This discussion of the complicated and often heated adjustments blacks must make to survive and prosper in any white-dominated society advocates personal responsibility and the need for change within black families and black culture, as well as the governmental and societal changes needed to enable blacks and whites to live and work productively together.
'This book rewarded me with dark, dry chuckles on every page' Reni Eddo-Lodge 'Hilarious . . . This original approach to discussing race is funny, intellectual and timely' Independent 'The work of a true mastermind' Benjamin Zephaniah I learned early on that, for me as a black professional, to rise through the ranks and really attain power, I needed to adopt the most ruthless of mindsets possible: the mindset of the White Man who would tear your cheek from your face before he even considered turning his one first.
Memories of Empire is a trilogy which explores the complex, subterranean political currents which emerged in English society during the years of postwar decolonization. Bill Schwarz shows that, through the medium of memory, the empire was to continue to possess strange afterlives long after imperial rule itself had vanished. The White Man's World, the first volume in the trilogy, explores ideas of the white man as they evolved during the time of the British Empire, from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, looking particularly at the transactions between the colonies and the home society of England. The story works back from the popular response to Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech in 1968, in which identifications with racial whiteness came to be highly charged. Driving this new racial politics, Bill Schwarz proposes, were unappeased memories of Britain's imperial past. The White Man's World surveys the founding of the so-called white colonies, looking in particular at Australia, South Africa, and Rhodesia, and argues that it was in this experience that contemporary meanings of racial whiteness first cohered. These colonial nations - 'white men's countries', as they were popularly known - embodied the conviction that the future of humankind lay in the hands of white men. The systems of thought which underwrote the ideas of the white man, and of the white man's country, worked as a form of ethnic populism, which gave life to the concept of Greater Britain. But if during the Victorian and Edwardian period the empire was largely narrated in heroic terms, in the masculine mode, by the time of decolonization in the 1960s racial whiteness had come to signify defeat and desperation, not only in the colonies but in the metropole too. Identifications with racial whiteness did not disappear in England in the moment of decolonization: they came alive again, fuelled by memories of what whiteness had once represented, recalling the empire as a lost racial utopia.
It's Tough to Be a N***** in a White Man's World By: Nat Williams It's Tough to Be a N***** in a White Man's World is about Nat Williams’ experiences as a young black man attending a 98% white public school and the effect it had on him as a young man. Nat describes the effect that growing up a young black man in a white society had on his relationship with people and society. Even though these events happened in the 70s-90s, it's still tough to be a black man in today's society. Nat hopes his readers understand how tough it is for minorities in today’s society and the effect it had on this young black male.
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An urgent primer on race and racism, from the host of the viral hit video series “Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man” “You cannot fix a problem you do not know you have.” So begins Emmanuel Acho in his essential guide to the truths Americans need to know to address the systemic racism that has recently electrified protests in all fifty states. “There is a fix,” Acho says. “But in order to access it, we’re going to have to have some uncomfortable conversations.” In Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man, Acho takes on all the questions, large and small, insensitive and taboo, many white Americans are afraid to ask—yet which all Americans need the answers to, now more than ever. With the same open-hearted generosity that has made his video series a phenomenon, Acho explains the vital core of such fraught concepts as white privilege, cultural appropriation, and “reverse racism.” In his own words, he provides a space of compassion and understanding in a discussion that can lack both. He asks only for the reader’s curiosity—but along the way, he will galvanize all of us to join the antiracist fight.
The New Scapegoats: Colored-On-Black Racism debunks the widespread and seemingly indelible myth of Africa's blind and facile complicity in the massive uprootment and enslavement of its own in the Americas between the Fifteenth and Nineteenth centuries. The author demonstrates the Transatlantic Slave Trade to have been the primary product of Western Europe's industrial revolution. Praise for Okoampa-Ahoofe's Work: "Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe's analyses always expand the frontiers of our knowledge. He challenges what is taken for granted and in the process pushes us to reflect critically on important issues of the day. In his latest work The New Scapegoats: Colored-On-Black Racism, Okoampa-Ahoofe re-visits old assumptions about the Africana world and takes to task how these tired assumptions are being re-cycled as the new paradigm for understanding Africa." -Karl Botchway, political scientist, New York City College of Technology of The City University of New York, author of Understanding 'Development' Intervention in Northern Ghana.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S TOP TEN NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK SELECTION • A BOOKLIST EDITORS' CHOICE BOOK SELECTION One doctor's passionate and profound memoir of his experience grappling with race, bias, and the unique health problems of black Americans When Damon Tweedy begins medical school,he envisions a bright future where his segregated, working-class background will become largely irrelevant. Instead, he finds that he has joined a new world where race is front and center. The recipient of a scholarship designed to increase black student enrollment, Tweedy soon meets a professor who bluntly questions whether he belongs in medical school, a moment that crystallizes the challenges he will face throughout his career. Making matters worse, in lecture after lecture the common refrain for numerous diseases resounds, "More common in blacks than in whites." Black Man in a White Coat examines the complex ways in which both black doctors and patients must navigate the difficult and often contradictory terrain of race and medicine. As Tweedy transforms from student to practicing physician, he discovers how often race influences his encounters with patients. Through their stories, he illustrates the complex social, cultural, and economic factors at the root of many health problems in the black community. These issues take on greater meaning when Tweedy is himself diagnosed with a chronic disease far more common among black people. In this powerful, moving, and deeply empathic book, Tweedy explores the challenges confronting black doctors, and the disproportionate health burdens faced by black patients, ultimately seeking a way forward to better treatment and more compassionate care.
