Featured Book: So You Want to Talk about Race
Author: Ijeoma Oluo
Published: January 16, 2018
ISBN: 1580056776
ISBN13: 9781580056779
Pages: 248
“In this breakout book, Ijeoma Oluo explores the complex reality of today’s racial landscape—from white privilege and police brutality to systemic discrimination and the Black Lives Matter movement—offering straightforward clarity that readers need to contribute to the dismantling of the racial divide.
In So You Want to Talk About Race, Editor at Large of The Establishment Ijeoma Oluo offers a contemporary, accessible take on the racial landscape in America, addressing head-on such issues as privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the “N” word. Perfectly positioned to bridge the gap between people of color and white Americans struggling with race complexities, Oluo answers the questions readers don’t dare ask, and explains the concepts that continue to elude everyday Americans.” – Seal Press
Age and Ageism
Enlightened Aging: Building Resilience for a Long, Active Life – UW Medicine Affiliation
Authors: Eric B. Larson, MD – UW Medicine Clinical Professor and Joan DeClaire
Published: June 9, 2017
ISBN: 1442274360
ISBN13: 9781442274365
Pages: 234
“A leading expert in the science of healthy aging, Dr. Eric B. Larson offers practical advice for growing old with resilience and foresight. More than just canned advice, Enlightened Aging proposes a path to resilience—one that’s proven to help many stave off disability until very old age. The steps on this path include pro-activity, acceptance, and building and maintaining good physical, mental, and social health
Using inspiring stories from Dr. Larson’s experiences with study participants, patients, friends, and relatives, Enlightened Aging will help readers determine what their paths can look like given their own experiences and circumstances. It informs readers of the scientific evidence behind new perspectives on aging. It inspires readers with stories of people who are approaching aging with enlightened attitudes. It offers advice and resources for readers to build their own reserves for old age. It recommends ways for readers to work with their doctors to stay as healthy as possible for their age. And it offers ideas for building better communities for our aging population. While especially relevant to the baby boom generation, this work is really for people of all ages looking for encouragement and wise counsel in order to live a long, active life.” – Rowman Littlefield
Aging: An Apprenticeship
Editor: Nan Narboe
Published: April 4 2017
ISBN: 0692753990
ISBN13: 978-0692753996
Pages: 298
“Nan Narboe’s 56 thoughtfully selected essays offer an intimate and lyrical account of aging through the decades. Authors Donald Hall, David Shields, Kate Clinton, Paulina Porizkova, Ursula K. Le Guin and others draw from their own experiences, describing a specific decade’s losses and gains to form a complex and unflinching portrait of the years from nearing fifty to ninety and beyond.
Drawing on seven decades worth of experiences, the selected essays offer a clear-eyed composition of narratives, each narrative as important as the one before it. In Paul Casey’s “Katie Couric Is No Friend of Mine,” a colonoscopy, not a red convertible, marks his initiation into mid-life. Germaine Koh, in “Thoughts on Aging,” is the oldest player in her roller derby league, confounded by her changing body. Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Dogs, Cats, and Dancers: Thoughts about Beauty” meditates on human self-consciousness–it is aging humans who find their bodies surprising. And in “Death,” Donald Hall rejects euphemisms: he’s not going to “pass away;” he’s going to die.” – Red Notebook Press
This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto against Ageism
Author: Ashton Applewhite
Published: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 0996934707
ISBN13: 9780996934701
Pages: 288
“In this lively, entertaining book, Applewhite mixes her personal experiences and opinions about growing old with an exploration of society’s attitudes about age, debunking myths and exposing ageism. Author (Cutting Loose) and blogger (Yo, Is This Ageist?) Applewhite uses an enormous number of sources, including books, interviews with experts, and research studies, to examine aging in America. She uncovers quite a few problems—“I see ageism everywhere”—and tempers them with recommendations for changing the conversation and inciting social change, suggesting ways to “push back” against, for example, antiaging rhetoric.
