Ties That Bind: A History of Intersectionality
591136
Previous histories have painted Native Americans as passive victims whose only interactions with U.S. citizens were negative and interactions with African Americans were nonexistent. In Ties That Bind, Tiya Miles challenged these traditional views by discussing the relationships between these two groups. Through the lives of the Shoeboots family, a mixed household, where Cherokee Shoe Boots was the patriarch who married first a white woman captive and then an African American slave named Doll.

Miles used the Shoeboots familys experiences to illustrate the larger interactions between Native Americans, whites, and African Americans in the nineteenth century. Her sources reflected this attempt to intersect race, gender, and legal status. Miles analyzed local newspapers, census records, and court documents to piece together a specific story of the Shoeboots family. She then researched primary and secondary to both fill in the gaps of the Shoeboot legacy and to discuss the larger world of the U.S. South and the interactions between the different races and genders. For instance, Miles put forth the novel, Beloved, to discuss the experience of female slaves as a mirror to what wife, mother, and slave Doll must have felt.

Miles made a convincing claim that the traditional history of the interactions between Native Americans, whites, and African Americans should be challenged and even rethought. The intersections of these different races and genders through the lens of the Shoeboots family revealed that all groups were not isolated in this new, interconnected nation.
4495593
Culling the Masses is a ground-breaking contribution to comparative immigration scholarship. It sheds light on what criteria were used to select immigrants in the entirety of the Americas, from Canada to Argentina, from the US to Cuba and other countries.

The often openly racist policies of exclusion and inclusion of certain immigrants are meticulously researched by the authors, as are the underlying assumptions and value judgments about certain groups, such as Asians, Roma, and others. Their analysis spans more than 200 years, revealing authentic documents from policy-making processes in a large number of countries that are the result of in-depth archival work by the authors.

Ultimately, the insights into processes of norm diffusion and the exploration on the impact of democratic and non-democratic political regimes make this book a must-read for scholars, students, and the interested public who want to learn more about how states learn to select immigrants and what are the limitations of the involved policy choices.
2868789
I enjoyed Ms Grant's book. It is a look at the history of the Black women who chose to become flight attendents in an industry which up until that time did not hire women of color. Black history is my favorite reading subject and Ms Grant gives us background on the obstacles these first young black women encountered and how they overcame their exclusion in the airline industry. I believe it was written with relevance to how being among the first to break down the barriors of unfair and unequal employment was a major accomplishment for civil rights. And it's something most generations can relate to. There were things I learned about the history of this occupation and some of the political participants who were instrumental in making it possible. The things that your elected officials were supose to do and did. Yes, Ms. Grant gave us a way to learn how it really was for the First Black Flight Attendents!
1391343
Guyatt brilliantly traces the surface evolution of racism as our cultural and political ancestors struggled to integrate their belief in human equality with their emotional inability to accept equality with Africans and Indigenous Americans. His scholarship is impressive. The reader is left with a hunger for going deeper to touch the social psychological dynamics that erupted on to this surface history.
3149363
I am fortunate to have picked up this book at a local feminist bookstore. This book taught me an abundant amount of information regarding the complex connections between reproduction, gender, and race in the United States. Starting with slavery, the author takes the reader all the way through to the present. Unfortunetly not much has changed since then. Society continues to control the reproduction of black women in order to keep the status quo of white male power structures alive and well. The most difficult chapter for me concerned the eugenics movement and forced sterilization. I knew this occurred but was not aware of how systematic it was. Who knows if doctors really stopped sterilizing black women without their consent in the 1970's as the author stated? I wouldn't be surprized if this practice continues. I had to have a couple drinks to process that chapter.
No longer can I hide behind ignorance of these events.
1378632
In this collection of essays, Laurie Penny describes how sexism, racism, heterosexism and neoliberalism fit together into a system of control and dehumanization that stifles everyone in it, even the ones who appear to be winning. Using specific examples from her own life, she filters specific social phenomena through a feminist lens that exposes little-discussed truths about masculinity, femininity, domesticity, love, monogamy, misogyny and money, among other things. Her style is lyrical, indirect, complex, and energetic, which makes the book exhilarating but somewhat exhausting. The best parts clearly depict partriarchy and sexism as methods of social control (of everyone, not just women) in service of society-as-business-enterprise-for-an-elite-few. As she says in the beginning, her aim is not to help us figure out how to adapt to this state of affairs. Instead, she exposes the lies and myths, and allows the reader to think about what other stories and social structures might be more life-giving.
4497493
Naim Akbar, Bebe Moore Campbell and John Henrik Clarke contributed to this group of essays and WOW! Some of the opinions may be a bit outdated, such as colorism, and stereotyping blacks as poor. But this book really analyzes many of hte struggle of the nucleus of the western model of the Black-American family. I did not see many examples of success through fictive kinships and applying the "it takes a village" African proverb. But I still think that they address the emasculation of black men through employment as a big root of many low income relationship problems. However, in 2017, we have more lower middle class to middle class black families and I think we are seeing better relationship and family outcomes.

