Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century
Dorothy Roberts, an acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law.
“Every time there is a census there is a different definition of race.”
-Dorothy Roberts
Source: www.blogtalkradio.com
“Harsha Walia has played a central role in building some of North America’s most innovative, diverse, and effective new movements. That this brilliant organizer and theorist has found time to share her wisdom in this book is a tremendous gift to us all.”—Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine
Undoing Border Imperialism combines academic discourse, lived experiences of displacement, and movement-based practices into an exciting new book. By reformulating immigrant rights movements within a transnational analysis of capitalism, labor exploitation, settler colonialism, state building, and racialized empire, it provides the alternative conceptual frameworks of border imperialism and decolonization. Drawing on the author’s experiences in No One Is Illegal, this work offers relevant insights for all social movement organizers on effective strategies to overcome the barriers and borders within movements in order to cultivate fierce, loving, and sustainable communities of resistance striving toward liberation. The author grounds the book in collective vision, with short contributions from over twenty organizers and writers from across North America.
Harsha Walia is a South Asian activist, writer, and popular educator rooted in emancipatory movements and communities for over a decade.”
See on www.amazon.com
See on Scoop.it – Community Village Daily
“The prison system as a whole isn’t working, particularly so for juvenile detention centers.
WHEN the Center for Investigative Reporting recently visited the Santa Cruz County Juvenile Hall — widely considered one of the best juvenile detention centers in the country — they found remarkably prison-like conditions, ranging from the bare, concrete walls to the use of solitary confinement as a method of disciplining youth. There are currently no federal or state laws that regulate the use of solitary confinement for juvenile offenders, despite overwhelming evidence of its harmful effects. But the abuses don’t stop there. A 2012 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a division of the Department of Justice, determined that youth held in adult prison facilities suffered less instances of sexual violence than their peers in juvenile facilities. And in some facilities, the rate of juvenile recidivism is over 80 percent, meaning that the bulk of these young people will eventually add to the burgeoning prison population.
There seems to be a consensus that the prison system as a whole isn’t working, and this is particularly true when it comes to juvenile detention. The United States incarcerates more young people under the age of 18 than any other industrialized country in the world. (By comparison, South Africa, our closest competitor, incarcerates its youth at one-fifth the rate of the United States.) Most juveniles who are sent to these facilities are from racial minorities. Many of them suffer abuses in prison that are heinous for adults and potentially ruinous for youth — solitary confinement, rape, repeated physical abuse, deprivation of sunlight, insufficient food and affection. Perhaps worst of all, children leave these facilities with additional traumas under their belts and no promise that their outside lives will improve.
And yet, despite protestations from all political parties that our society values children, despite the proliferation of New York Times bestsellers on how to raise children, despite growing scientific evidence that the confinement of adolescents may profoundly stunt their brain development, despite the fact that juvenile crime is steadily declining, change has not followed. Why?
In her new book, Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison, Nell Bernstein, a journalist whose previous book addresses the problems of children of the incarcerated, attempts to explore this elusive question using a mix of reporting, research, and anecdotal history. Bernstein’s basic premise, which I agree with, is that it’s mostly a matter of culture, an elusive but necessary concept. She argues that young adults and children require positive relationships with adults in order to rehabilitate, but prison, which isolates and punishes violators for transgressions, is based on just the opposite assumption. Prisons assume that those who commit crimes must be isolated from the community, both to force them to think about their immoral acts and to protect the rest of the law-abiding community. This is the direct opposite of what we should be doing for children in prison: educating them, providing them life skills and positive role models, and supporting their mental and physical development in a positive way.
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See on lareviewofbooks.org
“In their newly released book, The Triple Package, Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld propose that some groups are naturally better than the others due to certain cultural traits they possess. I was on HuffPost Live to discuss the book, and to debunk its central notions, which you can watch here:”
Prerna Lal’s article covers:
See on prernalal.com
In “The Warmth of Other Suns,” Isabel Wilkerson documents the sweeping 55-year-long migration of black Americans from the South.
The awesome book documents the migration of African Americans from the South of the U.S. to the North and West of the U.S. once they had the freedom to move after slavery was abolished.
See on www.nytimes.com
Explores what it means to be undocumented in a legal, social, economic and historical context
Immigrant rights activist Aviva Chomsky shows how “illegality” and “undocumentedness” are concepts that were created to exclude and exploit. With a focus on US policy, she probes how and why people, especially Mexican and Central Americans, have been assigned this status—and to what ends. Blending history with human drama, Chomsky explores what it means to be undocumented in a legal, social, economic, and historical context. She also unmasks how undocumented people live—how they work, what social services they’re eligible for, and how being undocumented affects the lives of children and families. Undocumented turns a fresh lens onto one of today’s most pressing debates.
See on www.amazon.com
“For a nation that often optimistically claims to be post-racial, we are still mired in the practices of racial inequality that plays out in law, policy, and in our local communities.
One of two explanations is often given for this persistent phenomenon: On the one hand, we might be hypocritical saying one thing, and doing or believing another; on the other, it might have little to do with us individually but rather be inherent to the structure of American society.
More Beautiful and More Terrible compels us to think beyond this insufficient dichotomy in order to see how racial inequality is perpetuated. Imani Perry asserts that the U.S. is in a new and distinct phase of racism that is post-intentional neither based on the intentional discrimination of the past, nor drawing upon biological concepts of race.
Drawing upon the insights and tools of critical race theory social policy, law, sociology and cultural studies, she demonstrates how post intentional racism works and maintains that it cannot be addressed solely through the kinds of structural solutions of the Left or the values arguments of the Right. Rather, the author identifies a place in the middle space of righteous hope and articulates a notion of ethics and human agency that will allow us to expand and amplify that hope.
To paraphrase James Baldwin, when talking about race, it is both more terrible than most think, but also more beautiful than most can imagine, with limitless and open-ended possibility. Perry leads readers down the path of imagining the possible and points to the way forward.”
Tim Wise worked with this author (Professor Imani Perry Ph.D.,J.D.) in his movie ‘White Like Me‘
‘More Beautiful and More Terrible’ has 5 out of 5 stars and glowing reviews.
I’m looking forward to this breakdown of “post-intentional’ racism.
It seems like the idea goes in conjunction with Michelle Alexander’s book ‘The New Jim Crow’. Where Alexander explains that even though the laws behind the war on drugs do not mention race, the effects are that with limited budgets and resources (and subconscious racism?), police forces primarily focus their war on Black and Brown communities, even through white people use illegal drugs as much or more than Black and Brown communities.
And because you can’t have a war on an inanimate object, the war is waged on Black and Brown people and on Black and Brown communities.
See on www.amazon.com
Historians of the Modern Civil Rights Movement of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s naturally tend to focus on the movement’s activism and the variety of forms it took. White segregationists receive much…
See on andrewpegoda.com
“Jonathan Manalo, the man who took the pictures of the back of George Zimmerman’s head, Trayvon’s body, and Zimmerman’s tactical flashlight, interviewed with Joy-Ann Reid, The Grio…”
