"Cultural criticism and pop culture history intertwine to dissect how hip hop has sidelined Black women's identity and emotional well-being"-- A "ride-or-die chick" is a woman who holds down her family and her community. She does anything for her family friends and significant other, even at the cost of her own well-being. Hubbard argues that this way of life has left Black women exhausted, overworked, overlooked, and feeling depleted. She urges...

"An acclaimed journalist travels the globe to solve the mystery of her ancestry, confronting the question at the heart of the American experience of immigration, race, and identity: Who are my people? Alex Wagner has always been fascinated by stories of exile and migration. Her father's ancestors immigrated to the United States from Ireland and Luxembourg. Her mother fled Rangoon in the 1960s, escaping Burma's military dictatorship. In her professional...

"At home and in government, contemporary America finds itself riven by a culture war in which aggression and defensiveness alike are on the rise. It is not alone. In such partisan conditions, how can humans best approach one another across our differences? Taking the study of whiteness and white supremacy as a guiding light, Claudia Rankine explores a series of real encounters with friends and strangers - each disrupting the false comfort of spaces...

Sixty years ago, the "projects" were considered to be the most desirable housing stock for low-to-low-middle-income Americans. Today, this same housing has become stigmatized, beset by financial and social problems, and may be phased out. This film, made in the 1980s, remains the classic portrait of a government program besieged on all sides. In two 30-minute sections, the film presents a concise social history of a housing movement and its opponents,...

"A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country's history. Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in...

The story of how young Arab and Muslim Americans are forging lives for themselves in a country that often mistakes them for the enemy. Just over a century ago, W.E.B. Du Bois posed a probing question in his classic The Souls of Black Folk: How does it feel to be a problem? Now, Moustafa Bayoumi asks the same about America's new "problem"--Arab- and Muslim-Americans. Bayoumi takes readers into the lives of seven twenty-somethings living in Brooklyn,...

For years, acclaimed author and speaker Tim Wise has been electrifying audiences on the college lecture circuit with his deeply personal take on whiteness and white privilege. In this spellbinding lecture, the author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son offers a unique, inside-out view of race and racism in America. Expertly overcoming the defensiveness that often surrounds these issues, Wise provides a non-confrontational explanation...

This award-winning documentary links everyday black men from various socioeconomic backgrounds with some of America's most prominent academics, social critics, and authors to provide an engaging, candid dialogue on black masculine identity in American culture. Featuring interviews with bell hooks, Michael Eric Dyson, John Henrick Clarke, Dr. Alvin Poussaint, MC Hammer, and others.

"The story of Gail Lukasik's mother's passing, Gail's struggle with the shame of her mother's choice, and her subsequent journey of self-discovery and redemption"--Amazon.com.

"The astonishing journey of a bright, utterly displaced boy, from the short-lived African nation of Biafra, to Jamaica, to the harshest streets of Los Angeles--a fierce and funny memoir that adds fascinating depth to the coming-to-America story"--