She covers topics of all kinds, such as isolation (a fertile environment for disease), sex and intimacy, and the role of work and how companies can better accommodate older workers. She works hard to discuss and correct common misperceptions about aging. Her humor, high-energy writing, and emphasis on positive ways to view and experience age contribute to making this a valuable resource, an agent for social change, and an enjoyable read. (BookLife) – Publishers Weekly
Being Mortal
Author: Atul Gawande
Published: October 7, 2014
ISBN: 080509512
ISBN13: 9780805095159
Pages: 282
“The recipient of numerous awards and widespread acclaim, Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal has secured a position among the bestselling medical books of all time. In the years since it was first published, Being Mortal has become a cultural touchstone that has profoundly altered the way we think about end of life care. From those confronting their own mortality or that of a loved one to medical professionals guiding patients through their final days, readers of all backgrounds have connected with Gawande’s insights on death and dignity. Being Mortal has been lauded as an invaluable tool by doctors, nurses, nursing home directors, hospice care workers, and funeral home directors. Academics and clergy have incorporated it into their lectures and sermons. Entire communities have read it together as part of One City Reads programs. It is a book that sparks conversation and leads to thoughtful reflection. It is, quite simply, a book for everyone.” – Picador
Life Gets Better: The Unexpected Pleasures of Growing Older
Author: Wendy Lustbader
Published: August 18, 2011
ISBN:1585428922
ISBN13: 9781585428922
Pages: 256
The acclaimed author of What’s Worth Knowing reveals the truth about aging: Old age often offers a richer, better, and more self-assured life than youth.“From our earliest lives, we are told that our youth will be the best time of our lives-that the energy and vitality of youth are the most important qualities a person can possess, and that everything that comes after will be a sad decline. But in reality, says Wendy Lustbader, youth is not the golden era it is often made out to be. For many, it is a time riddled with anxiety, angst, confusion, and the torture of uncertainty. Conversely, the media often feeds us a vision of growing older as a journey of defeat and diminishment. They are dead wrong. As Lustbader counters, “Life gets better as we get older, on all levels except the physical.”Life Gets Better is not a precious or whimsical tome on the quirky wisdom of the elderly. Lustbader-who has worked for several decades as a social worker specializing in aging issues-conducted firsthand research with aging and elderly people in all walks of life, and she found that they overwhelmingly spoke of the mental and emotional richness they have drawn from aging. Lustbader discovered that rather than experiencing a decline from youth, aging people were happier, more courageous, and more interested in being true to their inner selves than were young people. Life Gets Better examines through first-person stories, as well as Lustbader’s own observations, how a lifetime of lessons learned can yield one of the most personally and emotionally fruitful periods of anyone’s life. As an eighty-six-year-old who contributed her story to the book noted, “For me, being old is the reward for outlasting all the big and little problems that happen to all of us along life’s pathway.”The collected stories in Life Gets Better provide a hopeful corrective to the fear of aging aggressively instilled in us by the media. Don’t dread the future: The best years of our lives just may be ahead.” – Penguin Random House
Citizenship Status
From Immigrants to Americans: The Rise and Fall of Fitting In – UW Expert on Immigration Author: Jacob Vigdor
Published: January 16, 2010
ISBN: 1442201363
ISBN13: 978-1442201361
Pages: 232
“Immigration has always caused immense public concern, especially when the perception is that immigrants are not assimilating into society [the] way they should, or perhaps the way they once did. Americans are frustrated as they try to order food, hire laborers, or simply talk to someone they see on the street and cannot communicate with them because the person is an immigrant who has not fully adopted American culture or language. But is this truly a modern phenomenon? In From Immigrants to Americans, Jacob Vigdor offers a direct comparison of the experiences of immigrants in the United States from the mid-19th century to the present day. His conclusions are both unexpected and fascinating. Vigdor shows how the varying economic situations immigrants come from has always played an important role in their assimilation.
