America's Forgotten Caste

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Author :
Publisher : Xlibris Corporation
ISBN 13 : 1483619648
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (836 download)

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Book Synopsis America's Forgotten Caste by : Rodney Barfield

Download or read book America's Forgotten Caste written by Rodney Barfield and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2013 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Free blacks in antebellum America lived in a twilight world of oppressive laws and customs designed to suppress their mobility and their integration into civil society. Free blacks were free only to the extent of white tolerance in their community or town. They were at the mercy of the lowest members of the dominant race who could punish them on a whim. They were, in the words of a 19th century European traveler to America, "masterless slaves." Nonetheless, many successful and even prominent blacks emerged from the mire of oppressive laws and general public disdain to realize major achievements. Though excluded from the political process, from education, and from most professions they became preachers, teachers, missionaries, contractors, artisans, boat captains, and wealthy entrepreneurs. Members of this twilight social and legal class, which numbered nearly a half million by 1860, made great accomplishments against strong opposition in the first half of the 19th century. The history of America and of American slavery is woefully incomplete without their story.

Caste

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Author :
Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN 13 : 0593230272
Total Pages : 545 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (932 download)

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Book Synopsis Caste by : Isabel Wilkerson

Download or read book Caste written by Isabel Wilkerson and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2023-02-14 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions—now with a new Afterword by the author. #1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, O: The Oprah Magazine, NPR, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, New York Post, The New York Public Library, Fortune, Smithsonian Magazine, Marie Claire, Slate, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews Winner of the Carl Sandberg Literary Award • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • National Book Award Longlist • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalist • PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist • PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Longlist • Kirkus Prize Finalist “As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.” In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched, and beautifully written narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their outcasting of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity. Original and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.

America’S Forgotten Caste

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Author :
Publisher : Xlibris Corporation
ISBN 13 : 1483619664
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (836 download)

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Book Synopsis America’S Forgotten Caste by : Rodney Barfield

Download or read book America’S Forgotten Caste written by Rodney Barfield and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2013-05-14 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Free blacks in antebellum America lived in a twilight world of oppressive laws and customs designed to suppress their mobility and their integration into civil society. Free blacks were free only to the extent of white tolerance in their community or town. They were at the mercy of the lowest members of the dominant race who could punish them on a whim. They were, in the words of a 19th century European traveler to America, "masterless slaves." Nonetheless, many successful and even prominent blacks emerged from the mire of oppressive laws and general public disdain to realize major achievements. Though excluded from the political process, from education, and from most professions they became preachers, teachers, missionaries, contractors, artisans, boat captains, and wealthy entrepreneurs. Members of this twilight social and legal class, which numbered nearly a half million by 1860, made great accomplishments against strong opposition in the first half of the 19th century. The history of America and of American slavery is woefully incomplete without their story.

The Warmth of Other Suns

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Author :
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0679763880
Total Pages : 642 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (797 download)

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Book Synopsis The Warmth of Other Suns by : Isabel Wilkerson

Download or read book The Warmth of Other Suns written by Isabel Wilkerson and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this beautifully written masterwork, the Pulitzer Prize–winnner and bestselling author of Caste 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. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties. Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.

Marriage and Caste in America

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Author :
Publisher : Ivan R. Dee Publisher
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.X/5 (3 download)

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Book Synopsis Marriage and Caste in America by : Kay S. Hymowitz

Download or read book Marriage and Caste in America written by Kay S. Hymowitz and published by Ivan R. Dee Publisher. This book was released on 2006 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the widening gap in America's social structure, revealing how lower-class children are being separated from their middle-class peers by single parenthood and a lack of strong male role models.

Notes of a Racial Caste Baby

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Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 0814726526
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (147 download)

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Book Synopsis Notes of a Racial Caste Baby by : Bryan K. Fair

Download or read book Notes of a Racial Caste Baby written by Bryan K. Fair and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Affirmative action, the playing field is now level? Fair ambitiously surveys the most common arguments for and against affirmative action. He argues that we must distinguish between America in the pre-civil rights movement era - when the law of the land was explicitly anti-black - and today's affirmative action policies - which are decidedly not anti-white. He concludes that the only just and effective way both to account for America's racial past and to negotiate.

Castes of Mind

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Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400840945
Total Pages : 386 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis Castes of Mind by : Nicholas B. Dirks

Download or read book Castes of Mind written by Nicholas B. Dirks and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-09 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization. Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus. Castes of Mind is an ambitious book, written by an accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian history and anthropology. It uses the idea of caste as the basis for a magisterial history of modern India. And in making a powerful case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present, it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics.

