizations.
Afro-Uruguayans were also central participants in the creation of Uruguayan popular culture and the country's principal musical forms, tango and candombe. Candombe, a style of African-inflected music, is one of the defining features of the nation's culture, embraced equally by white and black citizens.
I was born and raised in Haiti where I was known as ti-blan—little white. And when we moved to central Florida, I remember the feeling of utter sadness and despair. I felt wrenched from the place I loved. The only person I could speak creole with was the janitor at the segregated white school. The teacher yelled at me for talking with him. Since then, I have been interested in this weird problem of race in America. I am drawn to women writers and Caribbean women writers. I love books that evoke place and language and tell me a story—but also deal with the specific urgent political questions of our times.
One of my all-time favorites. I think it is about Haiti, or it is a fictional island “Bourneville” that is based on Haiti. The novel describes a place linked to its history of enslavement and the battle for freedom. She is a beautiful deep-thinking writer. She carefully shows a group of white ethnographers going to this island, and how their attempts to "help" led to tragedy. It illustrates the pitfalls with international aid organizations. How often they damage, instead of help. And the novel is timely to this day.
The chosen place is Bourneville, a remote, devastated part of a Caribbean island; the timeless people are its inhabitants—black, poor, inextricably linked to their past enslavement. When the advance team for an ambitious American research project arrives, the tense, ambivalent relationships that evolve, between natives and foreigners, black and whites, haves and have-nots, keenly dramatize the vicissitudes of power.
“An important and moving book . . . Marshall is as wise as she is bold, for in compromising neither her politics nor her understanding of people, she makes better sense of both.”—Village Voice
I’m a writer and a Shakespeare and critical race studies scholar who’s always been intrigued by the invisible, artificial race-based boundaries in our world. I love analyzing the lives of literary characters and seeing how they can serve as mirrors for us along lines of gender, mental health, and more. My critical interests are informed by the fact that I grew up in a predominantly Black/Latino low-income neighborhood and attended an affluent, predominantly white private school from the sixth to twelfth grade. My adolescent experiences with inclusion/exclusion dynamics required me to reflect on race, for example, so I could understand and navigate the kinds of socio-cultural dynamics that affect us all.
I love this book because Fleming offers necessary socio-historical correctives and demystifies many myths that people believe about race, racism, and stereotypes.
The writing is punchy, pithy and humorous. As such, it is entertainingly educational and scholarly while presenting facts in a way that is accessible to general readers.
I also love this book because it is incredibly useful both to those who are “stupid about race,” so to speak, and those who aren’t. For the former, I think this is a great book to start with on one’s journey toward becoming more race-conscious and more educated about race.
A unique and irreverent take on everything that's wrong with our “national conversation about race”—and what to do about it
How to Be Less Stupid About Race is your essential guide to breaking through the half-truths and ridiculous misconceptions that have thoroughly corrupted the way race is represented in the classroom, pop culture, media, and politics. Centuries after our nation was founded on genocide, settler colonialism, and slavery, many Americans are kinda-sorta-maybe waking up to the reality that our racial politics are (still) garbage. But in the midst of this reckoning, widespread denial and misunderstandings about race persist, even as…
Raised by activist feminist parents and schooled by Quakers, I am surprisingly amusing. Eartha Kitt once held my left hand for five minutes. I work primarily as a playwright; Not a Cat is my first children’s book! Now when I show up at a little kid’s birthday instead of bringing a play I wrote, I can give the tot age-appropriate reading material. For me, reading a memoir is this intimate exchange with a writer where they’ve shared everything, and I’ve revealed nothing. What’s better than a good story beautifully curated? Okay, a cookie, but that’s it. I hope my book reaches all the kids out there who are told: be less this and more that.
This is sort of a cheat of the assignment, because it’s not Anastasia Higginbotham’s actual lived experience, but it is not one unfamiliar to her, about growing up in a country in which white parents cover up racism even unintentionally. I’ve known Anastasia for 30 years and no less than six children’s books she’s published. Her book series, Ordinary Terrible Things, published by dottir press is among my favorites because the illustrations are collaged and stunning and she creates indelible characters. Her other kid’s books deal with divorce (Divorce is Stupid), sex (Talk to Me about Sex, Grandma), incest (You Ruined It), so you can see, she’s doesn’t pull punches. Book by book, Anastasia is building a more just and beautiful world. Like the others, on this list, she’s also hot.
An honest explanation about how power and privilege factor into the lives of white children, at the expense of other groups, and how they can help seek justice. -THE NEW YORK TIMES
ONE OF HUFFPOST'S RECOMMENDED "ANTI-RACIST BOOKS FOR KIDS AND TEENS"
**A WHITE RAVEN 2019 SELECTION**
NAMED ONE OF SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL'S BEST BOOKS OF 2018
Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness is a picture book about racism and racial justice, inviting white children and parents to become curious about racism, accept that it's real, and cultivate justice.
This book does a phenomenal job of explaining how power…