The English language skills of contemporary immigrants are actually quite good compared to the historical average, but those who arrive without knowing English are learning at slower rates. He continues to argue that today’s immigrants face far fewer “incentives” to assimilate and offers a set of assimilation friendly policies. From Immigrants to Americans is an important book for anyone interested in immigration, either the history or the modern implications, or who want to understand why today’s immigrants seem so different from previous generations of immigrants and how much they are the same. “– Rowman & Littlefield
LGBTQ – Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender and Queer
Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America
Author: Rachel Hope Cleves
Published: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 0199335427
ISBN13: 9780199335428
Pages: 267
“A unique and often untold story of early LGBT American history, Charity and Sylviadocuments the true history of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, two nineteenth century women who decided to live together as a married couple. Using original letters, diaries, and poetry, author and historian Rachel Hope Cleves paints an intimate picture of the 44-year union between these two women, illuminating an often darkened piece of history.”– Bustle
The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing up Gay in a Straight Man’s World
Author: Alan Downs, PhD
Published: April 25, 2006
ISBN: 0738210617
ISBN13: 9780738210612
Pages: 212
“In The Velvet Rage, psychologist Alan Downs draws on his own struggle with shame and anger, contemporary research, and stories from his patients to passionately describe the stages of a gay man’s journey out of shame and offers practical and inspired strategies to stop the cycle of avoidance and self-defeating behavior. The Velvet Rage is an empowering book that has already changed the public discourse on gay culture and helped shape the identity of an entire generation of gay men.” – Hachette Book Group
Surpassing Certainty: What my Twenties Taught Me
Author: Janet Mock
Published: June 13 2017
ISBN: 1501145797
ISBN13: 9781501145797
Pages: 256
“The journey begins a few months before her twentieth birthday. Janet Mock is adjusting to her days as a first-generation college student at the University of Hawaii and her nights as a dancer at a strip club. Finally content in her body, she vacillates between flaunting and concealing herself as she navigates dating and disclosure, sex and intimacy, and most important, letting herself be truly seen. Under the neon lights of Club Nu, Janet meets Troy, a yeoman stationed at Pearl Harbor naval base, who becomes her first. The pleasures and perils of their union serve as a backdrop for Janet’s progression through her early twenties with all the universal growing pains—falling in and out of love, living away from home, and figuring out what she wants to do with her life.
Despite her disadvantages, fueled by her dreams and inimitable drive, Janet makes her way through New York City while holding her truth close. She builds a career in the highly competitive world of magazine publishing—within the unique context of being trans, a woman, and a person of color.
Long before she became one of the world’s most respected media figures and lauded leaders for equality and justice, Janet was a girl taking the time she needed to just be—to learn how to advocate for herself before becoming an advocate for others. As you witness Janet’s slow-won success and painful failures, Surpassing Certainty will embolden you, shift the way you see others, and affirm your journey in search of self.” – Atria Books
Love Wins: The Lovers and Lawyers Who Fought the Landmark Case for Marriage Equality
Original Title: Twenty One Years to Midnight
Authors: Debbie Cenziper, Jim Obergefell
Published: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 0062456083
ISBN13: 9780062456083
Pages: 304
“The fascinating and very moving story of the lovers, lawyers, judges and activists behind the groundbreaking Supreme Court case that led to one of the most important, national civil rights victories in decades—the legalization of same-sex marriage.
In June 2015, the Supreme Court made same-sex marriage the law in all fifty states in a decision as groundbreaking as Roe v Wade and Brown v Board of Education. Through insider accounts and access to key players, this definitive account reveals the dramatic and previously unreported events behind Obergefell v Hodges and the lives at its center. This is a story of law and love—and a promise made to a dying man who wanted to know how he would be remembered.
Twenty years ago, Jim Obergefell and John Arthur fell in love in Cincinnati, Ohio, a place where gays were routinely picked up by police and fired from their jobs. In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government had to provide married gay couples all the benefits offered to straight couples. Jim and John—who was dying from ALS—flew to Maryland, where same-sex marriage was legal. But back home, Ohio refused to recognize their union, or even list Jim’s name on John’s death certificate. Then they met Al Gerhardstein, a courageous attorney who had spent nearly three decades advocating for civil rights and who now saw an opening for the cause that few others had before him.
This forceful and deeply affecting narrative—Part Erin Brockovich, part Milk, part Still Alice—chronicles how this grieving man and his lawyer, against overwhelming odds, introduced the most important gay rights case in U.S. history. It is an urgent and unforgettable account that will inspire readers for many years to come.” – HarperCollinsPublishers
Nevada
Author: Imogen Binnie
Published: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 0983242232
ISBN13: 9780983242239
Pages: 262
“Nevada is the darkly comedic story of Maria Griffiths, a young trans woman living in New York City and trying to stay true to her punk values while working retail. When she finds out her girlfriend has lied to her, the world she thought she’d carefully built for herself begins to unravel, and Maria sets out on a journey that will most certainly change her forever.” – Bookwire by Bowker
Giovanni’s Room
Author: James Baldwin
Published: September 12, 2013 (First in 1956)
ISBN: 0345806565
ISBN13: 9780345806567
Pages: 176
“James Baldwin’s groundbreaking novel about love and the fear of love is set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris.
