African Politics

In Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, professor and author Bert Ashe delivers a witty, fascinating, and unprecedented account of Black male identity as seen through our culture's perceptions of hair. It is a deeply personal story that weaves together the cultural and political history of dreadlocks with Ashe's own midlife journey to lock his hair.

In the summer of 2020, when the nation was erupting in protest over the murder of George Floyd, Chad Sanders was quietly celebrating for selfish reasons. Why? After years of struggling to get his footing as a writer, he’d finally landed a New York Times op-ed. He wrote an essay about the hollow messages of concern he’d been receiving from white friends and colleagues. It went viral, and in the years that followed, he built a solid career as a creator—of books, podcasts, TV shows, and films—by mining his most painful experiences of being Black in America.

In The Way of Tenderness, Zen priest Zenju Earthlyn Manuel brings Buddhist philosophies of emptiness and appearance to bear on race, sexuality, and gender, using wisdom forged through personal experience and practice to rethink problems of identity and privilege.

Most people assume that racism grows from a perception of human difference: the fact of race gives rise to the practice of racism. Sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields argue otherwise: the practice of racism produces the illusion of race, through what they call “racecraft.” And this phenomenon is intimately entwined with other forms of inequality in American life. So pervasive are the devices of racecraft in American history, economic doctrine, politics, and everyday thinking that the presence of racecraft itself goes unnoticed.

In this original and penetrating audiobook, Lewis R. Gordon, one of the leading scholars of Black existentialism and anti-Blackness, takes the listener on a journey through the historical development of racialized Blackness, the problems this kind of consciousness produces, and the many creative responses from Black and non-Black communities in contemporary struggles for dignity and freedom. Skillfully navigating a difficult and traumatic terrain, Gordon cuts through the mist of White narcissism and the versions of consciousness it perpetuates.

Many believe the child welfare system protects children from abuse. But as Torn Apart uncovers, this system is designed to punish Black families. Drawing on decades of research, legal scholar and sociologist Dorothy Roberts reveals that the child welfare system is better understood as a “family policing system” that collaborates with law enforcement and prisons to oppress Black communities. Child protection investigations ensnare a majority of Black children, putting their families under intense state surveillance and regulation.

In Making the Second Ghetto, Arnold Hirsch argues that in the post-depression years Chicago was a "pioneer in developing concepts and devices" for housing segregation. Hirsch shows that the legal framework for the national urban renewal effort was forged in the heat generated by the racial struggles waged on Chicago's South Side.

Senseless killing of innocent people and children, bad governance, bribery, and corruption has taken over the politics of Africans. Today, Africans are dwelling in poverty and backwardness while other countries and continents are doing well. The reason I wrote this book while on a week vacation in Nigeria, was to compare Western politics to African politics. To find out what has gone wrong in African political systems.

In The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar, earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. And yet he became most closely associated with the flowering of Black culture in Jazz Age America.

The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter Godwin Woodson (1933), addresses important economic and social issues that were faced by African Americans. Woodson criticises education in American schools and the emphasis on the history of the Greeks, Romans, and British. He explores the legacy of slavery and the economic situation of Blacks in the time of depression. In each chapter, he considers the results of miseducation on the church, business, politics, and leadership.

Today, Americans are debating our criminal justice system with new urgency. Mass incarceration and aggressive police tactics - and their impact on people of color - are feeding outrage and a consensus that something must be done. But what if we only know half the story? In Locking Up Our Own, the Yale legal scholar and former public defender James Forman Jr. weighs the tragic role that some African Americans themselves played in escalating the war on crime.

The saga of the Freedom Riders is an improbable, almost unbelievable story. In the course of six months in 1961, 450 Freedom Riders expanded the realm of the possible in American politics, redefining the limits of dissent and setting the stage for the civil rights movement. In this new version of his encyclopedic Freedom Riders, Raymond Arsenault offers a significantly condensed and tautly written account.

The American Slave Coast tells the horrific story of how the slavery business in the United States made the reproductive labor of "breeding women" essential to the expansion of the nation. The book shows how slaves' children, and their children's children, were human savings accounts that were the basis of money and credit. This was so deeply embedded in the economy of the slave states that it could be decommissioned only by emancipation, achieved through the bloodiest war in the history of the United States.

First published in 1962, Negroes with Guns is the story of a southern black community's struggle to arm itself in self-defense against the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups. Frustrated and angered by violence condoned or abetted by the local authorities against blacks, the small community of Monroe, North Carolina, brought the issue of armed self-defense to the forefront of the civil rights movement.

Challenging incarceration and policing was central to the postwar Black Freedom Movement. In this bold new political and intellectual history of the Nation of Islam, Garrett Felber centers the Nation in the Civil Rights Era and the making of the modern carceral state. In doing so, he reveals a multifaceted freedom struggle that focused as much on policing and prisons as on school desegregation and voting rights.

From a leading journalist and activist comes a brave, beautifully wrought memoir. When Darnell Moore was 14, three boys from his neighborhood tried to set him on fire. He escaped, but just barely. It wasn't the last time he would face death. Three decades later, Moore is an award-winning writer, a leading Black Lives Matter activist, and an advocate for justice and liberation. In No Ashes in the Fire, he shares the journey taken by that scared, bullied teenager who not only survived, but found his calling.

Why is Africa still perceived as a country when there are around 2,000 languages spoken on the continent alone? It's a Continent aims to counter the misconception that Africa is a country by breaking down this vast, beautiful and complex continent into regions and countries. Each of the 54 African countries has a unique history and culture and this audiobook highlights the key historical moments that have shaped each nation and contributed to its global position, as well as within the African continent.

At a time when most of the public discourse was dominated by men, Anna Julia Cooper’s writings offered a blistering rebuke to that status quo. The essays and speeches collected here anticipated the debates about racism, sexism, and intersectionality that we are still having today. Cooper argues in particular for the importance of Black women’s participation in identifying and combating the structures of oppression that surrounded them - and that made life so much more difficult for many other groups as well.

In early 1968 the grisly on-the-job deaths of two African-American sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, prompted an extended strike by that city's segregated force of trash collectors. Workers sought union protection, higher wages, improved safety, and the integration of their work force. Their work stoppage became a part of the larger civil rights movement and drew an impressive array of national movement leaders to Memphis, including, on more than one occasion, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King added his voice to the struggle in what became the final speech of his life.

Abraham Bolden was a young African American Secret Service agent in Chicago when he was asked by John F. Kennedy to join the White House Secret Service detail. For Bolden, it was a dream come true—and an encouraging sign of the president's vision for a new America. But the dream quickly turned sour. Bolden found himself subjected to open hostility and blatant racism, and he was appalled by the White House team's irresponsible approach to security. In the wake of JFK's assassination, Bolden sought to expose the agency's negligence, only to find himself the victim of a sinister conspiracy.