By Ron Liskey | March 15, 2020
Books on Particularism (Racism)"
This list is heavily weighted toward the uniquely ugly situation inside the US Empire. Over time, more classical and universal texts will be added. Because overcoming a stubborn notion requires an understanding of its appeal, books promoting delusion and division are also listed. As always, inclusion does not imply agreement. There is no call to believe everything we think, read, or hear.
Remembering Jim Crow
The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois
Defending My Enemy: American Nazis, the Skokie Case, and the Risks of Freedom
In 1977, Frank Collin, leader of the National Socialist Party of America, sought to hold a Nazi march in Skokie, Illinois. In this Chicago suburb, over half the population was Jewish, and many were victims of the Holocaust in Europe.
The proposed march sparked a host of legal challenges. Skokie asked for an injunction to prevent the Nazis from marching, and new ordinances were adopted to block the march. Collin applied to hold a march on a later date, but was denied.
An ACLU lawsuit was brought in federal court seeking to invalidate the ordinances put in place to prevent the Nazi march. In the end, the Nazis did not march in Skokie, but in 1978 the Illinois Supreme Court ruled in defense of free speech rights for all.
The ACLU was severely weakened by a backlash from seemingly liberal groups who conveniently ignored their liberal principles when the targets of censorship were their own perceived enemies.
Writing from his perspective as national executive director of the ACLU, Aryeh Neier tells the story, and ponders the consequences, of Skokie and other cases in which the enemies of freedom claim for themselves rights that they would (often with the best of intentions) deny to other enemies of freedom.
American on Fire
America’s Racial Karma: An Invitation to Heal
When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America
Critical Race Theory
Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
When Donald Trump lost the 2016 presidential election, and won the presidential college selection, a bewildered nation turned to Strangers in Their Own Land to understand what Trump voters were thinking when they cast their ballots.
Arlie Hochschild, one of the most influential sociologists of her generation, had spent the preceding five years immersed in the community around Lake Charles, Louisiana, a Tea Party stronghold.
As Jedediah Purdy put it in the New Republic, “Hochschild is fascinated by how people make sense of their lives… [Her] attentive, detailed portraits…reveal a gulf between Hochchild’s ‘strangers in their own land’ and a new elite.”
Already a favorite book in communities and on campuses across the country and called “humble and important” by David Brooks and “masterly” by Atul Gawande, Hochschild’s book has been lauded by Noam Chomsky, New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, and countless others.
An African American and Latinx History of the United States (ReVisioning American History)
The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race
A People’s History of the United States
In a 1998 interview, Zinn said his goal in writing the book was to inspire a “quiet revolution”. “Not a revolution in the classical sense of a seizure of power, but rather from people beginning to take power from within the institutions. In the workplace, the workers would take power to control the conditions of their lives."
Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm
Dark Times
Tears We Cannot Stop
As the country grapples with racist division at a level not seen since the 1960s, one person’s voice soars with conviction and compassion. In his 2016 New York Times op-ed piece “Death in Black and White,” Michael Eric Dyson moved a nation. Now he continues to speak out in Tears We Cannot Stop―-a provocative and deeply personal call for change. Dyson argues that if we are to make real racial progress we must face difficult truths, including being honest about how black grievance has been ignored, dismissed, or discounted.
Diminished Democracy
The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois
Geography, Race and the Malleability of Man: Karl Von Baer and the Problem of Academic Particularism in the Russian Human Sciences
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Citizen and Subject
Things That Make White People Uncomfortable
Written with award-winning sportswriter and author Dave Zirin, Things That Make White People Uncomfortable is a sports book for our times, a sports memoir and manifesto as hilarious as it is revealing.
Bennett, a defensive end for the Seattle Seahawks, has gained international recognition for his public support for the Black Lives Matter Movement and women’s rights. Bennett donates all his endorsement money and half of the proceeds from his jersey sales to fund health and education projects for poor underserved youth and minority communities, and has recently expanded his reach globally to provide STEM programming in Africa.
Dave Zirin has been called the “finest, most important writer on sports and politics in America,” by Dr. Cornel West, Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at the Harvard Divinity School. He is sports editor for The Nation and author of several titles for Haymarket Books, including his critically acclaimed book The John Carlos Story, written with 1968 Olympian John Carlos.
Emancipation Betrayed
Contrary to previous claims that African Americans made few strides toward building an effective civil rights movement during this period, Ortiz documents how black Floridians formed mutual aid organizations—secret societies, women’s clubs, labor unions, and churches-to bolster dignity and survival in the harsh climate of Florida, which had the highest lynching rate of any state in the union. African Americans called on these institutions to build a statewide movement to regain the right to vote after World War I. African American women played a decisive role in the campaign as they mobilized in the months leading up to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.
The 1920 contest culminated in the bloodiest Election Day in modern American history, when white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan violently, and with state sanction, prevented African Americans from voting. Ortiz’s eloquent interpretation of the many ways that black Floridians fought to expand the meaning of freedom beyond formal equality and his broader consideration of how people resist oppression and create new social movements illuminate a strategic era of United States history and reveal how the legacy of legal segregation continues to play itself out to this day.
Invisible Man
The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government
A Basic Call to Consciousness: The Hau De No Saw Nee Address to the Western World
Democracy in America
The Port Huron Statement
America’s Racial Karma: An Invitation to Heal
African Studies in Social Movements and Democracy
La Seconde Revolution Tranquille
Related Content
- Link: How Colonial Violence Came Home: The Ugly Truth of the First World War
- Link: Prison Radio
- Music: Strange Fruit
- Link: Frederick Douglass Heritage
- People: Martin Luther King, Jr.