Long Time Coming

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Publisher : St. Martin's Press
ISBN 13 : 1250276764
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis Long Time Coming by : Michael Eric Dyson

Download or read book Long Time Coming written by Michael Eric Dyson and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER This edition includes illustrations by Everett Dyson From the New York Times bestselling author of Tears We Cannot Stop, a passionate call to America to finally reckon with race and start the journey to redemption. “Powerfully illuminating, heart-wrenching, and enlightening.” -Ibram X. Kendi, bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist “Crushingly powerful, Long Time Coming is an unfiltered Marlboro of black pain.” -Isabel Wilkerson, bestselling author of Caste "Formidable, compelling...has much to offer on our nation’s crucial need for racial reckoning and the way forward." -Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy The night of May 25, 2020 changed America. George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, was killed during an arrest in Minneapolis when a white cop suffocated him. The video of that night’s events went viral, sparking the largest protests in the nation’s history and the sort of social unrest we have not seen since the sixties. While Floyd’s death was certainly the catalyst, (heightened by the fact that it occurred during a pandemic whose victims were disproportionately of color) it was in truth the fuse that lit an ever-filling powder keg. Long Time Coming grapples with the cultural and social forces that have shaped our nation in the brutal crucible of race. In five beautifully argued chapters—each addressed to a black martyr from Breonna Taylor to Rev. Clementa Pinckney—Dyson traces the genealogy of anti-blackness from the slave ship to the street corner where Floyd lost his life—and where America gained its will to confront the ugly truth of systemic racism. Ending with a poignant plea for hope, Dyson’s exciting new book points the way to social redemption. Long Time Coming is a necessary guide to help America finally reckon with race.

India's Silent Revolution

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Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780231127868
Total Pages : 532 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (278 download)

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Book Synopsis India's Silent Revolution by : Christophe Jaffrelot

Download or read book India's Silent Revolution written by Christophe Jaffrelot and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jaffrelot argues that the trend towards lower-caste representation in national politics constitutes a genuine "democratization" of India and that the social and economic effects of this "silent revolution" are bound to multiply in the years to come.

Before Mestizaje

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107026431
Total Pages : 317 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis Before Mestizaje by : Ben Vinson III

Download or read book Before Mestizaje written by Ben Vinson III and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deepens our understanding of race and the implications of racial mixture by examining the history of caste in colonial Mexico.

The Sum of Us

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Author :
Publisher : One World
ISBN 13 : 0525509577
Total Pages : 450 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (255 download)

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Book Synopsis The Sum of Us by : Heather McGhee

Download or read book The Sum of Us written by Heather McGhee and published by One World. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • One of today’s most insightful and influential thinkers offers a powerful exploration of inequality and the lesson that generations of Americans have failed to learn: Racism has a cost for everyone—not just for people of color. WINNER OF THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, The Washington Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Ms. magazine, BookRiot, Library Journal “This is the book I’ve been waiting for.”—Ibram X. Kendi, #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist Look for the author’s new podcast, The Sum of Us, based on this book! Heather McGhee’s specialty is the American economy—and the mystery of why it so often fails the American public. From the financial crisis of 2008 to rising student debt to collapsing public infrastructure, she found a root problem: racism in our politics and policymaking. But not just in the most obvious indignities for people of color. Racism has costs for white people, too. It is the common denominator of our most vexing public problems, the core dysfunction of our democracy and constitutive of the spiritual and moral crises that grip us all. But how did this happen? And is there a way out? McGhee embarks on a deeply personal journey across the country from Maine to Mississippi to California, tallying what we lose when we buy into the zero-sum paradigm—the idea that progress for some of us must come at the expense of others. Along the way, she meets white people who confide in her about losing their homes, their dreams, and their shot at better jobs to the toxic mix of American racism and greed. This is the story of how public goods in this country—from parks and pools to functioning schools—have become private luxuries; of how unions collapsed, wages stagnated, and inequality increased; and of how this country, unique among the world’s advanced economies, has thwarted universal healthcare. But in unlikely places of worship and work, McGhee finds proof of what she calls the Solidarity Dividend: the benefits we gain when people come together across race to accomplish what we simply can’t do on our own. The Sum of Us is not only a brilliant analysis of how we arrived here but also a heartfelt message, delivered with startling empathy, from a black woman to a multiracial America. It leaves us with a new vision for a future in which we finally realize that life can be more than a zero-sum game. LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL

Caste, Class, and Race

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Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781397949356
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (493 download)

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Book Synopsis Caste, Class, and Race by : Oliver C. Cox

Download or read book Caste, Class, and Race written by Oliver C. Cox and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Summary of Caste

