Both theoretical and pragmatic, this refreshingly savvy book charts a course for the Black Lives Matter generation. In the United States, both struggles against oppression and the gains made by various movements for equality have often been led by Black people. Still, though progress has regularly been fueled by radical Black efforts, liberal politics are based on ideas and practices that impede the continued progress of Black America. Building on their original essay “The Anarchism of Blackness,” Samudzi and Anderson show the centrality of anti-Blackness to the foundational violence of the United States and to the racial structures upon which it is based as a nation. Racism is not, they say, simply a product of capitalism. Rather, we must understand how anti-Blackness shaped the contours and logics of European colonialism and its many legacies, to the extent that “Blackness” and “citizenship” are exclusive categories. As Black As Resistance makes the case for a new program of self-defense and transformative politics for Black Americans, one rooted in an anarchistic framework that the authors liken to the Black experience itself. This book argues against compromise and negotiation with intolerance. It is a manifesto for everyone who is ready to continue progressing towards liberation. “As Black as Resistance is an urgently needed book . . . a call to action through an embrace of the anarchy of blackness as a recognition and a refusal of the deathly logics of liberalism and consumption. In the face of the ever expanding carceral state, levels of inequality, environmental degradation, and resurgent fascism, this book offers a map to imagining the liberated futures that we can and must and do make.” —Christina Sharpe, author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

A timely collection of deeply personal, uplifting, and powerful essays that celebrate the redemptive strength of Black joy--in the vein of Black Girls Rock, You Are Your Best Thing, and I Really Needed This Today. When Tracey M. Lewis-Giggetts wrote an essay on Black joy for The Washington Post, she had no idea just how deeply it would resonate. But the outpouring of responses affirmed her own lived experience: that Black joy is not just a weapon of resistance, it is a tool for resilience. With this book, Tracey aims to gift her community with a collection of lyrical essays about the way joy has evolved, even in the midst of trauma, in her own life. Detailing these instances of joy in the context of Black culture allows us to recognize the power of Black joy as a resource to draw upon, and to challenge the one-note narratives of Black life as solely comprised of trauma and hardship. Black Joy is a collection that will recharge you. It is the kind of book that is passed between friends and offers both challenge and comfort at the end of a long day. It is an answer for anyone who needs confirmation that they are not alone and a brave place to quiet their mind and heal their soul.

All across the US in the last few years, there has been a resurgence of Black protest against structural racism and other forms of racial injustice. Black Resistance in the Americas draws attention to this renewed energy and how this theme of resistance intersects with other communities of Black people around the world. This edited collection examines in depth stories of resistance against slavery, narratives of resistance in African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-Latin American Literature, resistance in politics, education, religion, music, dance, and film, exploring a range of new perspectives from established and emerging researchers on Black communities. The essays in this pivotal book discuss some of the mechanisms that Black communities have used to resist bondage, domination, disempowerment, inequality, and injustices resulting from their encounters with the West, from colonization to forced migration.

How the government has used the Constitution to deny black Americans their legal rights From the arrival of the first twenty slaves in Jamestown to the Howard Beach Incident of 1986, Yusef Hawkins, and Rodney King, federal law enforcement has pleaded lack of authority against white violence while endorsing surveillance of black rebels and using “constitutional” military force against them. In this groundbreaking study, constitutional scholar Mary Frances Berry analyzes the reasons why millions of African Americans whose lives have improved enormously, both socially and economically, are still at risk of police abuse and largely unprotected from bias crimes.

A historical narrative and critical analysis of higher education centred on the experiences of Black students and faculty at McGill University.

The era of the American Revolution was one of violent and unpredictable social, economic, and political change, and the dislocations of the period were most severely felt in the South. Sylvia Frey contends that the military struggle there involved a triangle--two sets of white belligerents and approximately 400,000 slaves. She reveals the dialectical relationships between slave resistance and Britain's Southern Strategy and between slave resistance and the white independence movement among Southerners, and shows how how these relationships transformed religion, law, and the economy during the postwar years.

Black and Indigenous Resistance in the Americas is an essential roadmap to understanding contemporary racial politics across the Americas, where openly white supremacist politics are on the rise. It is the product of a multiyear, transnational research project by the Anti-racist Research and Action Network of the Americas in collaboration with resistance movements confronting racial retrenchment in Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States. How did we get here? And what anti-racist strategies are equal to the dire task of confronting resurgent racism? This volume provides powerful answers to these pressing questions. 1) It traces the making and contestation of state-led racial projects in response to black and indigenous mobilization during an era of expansion of multicultural rights in the context of neoliberal capitalism. 2) It identifies the origins and manifestations of the backlash against hard-fought (but hardly far-reaching) gains by marginalized peoples, showing that (contrary to critiques of “identity politics”) the losses and anxieties produced by the failures of neoliberalism have been understood in racial terms. 3) It distills a path forward for progressive anti-racist activism in the Americas that looks beyond state-centered, rights-seeking strategies and instead situates a critique of racial capitalism as central to the contestation of white supremacy.