Showing results for "Stories" in Racism & Discrimination

Dr Shahed Yousaf is a prison doctor dedicated to caring for people on the margins of society. An outsider on the inside, in Stitched Up he introduces us to a cast of unforgettable characters, including killers, con men and auto-cannibals. To Dr Yousaf, they are patients first and prisoners second—because any one of us could end up on the wrong side of the law. He tells us honestly and compassionately what it's like to be their doctor in a system that's chronically overcrowded, drastically under-resourced and all too easy to ignore.

In his own words, the heavyweight champion of the world pulls no punches as he chronicles the battles he faced in and out of the ring in this fascinating memoir edited by Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Toni Morrison. Growing up in the South, surrounded by racial bigotry and discrimination, Ali fought not just for a living, but also for respect and rewards far more precious than money or glory. He was named Sportsman of the Century by Sports Illustrated and the BBC.

Over the past decades, a healthy appreciation for the culture and heritage of minorities has transformed into an obsession with group identity in all its forms. A new ideology - which Yascha Mounk terms the 'identity synthesis' - seeks to put each citizen's matrix of identities at the heart of social, cultural and political life. This, he argues, is The Identity Trap. Mounk traces the intellectual origin of these ideas. He tells the story of how they were able to win tremendous power over the past decade.

Doing Time: For the prison writers whose work is included in this anthology, it means more than "serving a sentence"; it means staying alive and sane, preserving dignity, reinventing oneself, and somehow retaining one's humanity. For the last quarter century the prestigious writers' organization PEN has sponsored a contest for writers behind bars to help prisoners face these challenges. The contest honors the best short stories, plays, essays, and poems among hundreds submitted annually by men and women nationwide.

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb outside government buildings in central Oslo, killing eight people. He then proceeded to a youth camp on the island of Utøya, where he killed 69 more, most of them teenage members of Norway's governing Labour Party. In One of Us, the journalist Åsne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day and what led up to it. What made Breivik, a gifted child from an affluent neighborhood in Oslo, become a terrorist?

In a tour de force of investigative journalism and novelistic storytelling, White Terror follows the National Socialist Underground, or NSU, from their radicalisation as young skinheads through their transformation into fully fledged terrorists carrying out bombings and assassinations while living on the run. But it’s also about something almost as terrifying: the German police and intelligence services that missed clues, mishandled far-right informants and repeatedly tried to paint the immigrant victims as mafiosos.

A vivid love story and adventure tale, Oroonoko is a heroic slave narrative about a royal prince and his fight for freedom. The eponymous hero, Oroonoko, deemed royalty in one world and slave in another, is torn from his noble status and betrayed into slavery in Surinam, where he is reduced to chains, fetters, and shackles. But his high spirit and admirable character will not be suppressed.

America’s backstory is a whitewashed mythology implanted in our collective memory. It should come as no surprise that the dominant narrative of American history is blighted with errors and oversights—after all, history books were written by white men with their perspectives at the forefront. It could even be said that the devaluation and erasure of the Black experience is as American as apple pie. In Black AF History, Michael Harriot presents a more accurate version of American history.

From the founder and activist behind one of the largest movements of the 21st century, the Me Too movement, Tarana Burke debuts a powerful memoir about her own journey to saying those two simple yet infinitely powerful words and how she brought empathy back to an entire generation.

Alexandra Wilson was a teenager when her dear family friend Ayo was stabbed on his way home from football. Ayo's death changed Alexandra. She felt compelled to enter the legal profession in search of answers. As a junior criminal and family law barrister, Alexandra finds herself navigating a world and a set of rules designed by a privileged few. A world in which fellow barristers sigh with relief when a racist judge retires: 'I've got a black kid today and he would have had no hope'.

Sabrina Pace-Humphreys is a 43-year-old mother of four and grandmother of two, an award-winning businesswoman, an ultrarunner, a social justice activist and a recovering alcoholic. She is a mixed-raced woman, the daughter of a white Scottish Roman Catholic woman and a Black Church of England man. When she was two, her parents separated and Sabrina, her mother and her white-presenting younger sister moved to a small market town where no one looked like her. From as young as she can remember, she was the subject of verbal and physical racist abuse.

#SayHerName provides an analytical framework for understanding Black women's susceptibility to police brutality and state-sanctioned violence, and it explains how—through black feminist storytelling and ritual—we can effectively mobilize various communities and empower them to advocate for racial justice.

In this dual memoir, Mashama Bailey and John O. Morisano take turns telling how they went from tentative business partners to dear friends while turning a dilapidated formerly segregated Greyhound bus station into The Grey, now one of the most celebrated restaurants in the country. Recounting the trying process of building their restaurant business, they examine their most painful and joyous times, revealing how they came to understand their differences, recognize their biases, and continuously challenge themselves and each other to be better.

In Georgina Lawton's childhood home, her Blackness was never acknowledged; the obvious fact of her brown skin, ignored by her white parents. Over time, secrets and a complex family story became accepted as truth and Georgina found herself complicit in the erasure of her racial identity. It was only when her beloved father died that the truth began to emerge. Fleeing the shattered pieces of her family life and the comfortable, suburban home she grew up in, at age 22 Georgina went in search of answers.

Back in 1950 Pamela Rhodes became one of the first policewomen in the country. But the force's new female recruits faced a sceptical public in rural Yorkshire and even before they stepped out on the beat there were the prejudices of older male officers to overcome. Yet from the first Pam was thrust into the front line. From runaway bulls to investigating ladies of the night and cases of vice, her innocent eyes were quickly opened.

The astonishing untold history of America's first Black millionaires - former slaves who endured incredible challenges to amass and maintain their wealth for a century, from the Jacksonian period to the Roaring '20s - self-made entrepreneurs whose unknown success mirrored that of American business heroes such as Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and Thomas Edison.

Memphis Mayhem weaves the tale of the racial collision that led to a cultural, sociological, and musical revolution. Beginning with the 1870s yellow fever epidemics that created racial imbalance as wealthy whites fled the city, David Less moves from W. C. Handy's codification of blues in 1909 to the mid-century advent of interracial musical acts like Booker T. & the M.G.'s, the birth of punk, and finally to the growth of a music tourism industry.

A deeply reported book on the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement, offering unparalleled insight into the reality of police violence in America and an intimate, moving portrait of those working to end it. In over a year of on-the-ground reportage, Washington Post writer Wesley Lowery travelled across the US to uncover life inside the most heavily policed, if otherwise neglected, corners of America today.

Gender balance is first and foremost a business issue. McKinsey estimates we could add 28 trillion to global GDP if we achieved gender equality everywhere - that is more than the GDPs of the US and China combined. But it is so much more than that. Gender balance is one of the best levers we can pull to build better managers and leaders at every level, improve team performance and create better cultures where everyone can thrive.

On October 29, 1984, 66-year-old beloved Black disabled grandmother Eleanor Bumpurs was murdered in her own home. A public housing tenant 4 months behind on rent, Ms. Bumpurs was facing eviction when white NYPD officer Stephen Sullivan shot her twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. LaShawn Harris, 10 years old at the time, felt the aftershocks of the tragedy in her community well beyond the four walls of her home across the street.