David is a young American expatriate who has just proposed marriage to his girlfriend, Hella. While she is away on a trip, David meets a bartender named Giovanni to whom he is drawn in spite of himself. Soon the two are spending the night in Giovanni’s curtainless room, which he keeps dark to protect their privacy. But Hella’s return to Paris brings the affair to a crisis, one that rapidly spirals into tragedy. Caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality, David struggles for self-knowledge during one long, dark night—“the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life.” With sharp, probing insight, Giovanni’s Room tells an impassioned, deeply moving story that lays bare the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
Introduction by Colm Tóibín” – Penguin Random House
The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle
Author: Lillian Faderman
Published: September 8, 2005
ISBN: 1451694113
ISBN13: 9781451694116
Pages: 816
“The sweeping story of the struggle for gay and lesbian rights—based on amazing interviews with politicians, military figures, and members of the entire LGBT community who face these challenges every day: “This is the history of the gay and lesbian movement that we’ve been waiting for” (The Washington Post).
The fight for gay and lesbian civil rights—the years of outrageous injustice, the early battles, the heart-breaking defeats, and the victories beyond the dreams of the gay rights pioneers—is the most important civil rights issue of the present day. In “the most comprehensive history to date of America’s gay-rights movement” (The Economist), Lillian Faderman tells this unfinished story through the dramatic accounts of passionate struggles with sweep, depth, and feeling.
The Gay Revolution begins in the 1950s, when gays and lesbians were criminals, psychiatrists saw them as mentally ill, churches saw them as sinners, and society victimized them with hatred. Against this dark backdrop, a few brave people began to fight back, paving the way for the revolutionary changes of the 1960s and beyond. Faderman discusses the protests in the 1960s; the counter reaction of the 1970s and early eighties; the decimated but united community during the AIDS epidemic; and the current hurdles for the right to marriage equality.
“A compelling read of a little-known part of our nation’s history, and of individuals whose stories range from heart-wrenching to inspiring to enraging to motivational” (Chicago Tribune), The Gay Revolution paints a nuanced portrait of the LGBT civil rights movement. A defining account, this is the most complete and authoritative book of its kind.” – Simon & Schuster
Health
Fast Food Nation
Author: Eric Schlosser
Published: July 5, 2005
ISBN: 0060838582ISBN13: 9780060838584
Pages: 399
“FAST FOOD NATION is a groundbreaking work of investigation and cultural history that may change the way America thinks about the way it eats. To a degree both engrossing and alarming, the story of fast food is the story of postwar America. Though created by a handful of mavericks, the fast food industry has triggered the homogenization of our society. Fast food has hastened the malling of our landscape, widened the chasm between rich and poor, fueled an epidemic of obesity, and propelled the juggernaut of American cultural imperialism abroad. That’s a lengthy list of charges, but Eric Schlosser makes them stick with an artful mix of first-rate reportage, wry wit, and careful reasoning.” – Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic
Author: Randy Shilts
Published: November 27, 2017
ISBN: 0312241356
ISBN13: 9780312241353
Pages: 656
Upon its first publication twenty years ago, And The Band Played on was quickly recognized as a masterpiece of investigative reporting. An international bestseller, a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and made into a critically acclaimed movie, Shilts’ expose revealed why AIDS was allowed to spread unchecked during the early 80’s while the most trusted institutions ignored or denied the threat. One of the few true modern classics, it changed and framed how AIDS was discussed in the following years. Now republished in a special 20th Anniversary edition, And the Band Played On remains one of the essential books of our time. – MacMillan Publishers
Race and Ethnicity
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Author: Rebecca Skloot
Published: February 2, 2010
ISBN: 1400052173
ISBN13: 9781400052172
Pages: 370
“In telling Henrietta’s story, Skloot draws from primary sources and personal interviews to provide insightful narrative accounts of Henrietta’s childhood, young adulthood, diagnosis, illness, and tragic death. She also explores the birth and life of the immortal cell line HeLa, and shows how research involving HeLa has changed the landscape of medical research, leading to not only scientific and medical breakthroughs, but also new and evolving policies concerning the rights of patients and research subjects.” – Random House, Inc.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Author: Michelle Alexander
Published: January 5, 2010
ISBN: 1595581030
ISBN13: 9781595581037
