Books and Ebooks
Caste by
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * "An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far."--Dwight Garner, The New York Times The Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions. #1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, O: The Oprah Magazine, NPR, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, New York Post, The New York Public Library, Fortune, Smithsonian Magazine, Marie Claire, Slate, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews Winner of the Carl Sandberg Literary Award * Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize * National Book Award Longlist * National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist * Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalist * PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist * PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Longlist * Kirkus Prize Finalist "As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power--which groups have it and which do not." In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched, and beautifully written narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people--including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball's Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others--she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their outcasting of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity. Original and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.
Call Number: 305.5122 W681 2020ISBN: 9780593230251
Critical Ethnic Studies by
Building on the intellectual and political momentum that established the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, this Reader inaugurates a radical response to the appropriations of liberal multiculturalism while building on the possibilities enlivened by the historical work of Ethnic Studies. It does not attempt to circumscribe the boundaries of Critical Ethnic Studies; rather, it offers a space to promote open dialogue, discussion, and debate regarding the field's expansive, politically complex, and intellectually rich concerns. Covering a wide range of topics, from multiculturalism, the neoliberal university, and the exploitation of bodies to empire, the militarized security state, and decolonialism, these twenty-five essays call attention to the urgency of articulating a Critical Ethnic Studies for the twenty-first century.
Call Number: 305.80072 C9345 2016ISBN: 9780822361084
America for Americans by
This definitive history of American xenophobia is "essential reading for anyone who wants to build a more inclusive society" (Ibram X. Kendi, New York Times-bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist) The United States is known as a nation of immigrants. But it is also a nation of xenophobia. In America for Americans, Erika Lee shows that an irrational fear, hatred, and hostility toward immigrants has been a defining feature of our nation from the colonial era to the Trump era. Benjamin Franklin ridiculed Germans for their "strange and foreign ways." Americans' anxiety over Irish Catholics turned xenophobia into a national political movement. Chinese immigrants were excluded, Japanese incarcerated, and Mexicans deported. Today, Americans fear Muslims, Latinos, and the so-called browning of America. Forcing us to confront this history, Lee explains how xenophobia works, why it has endured, and how it threatens America. Now updated with an afterword reflecting on how the coronavirus pandemic turbocharged xenophobia, America for Americans is an urgent spur to action for any concerned citizen.
Call Number: 305.80097 L4778 2021ISBN: 9781541672611
Racial Formation in the United States by
Twenty years since the publication of the Second Edition and more than thirty years since the publication of the original book, Racial Formation in the United States now arrives with each chapter radically revised and rewritten by authors Michael Omi and Howard Winant, but the overall purpose and vision of this classic remains the same: Omi and Winant provide an account of how concepts of race are created and transformed, how they become the focus of political conflict, and how they come to shape and permeate both identities and institutions. The steady journey of the U.S. toward a majority nonwhite population, the ongoing evisceration of the political legacy of the early post-World War II civil rights movement, the initiation of the 'war on terror' with its attendant Islamophobia, the rise of a mass immigrants rights movement, the formulation of race/class/gender 'intersectionality' theories, and the election and reelection of a black President of the United States are some of the many new racial conditions Racial Formation now covers.
Call Number: 305.80097 O55 2014ISBN: 9780415520980
An African American and Latinx History of the United States by
An intersectional history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil rights Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the "Global South" was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar and activist Paul Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely taught formulations like "manifest destiny" and "Jacksonian democracy," and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms US history into one of the working class organizing against imperialism. Drawing on rich narratives and primary source documents, Ortiz links racial segregation in the Southwest and the rise and violent fall of a powerful tradition of Mexican labor organizing in the twentieth century, to May 1, 2006, known as International Workers' Day, when migrant laborers-Chicana/os, Afrocubanos, and immigrants from every continent on earth-united in resistance on the first "Day Without Immigrants." As African American civil rights activists fought Jim Crow laws and Mexican labor organizers warred against the suffocating grip of capitalism, Black and Spanish-language newspapers, abolitionists, and Latin American revolutionaries coalesced around movements built between people from the United States and people from Central America and the Caribbean. In stark contrast to the resurgence of "America First" rhetoric, Black and Latinx intellectuals and organizers today have historically urged the United States to build bridges of solidarity with the nations of the Americas. Incisive and timely, this bottom-up history, told from the interconnected vantage points of Latinx and African Americans, reveals the radically different ways that people of the diaspora have addressed issues still plaguing the United States today, and it offers a way forward in the continued struggle for universal civil rights. 2018 Winner of the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award
Call Number: 305.80097 O778 2018ISBN: 9780807013106
Contemporary Asian American Activism by
In the struggles for prison abolition, global anti-imperialism, immigrant rights, affordable housing, environmental justice, fair labor, and more, twenty-first-century Asian American activists are speaking out and standing up to systems of oppression. Creating emancipatory futures requires collective action and reciprocal relationships that are nurtured over time and forged through cross-racial solidarity and intergenerational connections, leading to a range of on-the-ground experiences. Bringing together grassroots organizers and scholar-activists, Contemporary Asian American Activism presents lived experiences of the fight for transformative justice and offers lessons to ensure the longevity and sustainability of organizing. In the face of imperialism, white supremacy, racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, ableism, and more, the contributors celebrate victories and assess failures, reflect on the trials of activist life, critically examine long-term movement building, and inspire continued mobilization for coming generations.
