Ohio State Newark: African American and African Studies 2081, African American History from 1877: Books & E-Books

From "black girl magic" to Black Lives Matter, the second decade of the 21st century is defined by black feminist politics. Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Trump is a definitive investigation of the mainstreaming of black feminist politics in the 21st century. Following on the success of Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton and Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Obama, this volume incorporates the black women leaders of Black Lives Matter; contemporary black feminist political stars like Rep. Maxine Waters and Senator Kamala Harris; and the transformative influence of black feminist political strategy and principles in mainstream U.S. politics, especially in the 2016 U.S. election. The text also deepens earlier editions' consideration of sexuality and gender identity in black feminist politics and explores the role of digital organizing and social media in setting the terms of contemporary political struggles. A must-read for scholars in Political Science, American Studies, Africana Studies, History, and Gender/Feminist/Women's Studies, Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Trump also breaks down the complexity of contemporary politics for an everyday reader eager to understand how black women have been defining leadership and politics since the mid-century.

The United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other industrialized nation in the world--about 1 in 100 adults, or more than 2 million people--while national spending on prisons has catapulted 400 percent. Given the vast racial disparities in incarceration, the prison system also reinforces race and class divisions. How and why did we become the world's leading jailer? And what can we, as a society, do about it? Reframing the story of mass incarceration, Heather Schoenfeld illustrates how the unfinished task of full equality for African Americans led to a series of policy choices that expanded the government's power to punish, even as they were designed to protect individuals from arbitrary state violence. Examining civil rights protests, prison condition lawsuits, sentencing reforms, the War on Drugs, and the rise of conservative Tea Party politics, Schoenfeld explains why politicians veered from skepticism of prisons to an embrace of incarceration as the appropriate response to crime. To reduce the number of people behind bars, Schoenfeld argues that we must transform the political incentives for imprisonment and develop a new ideological basis for punishment.

This book utilizes personal narratives and survey data from over 2,100 respondents to explore the diversity of experiences across Black LGBT communities within the United States. The authors document and celebrate many of the everyday strengths and strategies employed by this extraordinary population to navigate and negotiate their daily lives.

No issue in American higher education is more contentious than that of race-based affirmative action. In light of the ongoing debate around the topic and recent Supreme Court rulings, affirmative action policy may be facing further changes. As an alternative to race-based affirmative action, some analysts suggest affirmative action policies based on class. In Race, Class, and Affirmative Action, sociologist Sigal Alon studies the race-based affirmative action policies in the United States. and the class-based affirmative action policies in Israel. Alon evaluates how these different policies foster campus diversity and socioeconomic mobility by comparing the Israeli policy with a simulated model of race-based affirmative action and the U.S. policy with a simulated model of class-based affirmative action. Alon finds that affirmative action at elite institutions in both countries is a key vehicle of mobility for disenfranchised students, whether they are racial and ethnic minorities or socioeconomically disadvantaged. Affirmative action improves their academic success and graduation rates and leads to better labor market outcomes. The beneficiaries of affirmative action in both countries thrive at elite colleges and in selective fields of study. As Alon demonstrates, they would not be better off attending less selective colleges instead. Alon finds that Israel's class-based affirmative action programs have provided much-needed entry slots at the elite universities to students from the geographic periphery, from high-poverty high schools, and from poor families. However, this approach has not generated as much ethnic diversity as a race-based policy would. By contrast, affirmative action policies in the United States have fostered racial and ethnic diversity at a level that cannot be matched with class-based policies. Yet, class-based policies would do a better job at boosting the socioeconomic diversity at these bastions of privilege. The findings from both countries suggest that neither race-based nor class-based models by themselves can generate broad diversity. According to Alon, the best route for promoting both racial and socioeconomic diversity is to embed the consideration of race within class-based affirmative action. Such a hybrid model would maximize the mobility benefits for both socioeconomically disadvantaged and minority students. Race, Class, and Affirmative Action moves past political talking points to offer an innovative, evidence-based perspective on the merits and feasibility of different designs of affirmative action.

A groundbreaking history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of slaves Winner of the 2015 Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians Winner of the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution--the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy. Told through intimate slave narratives, plantation records, newspapers, and the words of politicians, entrepreneurs, and escaped slaves, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history. Bloomberg View Top Ten Nonfiction Books of 2014 Daily Beast Best Nonfiction Books of 2014

What explains the well-documented racial disparities in rates of homicide and other acts of criminal violence in the United States?

Critically confronting the conventional narratives that purport to answer this question, the authors of Roots of African American Violence offer an alternative framework¿one that acknowledges the often hidden cultural diversity and within-race ethnocentrism that exists in black communities. Their provocative work, drawing insights from criminology, criminal justice, anthropology, and sociology, is a seminal step in efforts to understand the intersection of race and violence.

From The Real Housewives of Atlanta to Flavor of Love, reality shows with predominantly black casts have often been criticized for their negative representation of African American women as loud, angry, and violent. Yet even as these programs appear to be rehashing old stereotypes of black women, the critiques of them are arguably problematic in their own way, as the notion of "respectability" has historically been used to police black women's behaviors.   The first book of scholarship devoted to the issue of how black women are depicted on reality television, Real Sister offers an even-handed consideration of the genre. The book's ten contributors--black female scholars from a variety of disciplines--provide a wide range of perspectives, while considering everything from Basketball Wives to Say Yes to the Dress. As regular viewers of reality television, these scholars are able to note ways in which the genre presents positive images of black womanhood, even as they catalog a litany of stereotypes about race, class, and gender that it tends to reinforce.   Rather than simply dismissing reality television as "trash," this collection takes the genre seriously, as an important touchstone in ongoing cultural debates about what constitutes "trashiness" and "respectability." Written in an accessible style that will appeal to reality TV fans both inside and outside of academia, Real Sister thus seeks to inspire a more nuanced, thoughtful conversation about the genre's representations and their effects on the black community.