An "Indispensable" Book of The Black World Today website A fresh new look at the Black Power movement and its leaders Much has been written about the Black Power movement in the United States. Most of this work, however, tends to focus on the personalities of the movement. In We Are Not What We Seem, Roderick D. Bush takes a fresh look at Black Power and other African American social movements with a specific emphasis on the role of the urban poor in the struggle for Black rights. Bush traces the trajectory of African American social movements from the time Booker T. Washington to the present, providing an integrated discussion of class. He addresses questions crucial to any understanding of Black politics: Is the Black Power movement simply another version of the traditional American ethnic politics, or does it have wider social import? What role has the federal government played in implicitly grooming social conservatives like Louis Farrakhan to assume leadership positions as opposed to leftist, grassroots, class-oriented leaders? Bush avoids the traditional liberal and social democratic approaches in favor of a more universalistic perspective that offers new insights into the history of Black movements in the U.S.

This book addresses the need to radically transform societies plagued by racism. It places prominence on persistent racialized violence in the lives of Black Americans as influential in how Black people in the U.S. and abroad perceive themselves as Black in juxtaposition to their perceptions of White people and other People of Color. An absence of understanding of the often-masked role of violence in the lives of Black people increases the likelihood of reproducing it. The author offers a reformulation of racial identity theory to examine the construction of Manichaeism in people and societies, and how meaningful engagement that confronts the violence is vital to psychological development, though this engagement also is not without dire risks.

Postcolonial discourses on African Diaspora history and relations have traditionally focused intensely on highlighting the common experiences and links between black Africans and African Americans. This is especially true of Afrocentric scholars and supporters who use Africa to construct and validate a monolithic, racial, and culturally essentialist worldview. Publications by Afrocentric scholars such as Molefi Asante, Marimba Ani, Maulana Karenga, and the late John Henrik Clarke have emphasized the centrality of Africa to the construction of Afrocentric essentialism. In the last fifteen years, however, countervailing critical scholarship has challenged essentialist interpretations of Diaspora history. Critics such as Stephen Howe, Yaacov Shavit, and Clarence Walker have questioned and refuted the intellectual and cultural underpinnings of Afrocentric essentialist ideology. Tunde Adeleke deconstructs Afrocentric essentialism by illuminating and interrogating the problematic situation of Africa as the foundation of a racialized worldwide African Diaspora. He attempts to fill an intellectual gap by analyzing the contradictions in Afrocentric representations of the continent. These include multiple, conflicting, and ambivalent portraits of Africa; the use of the continent as a global, unifying identity for all blacks; the de-emphasizing and nullification of New World acculturation; and the ahistoristic construction of a monolithic African Diaspora worldwide.

Branches of Asanteism explores the epistemologies and research methodologies that have sprung from Mwalimu Molefi Kete Asante’s treatises on Afrocentricity. The book identifies and analyzes thirteen such epistemologies and methodologies while defining and explicating the various “branches” of Asante’s idea of Afrocentricity.

What is social reality for men in modern society? What maintains or explains this social reality? What condition might we imagine that would be better for men? How might we achieve this better condition? These are the questions Kenneth Clatterbaugh brings to seven different visions of men in modern society considered in this newly updated edition. In clear and insightful language, Clatterbaugh surveys not just conservative, liberal, and radical views of masculinity, but also the alternatives offered by the men's rights movement, spiritual growth advocates, and black and gay rights activists. Each of these is explored both as a theoretical perspective and as a social movement, and each offers distinctive responses to the questions posed.The first edition of this book was the first to survey the range of responses to feminism that men have made as well as the first to put political theory at the center of men's awareness of their own masculinity. This new edition adds chapters on recent highly-publicized movements such at the Promise Keepers, Million Man March, and the evolution of gay men's rights. Clatterbaugh treats all views with fairness and timeliness as he develops and defends a vision of men and masculinity consistent with feminist ideals and a just society.

When George M. Fredrickson published White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History, he met universal acclaim. David Brion Davis, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called it "one of the most brilliant and successful studies in comparative history ever written." The book was honored with the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, the Merle Curti Award, and a jury nomination for the Pulitzer Prize. Now comes the sequel to that acclaimed work. In Black Liberation, George Fredrickson offers a fascinating account of how blacks in the United States and South Africa came to grips with the challenge of white supremacy. He reveals a rich history--not merely of parallel developments, but of an intricate, transatlantic web of influences and cross-fertilization. He begins with early moments of hope in both countries--Reconstruction in the United States, and the liberal colonialism of British Cape Colony--when the promise of suffrage led educated black elites to fight for color-blind equality. A rising tide of racism and discrimination at the turn of the century, however, blunted their hopes and encouraged nationalist movements in both countries. Fredrickson teases out the connections between movements and nations, examining the transatlantic appeal of black religious nationalism (known as Ethiopianism), and the pan-Africanism of Du Bois and Garvey. He brings to vivid life the decades of struggle, organizing, and debate, as blacks in the United States looked to Africa for identity and South Africans looked to America for new ideas and hope. The book traces the rise of Communist influence in black movements in the two nations in the 1920s and '30s, and the adoption of Gandhian nonviolent protest after World War II. The story of India's struggle, however, was not to be repeated in either America or South Africa: in one nation, nonviolence revealed its limitations, encouraging splits in the civil rights movement; in the other, it failed, fostering an armed struggle against white supremacy. Fredrickson brings the story up through the present, exploring the divergence between African-American identity politics and the nonracialism that has triumphed in South Africa. In a career spanning thirty years, George Fredrickson has won recognition as the leading scholar of the struggle over racial domination in the United States and South Africa. In Black Liberation, he provides the essential companion volume to his award-winning White Supremacy, telling the story of how blacks fought back on both sides of the Atlantic.

A socialist scholar sheds light on the interwoven histories of racism and capitalism in the United States—with vital lessons for today’s struggle. In Black Liberation and Socialism, Ahmed Shawki underscores the need to a struggle against racism that is equally clear-eyed in its opposition to the economic and political system that supports it: capitalism. Shawki begins with a socialist perspective on the history of slavery in the United States. He then presents a sharp analysis of the country’s movements against racism—from the separatism of Marcus Garvey, to the militancy of Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party, to the eloquence of Martin Luther King Jr., and more. In the decades since the civil rights movement, many gains have been made—but there is still far to go to win genuine change. Black Liberation and Socialism is an essential primer on the history and future of the struggle against racism.