Recommendations based on "Trans and Disabled An Anthology of Identities and Experiences"

Real Friends Talk About Race is an essential guide for those who want to have stronger interracial relationships—whether it’s with friends, colleagues, or loved ones. Having conversations about race is uncomfortable. But for progress between individuals (and our communities) to happen, we need to be able to speak openly and honestly. Podcast hosts of The Kinswomen Yseult and Hannah use their own friendship and experiences from different racial backgrounds to offer guidance on navigating these layered conversations. In Real Friends Talk About Race, the duo share their two perspectives on the ways in which culture, history, and white supremacy have prevented us from having the skills to build trust and healthy relationships across race. Yseult and Hannah approach these topics with love and candor—calling readers in (not out) to confront hard realities and their own internalized biases, while also sharing prescriptive advice, encouragement, and a sense of community. Real Friends Talk About Race is a must-read for anyone looking to listen, learn, and feel empowered to have meaningful conversations about race.

A collection of essays and speeches drawn from the past eight years from the author's nonfiction prose. -- From page 7.

An eloquent document of the civil rights movement that remains a work of profound social relevance 50 years after it was first published. A revolutionary work since its publication, Black Power exposed the depths of systemic racism in this country and provided a radical political framework for reform: true and lasting social change would only be accomplished through unity among African-Americans and their independence from the preexisting order.

A collection of The New Yorker‘s groundbreaking writing on race in America—including work by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hilton Als, Zadie Smith, and more—with a foreword by Jelani CobbThis anthology from the pages of the New Yorker provides a bold and complex portrait of Black life in America, told through stories of private triumphs and national tragedies, political vision and artistic inspiration. It reaches back across a century, with Rebecca West’s classic account of a 1947 lynching trial and James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind” (which later formed the basis of The Fire Next Time), and yet it also explores our current moment, from the classroom to the prison cell and the upheavals of what Jelani Cobb calls “the American Spring.” Bringing together reporting, profiles, memoir, and criticism from writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Elizabeth Alexander, Hilton Als, Vinson Cunningham, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Malcolm Gladwell, Jamaica Kincaid, Kelefa Sanneh, Doreen St. Félix, and others, the collection offers startling insights about this country’s relationship with race. The Matter of Black Lives reveals the weight of a singular history, and challenges us to envision the future anew.

Beyond Respectability charts the development of African American women as public intellectuals and the evolution of their thought from the end of the 1800s through the Black Power era of the 1970s. Eschewing the Great Race Man paradigm so prominent in contemporary discourse, Brittney C. Cooper looks at the far-reaching intellectual achievements of female thinkers and activists like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Barrier Williams, Pauli Murray, and Toni Cade Bambara. Cooper delves into the processes that transformed these women and others into racial leadership figures, including long-overdue discussions of their theoretical output and personal experiences. As Cooper shows, their body of work critically reshaped our understandings of race and gender discourse. It also confronted entrenched ideas of how--and who--produced racial knowledge.

An exquisite meditation on the geographies we inherit and the metaphors we inhabit, from Pulitzer Prize winner and nineteenth U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey "Searching and intimate, this impresses."--Publishers Weekly In a shotgun house in Gulfport, Mississippi, at the crossroads of Highway 49, the legendary highway of the Blues, and Jefferson Street, Natasha Trethewey learned to read and write. Before the land was a crossroads, however, it was a pasture: a farming settlement where, after the Civil War, a group of formerly enslaved women, men, and children made a new home. In this intimate and searching meditation, Trethewey revisits the geography of her childhood to trace the origins of her writing life, born of the need to create new metaphors to inhabit "so that my story would not be determined for me." She recalls the markers of history and culture that dotted the horizons of her youth: the Confederate flags proudly flown throughout Mississippi; her gradual understanding of her own identity as the child of a Black mother and a white father; and her grandmother's collages lining the hallway, offering glimpses of the world as it could be. With the clarity of a prophet and the grace of a poet, Trethewey offers up a vision of writing as reclamation: of our own lives and the stories of the vanished, forgotten, and erased.