“Once in a great while a book comes along that changes the way we see the world and helps to fuel a nationwide social movement. The New Jim Crow is such a book. Praised by Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier as “brave and bold,” this book directly challenges the notion that the presidency of Barack Obama signals a new era of colorblindness. With dazzling candor, legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control—relegating millions to a permanent second-class status—even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness. In the words of Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, this book is a “call to action.” – The New Press
Between the World and Me
Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Published: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 0812993543
ISBN13: 9780812993547
Pages: 152
“Touching on a range of topics, Coates’s letter to his adolescent son is a deeply ruminative and moving meditation. The impetus for the book is Coates’s attempt to situate himself within our current fraught racial climate, while grappling with our nation’s history of slavery. As the book progresses, he offers philosophical investigations into systems of slavery, police brutality, what it means to parent a child, and other topics that are of critical import for understanding identity in twenty-first-century America. However, there are ultimately no clear answers, making this text an excellent resource for discussion, reflection, and re-reading.” – Penguin Random House
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
Author: Harriet A. Washington
Published: January 9, 2007
ISBN: 0385509936
ISBN13: 9780385509930
Pages: 501
“Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge—a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It reveals how blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the twentieth century, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of blacks, and the view that they were biologically inferior, oversexed, and unfit for adult responsibilities. Shocking new details about the government’s notorious Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less-well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, prisons, and private institutions.” – Penguin Random House
Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Healthcare
Contributors: Institute of Medicine; Board on Health Sciences Policy; Committee on Understanding and Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Healthcare; Brian D. Smedley, Adrienne Y. Stith, an dAlan R. Nelson, Editors
Published: March 20, 2002
ISBN: 0309085322
ISBN13: 9780309085328
Pages: 780
“Racial and ethnic disparities in health care are known to reflect access to care and other issues that arise from differing socioeconomic conditions. There is, however, increasing evidence that even after such differences are accounted for, race and ethnicity remain significant predictors of the quality of health care received.
In Unequal Treatment, a panel of experts documents this evidence and explores how persons of color experience the health care environment. The book examines how disparities in treatment may arise in health care systems and looks at aspects of the clinical encounter that may contribute to such disparities. Patients’ and providers’ attitudes, expectations, and behavior are analyzed.
How to intervene? Unequal Treatment offers recommendations for improvements in medical care financing, allocation of care, availability of language translation, community-based care, and other arenas. The committee highlights the potential of cross-cultural education to improve provider-patient communication and offers a detailed look at how to integrate cross-cultural learning within the health professions. The book concludes with recommendations for data collection and research initiatives. Unequal Treatment will be vitally important to health care policymakers, administrators, providers, educators, and students as well as advocates for people of color.” – Institute of Medicine
Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
Author: James H. Jones
Published: December 5, 1992 (Originally in 1981)
ISBN: 0029166764
ISBN13: 9780029166765
Pages: 336
“From 1932 to 1972, the United States Public Health Service conducted a non-therapeutic experiment involving over 400 black male sharecroppers infected with syphilis. The Tuskegee Study had nothing to do with treatment. Its purpose was to trace the spontaneous evolution of the disease in order to learn how syphilis affected black subjects. The men were not told they had syphilis; they were not warned about what the disease might do to them; and, with the exception of a smattering of medication during the first few months, they were not given health care. Instead of the powerful drugs they required, they were given aspirin for their aches and pains. Health officials systematically deceived the men into believing they were patients in a government study of “bad blood”, a catch-all phrase black sharecroppers used to describe a host of illnesses. At the end of this 40 year deathwatch, more than 100 men had died from syphilis or related complications.
