A hilarious and affecting essay collection about race, gender, and pop culture from celebrated stand-up comedian and WNYC podcaster Phoebe Robinson. Being a Black woman in American means contending with old prejudices and fresh absurdities. Robinson uses her trademark wit to explore examine our cultural climate and skewer our biases with humor and heart. "Being a black woman in America means contending with old prejudices and fresh absurdities every...

"Scientific research has now established that race should be understood as a social construct, not a true biological division of humanity. In Imagining Black America, Michael Wayne explores the construction and reconstruction of black America from the arrival of the first Africans in Jamestown in 1619 to Barack Obama's reelection. Races have to be imagined into existence and constantly reimagined as circumstances change, Wayne argues, and as a consequence...

"Over more than two centuries men, women, and children escaped from slavery to make the Southern wilderness their home. They hid in the mountains of Virginia and the low swamps of South Carolina; they stayed in the neighborhood or paddled their way to secluded places; they buried themselves underground or built comfortable settlements. Known as maroons, they lived on their own or set up communities in swamps or other areas where they were not likely...

"How do we balance the desire for tales of exceptional accomplishment with the need for painful doses of reality? How hard do we work to remember our past or to forget it? These are some of the questions that Jonathan Scott Holloway addresses in this exploration of race memory from the dawn of the modern civil rights era to the present. Relying on social science, documentary film, dance, popular literature, museums, memoir, and the tourism trade,...

"Black Stats-- a comprehensive guide filled with contemporary facts and figures on African Americans-- is an essential reference for anyone attempting to fathom the complex state of our nation. With fascinating and often surprising information on everything from incarceration rates, lending practices, and the arts to marriage, voting habits, and green jobs, the contextualized material in this book will better attune readers to telling trends while...

"Award-winning journalist Herb Boyd chronicles the fascinating history of Detroit through the lens of the African American experience. Offering an expansive discussion of this iconic city, Black Detroit ranges in subject from Antoine de Lamothe Cadillac's initial vision of what would become a thriving metropolis to the city's glory days as the center of American commerce; from the waves of fugitives traveling on the Underground Railroad to the advent...

"Henry Louis Gates, Jr., gives us a sumptuously illustrated, landmark book tracing African American history from the arrival of the conquistadors to the election of Barack Obama. Informed by the latest, sometimes provocative scholarship, and including more than eight hundred images--ancient maps, art, documents, photographs, cartoons, posters--Life Upon These Shores focuses on defining events, debates, and controversies, as well as the achievements...

This is the unflinching memoir of a female African American advertising executive's unprecedented and unlikely success, which began in the Mad Men era. It follows her journey from the projects of Motown-era Michigan to the skyscrapers of Madison Avenue and beyond. With marches, riots, and demonstrations as the backdrop, and rock 'n' roll as a soundtrack, this book accompanies Graves as she traverses the seismically shifting terrain of 1960s and '70s...

Making headlines when it was launched in 2015, Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley's undergraduate course "Beyonce Feminism, Rihanna Womanism" has inspired students from all walks of life. In Beyonce in Formation, Tinsley now takes her rich observations beyond the classroom, using the blockbuster album and video Lemonade as a soundtrack for vital next-millennium narratives. Woven with candid observations about her life as a feminist scholar of African studies...

""The best site for thoughtful, fierce advice about parenting from a Black perspective" -Ebony For almost a decade, national parenting expert and bestselling author Denene Millner has published thought-provoking, insightful, sometimes wickedly funny commentary about motherhood on her critically acclaimed website MyBrownBaby,com. The site, hailed as a "must-read" by the New York Times, speaks to the experiences, joys, fears, sorrows, and triumphs of...