Social Science : Discrimination & Race Relations

In 1964 an Urban League survey ranked Los Angeles as the most desirable city for African Americans to live in. In 1965 the city burst into flames during one of the worst race riots in the nation's history. How the city came to such a pass--embodying both the best and worst of what urban America offered black migrants from the South--is the story told for the first time in this history of modern black Los Angeles. more...

Price: $15.95

Black is Beautiful! The words were the exuberant rallying cry of a generation of black women who threw away their straightening combs and adopted a proud new style they called the Afro. The Afro, as worn most famously by Angela Davis, became a veritable icon of the Sixties. Although the new beauty standards seemed to arise overnight, they actually had deep roots within black communities. Tracing her story to 1891, when a black newspaper launched a contest to find the most beautiful woman of the race, Maxine Leeds Craig documents how black women have negotiated the intersection of race, class, politics, and personal appearance in their lives. Craig takes the reader from beauty parlors in the 1940s to late night political meetings in the 1960s to demonstrate the powerful influence of social movements on the experience of daily life. With sources ranging from oral histories of Civil Rights and Black Power Movement activists and men and women who stood on the sidelines to black popular magazines and the black movement press, Ain't I a Beauty Queen? will fascinate those interested in beauty culture, gender, class, and the dynamics of race and social movements.  more...

Price: $25.00

"Part true-crime thriller, part social history, and an absolute 'page-turner'" Chicago Tribune. In the fall of 1931, Thalia Massie, the bored, aristocratic wife of a young naval officer stationed in Honolulu, accused six nonwhite islanders of gang rape. The ensuing trial let loose a storm of racial and sexual hysteria, but the case against the suspects was scant and the trial ended in a hung jury. Outraged, Thalia’s socialite mother arranged the kidnapping and murder of one of the suspects. In the spectacularly publicized trial that followed, Clarence Darrow came to Hawai’i to defend Thalia’s mother, a sorry epitaph to a noble career. It is one of the most sensational criminal cases in American History, Stannard has rendered more than a lurid tale. One hundred and fifty years of oppression came to a head in those sweltering courtrooms. In the face of overwhelming intimidation from a cabal of corrupt military leaders and businessmen, various people involved with the case—the judge, the defense team, the jurors, a newspaper editor, and the accused themselves—refused to be cowed. Their moral courage united the disparate elements of the non-white community and galvanized Hawai’i’s rapid transformation from an oppressive white-run oligarchy to the harmonic, multicultural American state it became. Honor Killing is a great true crime story worthy of Dominick Dunne—both a sensational read and an important work of social history. more...

Price: $16.00

THE IRREVERENT, EYE-OPENING, AND HILARIOUS BOOK THAT DARES TO ASK... Why do so many high-profile black men date and marry the most ordinary white women?. Why do so many other black men desire and covet the company of white women?. And why does this subject deeply touch so many people of both races?. Are these provocative questions matters of love, sex, revenge, power, or politics? All of the above, asserts Rajen Persaud in this illuminating, no-holds-barred book that will have you laughing with recognition while fundamentally changing the way you see just about everything -- from sex and marriage to your own gender and race in all its foibles, pretensions, and ultimate possibilities. more...

Price: $15.00

Judy offers an alternative interpretation of literacy that challenges traditional Enlightenment discourse’s claim that literacy and reason are the privileged properties of Western culture. Judy argues, on the basis of his readings of autobiographical African-American Arabic slave narratives, that through the production of the Arabic text, the African slave already had all the elements that the West attributes to “reason” before his original introduction to Western culture—a literacy that already mediated between Africa and Europe. more...

Price: $72.00