‘Bad Blood’ provides compelling answers to the question of how such a tragedy could have been allowed to occur. Tracing the evolution of medical ethics and the nature of decision making in bureaucracies, Jones attempted to show that the Tuskegee Study was not, in fact, an aberration, but a logical outgrowth of race relations and medical practice in the United States. Now, in this revised edition of ‘Bad Blood,’ Jones traces the tragic consequences of the Tuskegee Study over the last decade. A new introduction explains why the Tuskegee Study has become a symbol of black oppression and a metaphor for medical neglect, inspiring a prize-winning play, a Nova special, and a motion picture. A new concluding chapter shows how the black community’s wide-spread anger and distrust caused by the Tuskegee Study has hampered efforts by health officials to combat AIDS in the black community. ‘Bad Blood’ was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and was one of the ‘N.Y. Times’ 12 best books of the year.” – Simon & Schuster
What does it mean to be White? Developing White Racial Literacy
Author: Robin DiAngelo
Published: May 30, 2012
ISBN: 1433111160
ISBN13: 9781433111167
Pages: 318
“What does it mean to be white in a society that proclaims race meaningless, yet is deeply divided by race? In the face of pervasive racial inequality and segregation, most white people cannot answer that question. In the second edition of this seminal text, Robin DiAngelo reveals the factors that make this question so difficult: mis-education about what racism is; ideologies such as individualism and colorblindness; segregation; and the belief that to be complicit in racism is to be an immoral person. These factors contribute to what she terms white racial illiteracy.
Speaking as a white person to other white people, DiAngelo clearly and compellingly takes readers through an analysis of white socialization. Weaving research, analysis, stories, images, and familiar examples, she provides the framework needed to develop white racial literacy. She describes how race shapes the lives of white people, explains what makes racism so hard to see, identifies common white racial patterns, and speaks back to popular narratives that work to deny racism. Written as an accessible overview on white identity from an anti-racist framework, What Does It Mean to Be White? is an invaluable resource for members of diversity and anti-racism programs and study groups, and students of sociology, psychology, education, and other disciplines.
This revised edition features two new chapters, including one on DiAngelo’s influential concept of white fragility. Written to be accessible both within and without academia, this revised edition also features discussion questions, an index, and a glossary.” – Peter Lang
White Fragility: Why it’s so hard for White People to Talk about Racism
Author: Robin DiAngelo
ISBN: 0807047414
ISBN13: 9780807047415
Pages: 192
“In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’” (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.” – Beacon Press
Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education
Authors: Robin DiAngelo, Özlem Sensoy
Published: November 10,2011
ISBN: 080775269X
ISBN13: 9780807752692
Pages: 214
“This is the new edition of the award-winning guide to social justice education. Based on the authors’ extensive experience in a range of settings in the United States and Canada, the book addresses the most common stumbling blocks to understanding social justice. This comprehensive resource includes new features such as a chapter on intersectionality and classism; discussion of contemporary activism (Black Lives Matter, Occupy, and Idle No More); material on White Settler societies and colonialism; pedagogical supports related to “common social patterns” and “vocabulary to practice using”; and extensive updates throughout.
Accessible to students from high school through graduate school, Is Everyone Really Equal? is a detailed and engaging textbook and professional development resource presenting the key concepts in social justice education. The text includes many user-friendly features, examples, and vignettes to not just define but illustrate the concepts.” – Teachers College Press
What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation about Race in America
Author: Michael Eric Dyson
Published: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 1250199417
ISBN13: 9781250199416
Pages: 304
“In 2015 BLM activist Julius Jones confronted Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton with an urgent query: “What in your heart has changed that’s going to change the direction of this country?” “I don’t believe you just change hearts,” she protested. “I believe you change laws.”
The fraught conflict between conscience and politics – between morality and power – in addressing race hardly began with Clinton. An electrifying and traumatic encounter in the sixties crystallized these furious disputes.
In 1963 Attorney General Robert Kennedy sought out James Baldwin to explain the rage that threatened to engulf black America. Baldwin brought along some friends, including playwright Lorraine Hansberry, psychologist Kenneth Clark, and a valiant activist, Jerome Smith. It was Smith’s relentless, unfiltered fury that set Kennedy on his heels, reducing him to sullen silence.