This volume features in-depth, oral interviews with eleven incarcerated women, each of whom offers a narrative of her life and her reading experiences within prison walls. The women share powerful stories about their complex and diverse efforts to negotiate difficult relationships, exercise agency in restrictive circumstances, and find meaning and beauty in the midst of pain. Their shared emphases on abuse, poverty, addiction, and mental illness illuminate the pathways that lead many women to prison and suggest possibilities for addressing the profound social problems that fuel crime.Framing the narratives within an analytic introduction and reflective afterword, Megan Sweeney highlights the crucial intellectual work that the incarcerated women perform despite myriad restrictions on reading and education in U.S. prisons. These women use the limited reading materials available to them as sources of guidance and support and as tools for self-reflection and self-education. Through their creative engagements with books, the women learn to reframe their own life stories, situate their experiences in relation to broader social patterns, deepen their understanding of others, experiment with new ways of being, and maintain a sense of connection with their fellow citizens on both sides of the prison fence.

Edited by National Book Award finalist Ibi Zoboi, and featuring some of the most acclaimed bestselling Black authors writing for teens today—Black Enough is an essential collection of captivating stories about what it’s like to be young and Black in America. A selection of the Schomburg Center's Black Liberation Reading List.Black is...sisters navigating their relationship at summer camp in Portland, Oregon, as written by Renée Watson.Black is…three friends walking back from the community pool talking about nothing and everything, in a story by Jason Reynolds.Black is…Nic Stone’s high-class beauty dating a boy her momma would never approve of.Black is…two girls kissing in Justina Ireland’s story set in Maryland.Black is urban and rural, wealthy and poor, mixed race, immigrants, and more—because there are countless ways to be Black enough.Contributors:Justina IrelandVarian JohnsonRita Williams-GarciaDhonielle ClaytonKekla MagoonLeah HendersonTochi OnyebuchiJason ReynoldsNic StoneLiara TamaniRenée WatsonTracey BaptisteCoe BoothBrandy ColbertJay ColesIbi ZoboiLamar Giles

A profound book of essays from a celebrated master of the form.“Darkness is not empty,” writes Teju Cole in Black Paper, a book that meditates on what it means to sustain our humanity—and witness the humanity of others—in a time of darkness. One of the most celebrated essayists of his generation, Cole here plays variations on the essay form, modeling ways to attend to experience—not just to take in but to think critically about what we sense and what we don’t.Wide-ranging but thematically unified, the essays address ethical questions about what it means to be human and what it means to bear witness, recognizing how our individual present is informed by a collective past. Cole’s writings in Black Paper approach the fractured moment of our history through a constellation of interrelated concerns: confrontation with unsettling art, elegies both public and private, the defense of writing in a time of political upheaval, the role of the color black in the visual arts, the use of shadow in photography, and the links between literature and activism. Throughout, Cole gives us intriguing new ways of thinking about blackness and its numerous connotations. As he describes the carbon-copy process in his epilogue: “Writing on the top white sheet would transfer the carbon from the black paper onto the bottom white sheet. Black transported the meaning.”

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A GOODREADS CHOICE AWARDS FINALIST"Hilarious yet soul-shaking." —Black EnterpriseThe fearless comedy legend—one of the “Original Kings of Comedy”—hilariously breaks down the wisdom of white people, advice that has been killing black folks in America for four hundred years and counting.200 years ago, white people told black folks, “‘I suggest you pick the cotton if you don’t like getting whipped.” Today, it’s “comply with police orders if you don’t want to get shot.” Now comedian/activist D. L. Hughley–one the Original Kings of Comedy–confronts and remixes white people’s “advice” in this “hilarious examination of the current state of race relations in the United States” (Publishers Weekly).In America, a black man is three times more likely to be killed in encounters with police than a white guy. If only he had complied with the cop, he might be alive today, pundits say in the aftermath of the latest shooting of an unarmed black man. Or, Maybe he shouldn’t have worn that hoodie … or, moved more slowly … not been out so late … Wait, why are black people allowed to drive, anyway?This isn’t a new phenomenon. White people have been giving “advice” to black folks for as long as anyone can remember, telling them how to pick cotton, where to sit on a bus, what neighborhood to live in, when they can vote, and how to wear our pants. Despite centuries of whites’ advice, it seems black people still aren’t listening, and the results are tragic.Now, at last, activist, comedian, and New York Times bestselling author D. L. Hughley offers How Not to Get Shot, an illustrated how-to guide for black people, full of insight from white people, translated by one of the funniest black dudes on the planet. In these pages you will learn how to act, dress, speak, walk, and drive in the safest manner possible. You also will finally understand the white mind. It is a book that can save lives. Or at least laugh through the pain.Black people: Are you ready to not get shot! White people: Do you want to learn how to help the cause? Let’s go!