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Author :
Publisher : Lonnie Trinidad
ISBN 13 : 9781637331781
Total Pages : 130 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (317 download)

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Book Synopsis Summary of Caste by : Lonnie Trinidad

Download or read book Summary of Caste written by Lonnie Trinidad and published by Lonnie Trinidad. This book was released on 2020-08 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book was created for the modern American looking to expand their knowledge on the multitude of manifestations of caste influence on political, economic, and social life from historical events to present day narratives. All of the information, research, and anecdotes contained in this book belong to Isabel Wilkerson, the author of Caste: The Origins of our Discontents. This novel serves to streamline the narrative and theories presented by Wilkerson into more digestible knowledge for the average American. While none of the ideas are original, all are paraphrased from the research and a multitude of stories that were used in constructing this powerful foundation for understanding the origin and perpetuation of caste in America. This novel explores the many facets of caste, concluding that it is caste and not racism or class that is the institutionalized system that prohibits the progress of racial equality in America. In this book, you will learn how the creation of caste is completely arbitrary and entirely fabricated and how it became the fabric of American society. You will be able to see the ways in which caste was perpetuated in the United States and the way in which our caste system was influenced by the caste systems of Germany and India. You will conclude this novel with the ability to scrutinize the larger caste system at work in addition to being able to see in which ways you perpetuate caste in your own life, with the hopes that all those who read this book will work to dismantle it.

The New Jim Crow

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Publisher : The New Press
ISBN 13 : 1620971941
Total Pages : 434 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (29 download)

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Book Synopsis The New Jim Crow by : Michelle Alexander

Download or read book The New Jim Crow written by Michelle Alexander and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly‚ Slate‚ Chronicle of Higher Education‚ Literary Hub, Book Riot‚ and Zora A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller—"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education—with a new preface by the author "It is in no small part thanks to Alexander's account that civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter have focused so much of their energy on the criminal justice system." —Adam Shatz, London Review of Books Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is "undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S." Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

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Author :
Publisher : Liveright Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1631492861
Total Pages : 246 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (314 download)

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Book Synopsis The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by : Richard Rothstein

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.

So You Want to Talk About Race

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Author :
Publisher : Seal Press
ISBN 13 : 1541619226
Total Pages : 214 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (416 download)

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Book Synopsis So You Want to Talk About Race by : Ijeoma Oluo

Download or read book So You Want to Talk About Race written by Ijeoma Oluo and published by Seal Press. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this #1 New York Times bestseller, Ijeoma Oluo offers a revelatory examination of race in America Protests against racial injustice and white supremacy have galvanized millions around the world. The stakes for transformative conversations about race could not be higher. Still, the task ahead seems daunting, and it’s hard to know where to start. How do you tell your boss her jokes are racist? Why did your sister-in-law hang up on you when you had questions about police reform? How do you explain white privilege to your white, privileged friend? In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo guides readers of all races through subjects ranging from police brutality and cultural appropriation to the model minority myth in an attempt to make the seemingly impossible possible: honest conversations about race, and about how racism infects every aspect of American life. "Simply put: Ijeoma Oluo is a necessary voice and intellectual for these times, and any time, truth be told." ―Phoebe Robinson, New York Times bestselling author of You Can't Touch My Hair

Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America

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Author :
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674070402
Total Pages : 317 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America by : Vivek Bald

Download or read book Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America written by Vivek Bald and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-07 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award Winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for History A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year A Saveur “Essential Food Books That Define New York City” Selection In the final years of the nineteenth century, small groups of Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island every summer, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their home villages in Bengal. The American demand for “Oriental goods” took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey’s beach boardwalks into the heart of the segregated South. Two decades later, hundreds of Indian Muslim seamen began jumping ship in New York and Baltimore, escaping the engine rooms of British steamers to find less brutal work onshore. As factory owners sought their labor and anti-Asian immigration laws closed in around them, these men built clandestine networks that stretched from the northeastern waterfront across the industrial Midwest. The stories of these early working-class migrants vividly contrast with our typical understanding of immigration. Vivek Bald’s meticulous reconstruction reveals a lost history of South Asian sojourning and life-making in the United States. At a time when Asian immigrants were vilified and criminalized, Bengali Muslims quietly became part of some of America’s most iconic neighborhoods of color, from Tremé in New Orleans to Detroit’s Black Bottom, from West Baltimore to Harlem. Many started families with Creole, Puerto Rican, and African American women. As steel and auto workers in the Midwest, as traders in the South, and as halal hot dog vendors on 125th Street, these immigrants created lives as remarkable as they are unknown. Their stories of ingenuity and intermixture challenge assumptions about assimilation and reveal cross-racial affinities beneath the surface of early twentieth-century America.