Kennedy walked away from the nearly three-hour meeting angry – that the black folk assembled didn’t understand politics, and that they weren’t as easy to talk to as Martin Luther King. But especially that they were more interested in witness than policy. But Kennedy’s anger quickly gave way to empathy, especially for Smith. “I guess if I were in his shoes…I might feel differently about this country.” Kennedy set about changing policy – the meeting having transformed his thinking in fundamental ways.
There was more: every big argument about race that persists to this day got a hearing in that room. Smith declaring that he’d never fight for his country given its racist tendencies, and Kennedy being appalled at such lack of patriotism, tracks the disdain for black dissent in our own time. His belief that black folk were ungrateful for the Kennedys’ efforts to make things better shows up in our day as the charge that black folk wallow in the politics of ingratitude and victimhood. The contributions of black queer folk to racial progress still cause a stir. BLM has been accused of harboring a covert queer agenda. The immigrant experience, like that of Kennedy – versus the racial experience of Baldwin – is a cudgel to excoriate black folk for lacking hustle and ingenuity. The questioning of whether folk who are interracially partnered can authentically communicate black interests persists. And we grapple still with the responsibility of black intellectuals and artists to bring about social change.
What Truth Sounds Like exists at the tense intersection of the conflict between politics and prophecy – of whether we embrace political resolution or moral redemption to fix our fractured racial landscape. The future of race and democracy hang in the balance.” – MacMillan Publishers
Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America
Author: Michael Eric Dyson
Published: January 17, 2017
ISBN: 1250135990
ISBN13: 9781250135995
Pages: 228
“Short, emotional, literary, powerful—Tears We Cannot Stop is the book that all Americans who care about the current and long-burning crisis in race relations will want to read.
As the country grapples with racist division at a level not seen since the 1960s, one man’s voice soars above the rest 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.
‘The time is at hand for reckoning with the past, recognizing the truth of the present, and moving together to redeem the nation for our future. If we don’t act now, if you don’t address race immediately, there very well may be no future.'” – MacMillan Publishers
Intersectionality of Weight and Healthcare Equity
Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight
Authors: Linda Bacon, Lucy Aphramor
Published: Sepetember 2, 2014
ISBN: 1940363195
ISBN13: 9781940363196
Pages: 232
“At last: the missing chapters on weight, health and diet! Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Leave Out, Get Wrong, or Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight is the insider’s guide not just to nutrition and our bodies, but to all that’s misunderstood about them. You may have sensed for a while that conventional health books aren’t getting the story right or are ignoring new understandings of metabolism, disease, exercise, and nutrition and the impact of inequality. But finding authoritative texts to better learn, implement, and teach these new understandings has been a challenge— until now.
Bacon & Aphramor cover the latest science on size, weight, and diet in clear, lively language rigorously supported by data. Integrating a social justice agenda, Body Respect critiques weight science, explains the fall-out of a health agenda based on thinness as the goal, and offers an alternative path to compassionate and effective health care. Using peer-reviewed evidence, case study scenarios, and an ethical rationale, the authors debunk obesity myths and outline the key processes – in our bodies, the sciences, industry, and society—affecting our diet and health as individuals and as a nation.
Body insecurity is rampant, and it doesn’t have to be. It’s time to show every body respect. Let’s toss out the discredited beliefs and false assumptions that drive our culture’s shame and distress about weight. This book will be indispensable reading for everyone seeking a clearer, more hopeful alternative.”– BenBella
Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive our Obsession with Weight – and What We Can Do about It
Author: Harriet Brown
Published: March 24, 2015
ISBN: 0738218820
ISBN13: 9780738218823
Pages: 304
“Over the past twenty-five years, our quest for thinness has morphed into a relentless obsession with weight and body image. In our culture, “fat” has become a four-letter word. Or, as Lance Armstrong said to the wife of a former teammate, “I called you crazy. I called you a bitch. But I never called you fat.” How did we get to this place where the worst insult you can hurl at someone is “fat”? Where women and girls (and increasingly men and boys) will diet, purge, overeat, undereat, and berate themselves and others, all in the name of being thin?
As a science journalist, Harriet Brown has explored this collective longing and fixation from an objective perspective; as a mother, wife, and woman with “weight issues,” she has struggled to understand it on a personal level. Now, in Body of Truth, Brown systematically unpacks what’s been offered as “truth” about weight and health.