Call Number: 305.89507 C7612 2022ISBN: 9780295749808
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by
New York Times Bestseller Now part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul Peck Recipient of the American Book Award The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples' Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present. In An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: "The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them." Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples' history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.
Call Number: 970.00497 D899 2014ISBN: 9780807000403
We Are the Land by
"A Native American rejoinder to Richard White and Jesse Amble White's California Exposures."--Kirkus Reviews Rewriting the history of California as Indigenous. Before there was such a thing as "California," there were the People and the Land. Manifest Destiny, the Gold Rush, and settler colonial society drew maps, displaced Indigenous People, and reshaped the land, but they did not make California. Rather, the lives and legacies of the people native to the land shaped the creation of California. We Are the Land is the first and most comprehensive text of its kind, centering the long history of California around the lives and legacies of the Indigenous people who shaped it. Beginning with the ethnogenesis of California Indians, We Are the Land recounts the centrality of the Native presence from before European colonization through statehood--paying particularly close attention to the persistence and activism of California Indians in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The book deftly contextualizes the first encounters with Europeans, Spanish missions, Mexican secularization, the devastation of the Gold Rush and statehood, genocide, efforts to reclaim land, and the organization and activism for sovereignty that built today's casino economy. A text designed to fill the glaring need for an accessible overview of California Indian history, We Are the Land will be a core resource in a variety of classroom settings, as well as for casual readers and policymakers interested in a history that centers the native experience.
Call Number: 979.00497 A3153 2021ISBN: 9780520280496
Media
Beyond Recognition - Women Preserving Native Culture by Call Number: Streaming onlyAfter decades struggling to protect her ancestors' burial places, now engulfed by San Francisco's sprawl, a Native woman from a federally unrecognized tribe and her allies occupy a development site to prevent desecration of sacred ground. When this fails to stop the development, they vow to follow a new path: to establish the first women-led urban Indigenous land trust. Beyond Recognition tells the inspiring story of women creating opportunities to preserve Native culture and homeland in a society bent on erasing them. Through cinema verite, interviews, and stunning footage of the land, the film introduces Corrina Gould, Johnella LaRose, and Indian People Organizing for Change as they embark on an incredible journey to transform the way we see cities. The film invites viewers to examine their own relationship to place, revealing histories that have been buried by shifting landscapes.. Beyond Recognition points to the intersection of human rights, women's rights, and environmental protection, spotlighting a California story that has worldwide resonance.
Exterminate All the Brutes by Call Number: Streaming onlyExterminate All the Brutes is an eye-opening journey through time, offering an incisive look at the history of European colonialism in Africa and the Americas. The groundbreaking series explores the lasting impact of exploitation and genocide on society today, pushing the boundaries of traditional documentary filmmaking by weaving director Raoul Peck’s (I Am Not Your Negro) personal voyage into the darkest hours of humanity with scripted scenes starring Josh Hartnett (Pearl Harbor). Across four episodes, Peck deconstructs the making and masking of history, digs deep into the ideology of white supremacy, and challenges audiences to rethink the very notion of how history is written.
Freedom Archives: Cointelpro 101 by Call Number: Streaming onlyCOINTELPRO 101 exposes illegal surveillance, disruption, and outright murder committed by the U.S. government in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. "Cointelpro" refers to the official FBI COunter INTELligence PROgram carried out to surveil, imprison, and eliminate leaders of social justice movements and to disrupt, divide, and destroy the movements as well.
Kumu Hina : the true meaning of aloha by Call Number: Videos - 2nd Floor ; 306.76809 K9643 2014 DVDAlso available to stream: Kumu Hina is a powerful film about the struggle to maintain Pacific Islander culture and values within the westernized society of modern day Hawai'i. It is told through the lens of an extraordinary Native Hawaiian who is both a proud and confident mahu, or transgender woman, and an honored and respected kumu, or teacher, cultural practioner, and community leader.
On strike! Ethnic Studies, 1969-1999 by Call Number: Videos - 2nd Floor ; 378.1981 O582 DVDA historical presentation of the struggle to create and maintain a Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California Berkeley. Includes interviews with participants in the 1969 demonstrations when the program was first established, with the 1999 demonstrators when the funding for the program was threatened and with Ethnic Studies faculty at U.C.B.Police On Trial by
Call Number: Streaming onlyInvestigating the Minneapolis police in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. With Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters from the Star Tribune--from the killing and protests to the trial of Derek Chauvin to the struggle for accountability.