A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A collection of provocative essays exploring the key social justice issues of our time—from George Floyd to antiracism to inequality and the Supreme Court. Kennedy is "among the most incisive American commentators on race" (The New York Times). Informed by sharpness of observation and often courting controversy, deep fellow feeling, decency, and wit, Say It Loud! includes: The George Floyd Moment: Promise and Peril • Isabel Wilkerson, the Election of 2020, and Racial Caste • The Princeton Ultimatum: Anti­racism Gone Awry • The Constitutional Roots of “Birtherism” • Inequality and the Supreme Court • “Nigger”: The Strange Career Contin­ues • Frederick Douglass: Everyone’s Hero • Remembering Thurgood Marshall • Why Clar­ence Thomas Ought to Be Ostracized • The Politics of Black Respectability • Policing Ra­cial Solidarity In each essay, Kennedy is mindful of com­plexity, ambivalence, and paradox, and he is always stirring and enlightening. Say It Loud! is a wide-ranging summa of Randall Kennedy’s thought on the realities and imaginaries of race in America.

“You won’t leave this hypnotic book without feeling that James Brown is still out there, howling.”—The Boston Globe From the New York Times bestselling author of The Good Lord Bird, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction, Deacon King Kong, and Five-Carat Soul Kill ’Em and Leave is more than a book about James Brown. Brown embodied the contradictions of American life: He was an unsettling symbol of the tensions between North and South, black and white, rich and poor. After receiving a tip that promises to uncover the man behind the myth, James McBride goes in search of the “real” James Brown. McBride’s travels take him to forgotten corners of Brown’s never-before-revealed history, illuminating not only our understanding of the immensely troubled, misunderstood, and complicated Godfather of Soul, but the ways in which our cultural heritage has been shaped by Brown’s enduring legacy. Praise for Kill ’Em and Leave “A tour de force of cultural reportage.”—The Seattle Times “Thoughtful and probing.”—The New York Times Book Review “Masterly . . . powerful.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “McBride provides something lacking in most of the books about James Brown: an intimate feeling for the musician, a veracious if inchoate sense of what it was like to be touched by him. . . . It may be as close [to ‘the real James Brown’] as we’ll ever get.”—David Hajdu, The Nation “A feat of intrepid journalistic fortitude.”—USA Today “[McBride is] the biographer of James Brown we’ve all been waiting for. . . . McBride’s true subject is race and poverty in a country that doesn’t want to hear about it, unless compelled by a voice that demands to be heard.”—Boris Kachka, New York “Illuminating . . . engaging.”—The Washington Post “A gorgeously written piece of reportage that gives us glimpses of Brown’s genius and contradictions.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

"Black is Beautiful!" The words were the exuberant rallying cry of a generation of black women who threw away their straightening combs and adopted a proud new style they called the Afro. The Afro, as worn most famously by Angela Davis, became a veritable icon of the Sixties. Although the new beauty standards seemed to arise overnight, they actually had deep roots within black communities. Tracing her story to 1891, when a black newspaper launched a contest to find the most beautiful woman of the race, Maxine Leeds Craig documents how black women have negotiated the intersection of race, class, politics, and personal appearance in their lives. Craig takes the reader from beauty parlors in the 1940s to late night political meetings in the 1960s to demonstrate the powerful influence of social movements on the experience of daily life. With sources ranging from oral histories of Civil Rights and Black Power Movement activists and men and women who stood on the sidelines to black popular magazines and the black movement press, Ain't I a Beauty Queen? will fascinate those interested in beauty culture, gender, class, and the dynamics of race and social movements.

