Showing titles in Racism & Discrimination

The books that make up the life and times of Maya Angelou are some of the best, most beautiful and haunting pieces of autobiography written. They run the gamut from life affirming to tragedy and back again with a tone that is a joyous, direct and searingly honest and are an extraordinary portrait of 20th century black America.

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?

The New Age of Empire takes us back to the beginning of the European Empires, outlining the deliberate terror and suffering wrought during every stage of the expansion, and destroys the self-congratulatory myth that the West was founded on the three great revolutions of science, industry and politics. Instead, genocide, slavery and colonialism are the key foundation stones upon which the West was built and we are still living under this system today: America is now at the helm.

As one of the few black students in his philosophy program at Columbia University years ago, Coleman Hughes wondered why his peers seemed more pessimistic about the state of American race relations than his own grandparents–who lived through segregation. The End of Race Politics is the culmination of his years-long search for an answer.

What does it mean when God is presented as male? What does it mean when - from our internal assumptions to our shared cultural imaginings - God is presented as white? These are the urgent questions Chine McDonald asks in a searing look at her experience of being a Black woman in the white-majority space that is the UK church - a church that is being abandoned by Black women no longer able to grin and bear its casual racism, colonialist narratives and lack of urgency on issues of racial justice.

The mixed population is the fastest-growing group in the UK today, but the mainstream conversation around mixedness is stilted, repetitive and often problematic. At a time when ethnically ambiguous models fill our Instagram feeds and our high street shop windows, and when children of interracial relationships are lauded as heralding in the dawn of a post-racial utopia, journalist Natalie Morris takes a deep dive into what it really means to be mixed in Britain today.

Have you ever been told to smile more, been teased about your accent or had your name pronounced incorrectly? If so, you’ve probably already faced bias in your everyday life. We like to believe that we are all fair-minded and egalitarian, but we all carry biases that we might not even be aware of. We might believe that we live in a post-racial society, but racial tension and inequality is pernicious and pervasive. We might believe that gender inequality is a thing of the past, but it is still ubiquitous.

Part thesis, part memoir, and part poetry, this book is unlike any other therapeutic text. Psychotherapist and writer Foluke Taylor explores how the centering of Black women’s experiences in therapeutic scholarship allows for greater space―space for wandering, for wondering, and for deepening narratives―in every therapeutic relationship.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Evicted by Matthew Desmond, read by Dion Graham. Arleen spends nearly all her money on rent but is kicked out with her kids in Milwaukee's coldest winter for years. Doreen's home is so filthy her family call it 'the rat hole'. Lamar, a wheelchair-bound ex-soldier, tries to work his way out of debt for his boys. Scott, a nurse turned addict, lives in a gutted-out trailer.

Racism is not a simple matter of good people versus bad. In White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo explained how racism is a system into which all white people are socialised. She also made a provocative claim: that white progressives cause the most daily harm to people of colour. In Nice Racism, her follow-up work, she explains how they do so. Drawing on her background as a sociologist and over 25 years working as an antiracist educator, she moves the conversation forward.

Who is Satan in the New Testament, and what is the evil that he represents? In this groundbreaking book, Elaine Pagels, Princeton's distinguished historian of religion, traces the evolution of Satan from its origins in the Hebrew Bible, where Satan is at first merely obstructive, to the New Testament, where Satan becomes the Prince of Darkness, the bitter enemy of God and man, evil incarnate. In The Origin of Satan, Pagels shows that the four Christian gospels tell two very different stories.

White tears possess a potency that is rarely acknowledged or commented upon, but they have long been used as a dangerous and insidious tool against people of colour. Taking us from the slave era, when white women fought in court to keep 'ownership' of their slaves, through centuries of colonialism, when women offered a soft face for brutal tactics, to the modern workplace, in which tears serve as a defense to counter accusations of bias and microaggressions, White Tears/Brown Scars tells a charged story of white women's active participation in campaigns of oppression.

For the last three decades Gary Younge has had a ringside seat during the biggest events and with the most significant personalities to impact the black diaspora: accompanying Nelson Mandela on his first election campaign, joining revellers on the southside of Chicago during Obama's victory, entering New Orleans days after hurricane Katrina or interviewing Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Maya Angelou and Stormzy. He has witnessed how much change is possible and the power of systems to thwart those aspirations.

While the North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," Heather Cox Richardson argues in this provocative work that democracy's blood-soaked victory was ephemeral. The system that had sustained the defeated South moved westward and there established a foothold. It was a natural fit. Settlers from the East had for decades been pushing into the West, where the seizure of Mexican lands at the end of the Mexican-American War and treatment of Native Americans cemented racial hierarchies....

Emmett Till’s murder is one of the most infamous in American history; a moment that, more than any other, awakened the world to the racism of the Deep South. Yet despite growing up just a few miles from where it happened, Wright Thompson knew nothing of it until he left Mississippi. This is no accident: the cover-up began at once, and it is ongoing. Over the course of five years’ research, Thompson has learnt that almost every part of the standard account of Till’s killing is wrong.

Recognising Black British experience within the Black Lives Matter movement, 19 prominent Black figures explain why Black lives should be celebrated when too often they are undervalued. Drawing from personal experience, they stress how Black British people have unique perspectives and experiences that enrich British society and the world; how Black lives are far more interesting and important than the forces that try to limit it.

Take a step through the looking glass to a strange land, one where Piers Morgan is a voice worth listening to about race, where white people buy self-help books to help them cope with their whiteness, where Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are seen by the majority of the population as 'the right (white) man for the job'. Kehinde Andrews is your piercing, wry and not a little funny guide back to sanity, unpicking the absurd and outrageous lies society tells to keep up the status quo and The Psychosis of Whiteness is your lifeboat out of this topsy turvey world.

Some Americans cling desperately to the myth that we are living in a post-racial society, that the election of the first Black president spelled the doom of racism. In fact, racist thought is alive and well in America - more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, if we have any hope of grappling with this stark reality, we must first understand how racist ideas were developed, disseminated, and enshrined in American society.

Women are standing up and #shoutingback. In a culture that's driven by social media, for the first time women are using this online space (@EverydaySexism www.everydaysexism.com) to come together, share their stories, and encourage a new generation to recognise the problems that women face. This book is a call to arms in a new wave of feminism and it proves sexism is endemic - socially, politically, and economically. But women won't stand for it.

For the past 15 years, radical psychologist and therapist Guilaine Kinouani has helped hundreds of Black people to protect their mental and physical health from the harm of white supremacy. In this timely book, she brings together powerful case studies, eye-opening research and effective coping techniques from her anti-racist academy and award-nominated blog, Race Reflections.