So it would be great to have a book end to this called a Breakthrough in Black Sexual Politics (2017)
4826730
I highly recommend this book for any sociologist and any individual interested in inequality. Lobao, Hooks, and Tickamyer present a well-written, thought-provoking book that helps highlight an area sorely in need of scholarly attention--spatial inequality.
1814010
This book covers several generations of women. The beginning focuses on Eva. She is working with a group of other women during WWII. She has not heard from her husband who is in the service for several years so she assumes he is dead. She does have a young son. She decides one evening to go to a dance and she meets Bill there. Bill is a black soldier who can dance. Eva is very sensitive to injustice, and this plays a part in her decision to dance with him. They go on to have a rather secret relationship, more because he is black, not because she is married.
  This book really explores race and shame and the nature of society. It also shows how time changes attitudes. I really liked this book, but the story seemed to fall off near the end a bit. I also felt the relationships were not flushed out enough to justify some of the actions of the heroines of the story.
3368079
This is an excellent book on black male/female relationships, and I will tell you why.
Currently, there is a deadlock between the males and the females.  This is both a time of The Divine Feminine, a shift in energy that begins to focus on the female, and a time of the highest amount of black woman hatred.

As a result, it is very, very difficult for the young people to come together.  They blame each other.

This book holds the secret.  It explains what went wrong and what broke in the black community to create the chaos we have today.  And if that underlying issue is fixed, then the re-building can begin.
1223397
Danuser's book offers a unique insight into the varying responses to and opinions of today's interracial couples. Through a series of poignant and candid interviews with a diversity of individuals, we learn that although the freedom to decide who to love truly exists within the confines of these relationships, the reactions of family, friends, and society in general, often influence the level of freedom that these couples actually experience in their daily lives. As a reader, I felt valued to be given these qualified testimonies with an opportunity to draw my own conclusions. A good read and very thought-provoking!
3596604
In this collection of works, Westra and Wenz present some of the shocking realities of enviromental racism in today's global environment and force the reader to explore the existence of environmental racism, even in our own back yards. Further, this collection forces the reader to examine the fundamental moral issues behind the prinicpal of enviromental racism.
The examples given expose large corporations and how these big businesses exploit poor minority groups and the neighbourhoods in which they live.
An excellent read about the moral and ethical issues of global justice.
3027017
Admirable example of ethnographic methods to reveal the critical participation of African Americans in the labor movement.  Needleman provides new evidence that black leaders were instrumental in breaking down barriers of racial discrimination.  In this work, Needleman deftly examines how African Americans took on powerful labor leaders and built autonomous African American organizations to encourage desegregation and the development of inter-racial alliances.  The writer is clearly among the leading ethnographers in the field, and this book makes a solid contribution to understanding the movement for racial justice in America.  Highly recommended.
1700440
Recommended for those interested in social justice and oppression, especially of Native peoples in Caribbean, Mexico,, and USA. Fascinating explanation of institutions of enslavement.  Well-written, engaging, but scholarly approach to heartbreaking topic.  Each chapter is like a teaser for another, in-depth book on a particular embodiment of enslaved peoples. Book leaves the mind full of big picture ruminations on this topic. I highly recommend.
676145
This is an esoteric scholarly work examining the forces and motivations shaping the lives of both black and white people in general from before the Civil War to the early 20th century. The author's personal anecdotes are combined with rhetorical arguments to illustrate a series of patterns throughout American history. It describes multiple efforts to direct race relations over the years and their consequences, both intentional and accidental. Many of the traits ascribed to black people as character flaws are better understood as the history behind these behaviors comes to light. For instance, the myth of black fathers abandoning their women and children in droves can be traced to the practice of separating families routinely under slavery, making lifelong marriage an impossible dream. The school to prison pipeline can be seen as an extension of the efforts to re-enslave black people under reconstruction by trapping them as sharecroppers or imprisoning them for free labor. When a person is able to keep no fruits of their own labors, of course they don't want to work very hard, it's like communism without the veneer of equality among comrades. This is an excellent introduction to the issues that continue to influence race relations today.
4968157
An excellent look at the ways that religious beliefs have shaped the legal structures of race and interracial marriage in US history. Chapter on Loving v. Virginia is particularly helpful.
4018217
A marvelous read that goes well into the sexological depths of cross dressing. It resists a disease model approach discussion of gender variance and gives a more interdisciplinary account. Since the authors have been providing great contributions to the field of transgender studies for so long, they are easily able to provide historical analyses of cross dressing, sex and gender that are rivetting.
This is but one of the amazing texts in their treasure trove. It can easily be read by both scholars and a general reader since it is so accessible and well written.