Learn how to address racial wealth disparity in the United States today From the life, professional experiences, and research of former Harvard Business School professor Steven Rogers, comes his boldly stated, A Letter to My White Friends and Colleagues. This informative epistle investigates the causes of racial wealth disparity in the United States and provides solutions for addressing it. Through extensive data and historical research, anecdotes, teaching, and case studies, it presents practical ways White people can work with and help the Black community. It teaches readers that eliminating the $153,000 wealth gap between Black and White people is the solution to over 75% of our problems and offers solutions to help improve Black-White racial relations in the United States. In straightforward language, filled with facts, stories, advice, and sometimes even humor, A Letter to My White Friends and Colleagues encourages every White person to share his/her wealth with the Black community—plain and simple. This book recommends that you spend a portion of your annual household budget with Black-owned companies. If more money is spent at Black-owned businesses, those companies can grow and create more jobs for Black people. Rogers also proposes White people make large savings deposits into Black-owned banks. These are the financial institutions that are the backbone of the Black community that provide loans to the Black community for businesses, education, automobiles, and home mortgages. And finally, he resolutely encourages White people to support government reparations to Black Americans who are descendants of Black men and women, who were enslaved from 1619 to 1865. Those who read the book will: Understand the root causes of racial disparities in America Discover how you can personally contribute to reducing the inequality between Black and White people in the United States today Get concrete recommendations on how to redirect your spending to Black-owned institutions to help decrease the racial wealth gap This groundbreaking book provides financial recommendations that you can put into practice today, using his helpful instructions in most of the chapters, to address the systemic inequality between White and Black Americans. Read A Letter to My White Friends and Colleagues and be part of the path forward.

Anecdotes, reminiscences, first-hand reports, and appreciative commentary combine to provide a celebratory account of the blues' development from turn-of-the-century New Orleans honky-tonk and Mississippi Delta barrelhouse to today's urban blues.

Globalization is transforming the very nature of our business relationships, decision-making processes, and interactions, making world-class diversity management more needed than ever before. But until now, the field of diversity had no established standard for evaluating best practices, or even agreement on fundamental philosophies, principles, and concepts. In this pioneering book, the world's leading diversity authority proposes a framework that will facilitate the development of a truly world-class standard for diversity management. R. Roosevelt Thomas begins by laying out his Four Quadrant model, which encompasses all core diversity strategies: managing workforce demographic representation, managing demographic relationships, managing diverse talent, and managing all strategic diversity mixtures. He analyzes the goals, motives, approaches, accomplishments, and challenges associated with each quadrant, as well as the paradigm or mindset that lies behind each quadrant's express purpose. Having laid out this broad range of strategies, Thomas shows how to realize them through the Strategic Diversity Management Process™, by far the most effective method for implementation. A detailed case study of CEO Jeff Kilt—a fictional composite of the many executives Thomas has worked with—effectively illustrates the complexities encountered when working with each of the Four Quadrant strategies in the real world. This book offers a comprehensive blueprint that will enable leaders to address any diversity issue (not just race or gender) in any setting, anywhere in the world. Most important, it proves that a world-class standard of diversity management is indeed a possible and achievable goal.

Copublished with the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE)Advances the field by providing a unified framework and terminology and spelling out exactly what needs to be done to build world-class diversity management capabilityIdentifies optimal implementation approaches that can be used anywhere, anytime With demographic shifts and globalization transforming the nature of relationships, interactions, and decision making, excellence in diversity management is more important than ever. However, the field of diversity has no established standard for evaluating what constitutes best practices, nor has there been any agreement on what the most fundamental philosophies, principles, and concepts are - until now. In this pioneering book R. Roosevelt Thomas, one of our most distinguished diversity theorists and practitioners, proposes a framework that will enable the development of a truly world-class diversity management capability. It was the development of such standards in manufacturing that enabled companies to strategically pursue excellence in this area.A world-class approach to diversity management must be applicable anywhere in the world, be able to address any possible issue, facilitate comparison of different concepts and practices, and focus on the entire field of diversity rather than specific dimensions such as race or gender. These requirements are amply met by Thomas's Four Quadrant model and his Strategic Diversity Management Process.Thomas first analyzes each of four quadrants - managing workforce demographic representation, managing demographic relationships, managing diverse talent, and managing strategic mixtures - exploring the goals, motives, approaches, accomplishments, and challenges associated with each. And he reveals the unrecognized paradigm or mind-set that lies behind each quadrant's express purpose