Starting with the four biggest lies, Brown shows how research has been manipulated; how the medical profession is complicit in keeping us in the dark; how big pharma and big, empty promises equal big, big dollars; how much of what we know (or think we know) about health and weight is wrong. And how all of those affect all of us every day, whether we know it or not.
The quest for health and wellness has never been more urgent, yet most of us continue to buy into fad diets and unattainable body ideals, unaware of the damage we’re doing to ourselves. Through interviews, research, and her own experience, Brown not only gives us the real story on weight, health, and beauty, but also offers concrete suggestions for how each of us can sort through the lies and misconceptions and make peace with and for ourselves.” – Hachette Book Group
The Fat Studies Reader
Editors: Esther D. Rothblum, Sondra Solovay, Marilyn Wann
Published: November 4, 2009
ISBN: 0814776310
ISBN13: 9780814776315
Pages: 365
“We have all seen the segments on television news shows: A fat person walking on the sidewalk, her face out of frame so she can’t be identified, as some disconcerting findings about the “obesity epidemic” stalking the nation are read by a disembodied voice. And we have seen the movies—their obvious lack of large leading actors silently speaking volumes. From the government, health industry, diet industry, news media, and popular culture we hear that we should all be focused on our weight. But is this national obsession with weight and thinness good for us? Or is it just another form of prejudice—one with especially dire consequences for many already disenfranchised groups?
For decades a growing cadre of scholars has been examining the role of body weight in society, critiquing the underlying assumptions, prejudices, and effects of how people perceive and relate to fatness. This burgeoning movement, known as fat studies, includes scholars from every field, as well as activists, artists, and intellectuals. The Fat Studies Reader is a milestone achievement, bringing together fifty-three diverse voices to explore a wide range of topics related to body weight. From the historical construction of fatness to public health policy, from job discrimination to social class disparities, from chick-lit to airline seats, this collection covers it all.
Edited by two leaders in the field, The Fat Studies Reader is an invaluable resource that provides a historical overview of fat studies, an in-depth examination of the movement’s fundamental concerns, and an up-to-date look at its innovative research.”– New York University Press
Helping Patients Outsmart Overeating: Psychological Strategies for Doctors & Healthcare Providers
Authors: Karen R. Koenig, Paige O’Mahoney
Published: January 12, 2017
ISBN: 1442266627
ISBN13: 9781442266629
Pages: 260
“Helping Patients Outsmart Overeating, written by an eating disorder therapist and a physician, offers a new paradigm for doctors and health care providers who treat patients with eating and weight concerns. It describes how both parties are frustrated by weight-loss plans and programs that fail in the long term, and presents a science-based explanation for why diets fail and how they, in fact, may adversely impact patients’ mental and physical health. The authors illustrate how providers can truly help patients by using empathy, compassion, and motivational interviewing. They explain how helping patients strengthen skills related to self-awareness, emotional management, stress reduction, appetite attunement, perseverance and effective self-care can improve self-efficacy and support sustained motivation in improving health and wellness promoting behaviors. The issue of weight stigma is addressed, along with how professionals’ view of their own eating and weight affects the patient-provider relationship. This book introduces clinicians to tools from eating and success psychology, Intuitive Eating, Lifestyle Medicine, and Health and Wellness Coaching, within a weight-inclusive paradigm. It also details a collaborative model for working with ancillary disciplines to give patients and providers the comprehensive support needed for lasting success.” – Rowman & Littlefield
Your Child’s Weight: Helping Without Harming
Author: Ellyn Satter
Published: August 5, 2005
ISBN: 0967118913
ISBN13: 9780967118918
Pages: 472
“Despite all the concern about child obesity, parents remain unconvinced that their overweight child is – well – overweight. Early intervention is good, but too often it takes the form of food restriction, which turns parents into food police, children into food sneaks, siblings into spying tattletales, and makes everyone miserable. Feeding expert Ellyn Satter sets the misery aside and demonstrates that child obesity can be prevented and even treated from birth for all children by emphasizing the how rather than the what of feeding. Your Child’s Weight belongs in any medical, public service, educational, or informational setting that concerns itself with prevention and treatment of child obesity.” – Kelcy Press
