Melissa McFadden always wanted to be an officer when she grew up--to help people. As she left the disciplined, rule driven, world of the Air Force Security Services and landed her dream job in the Columbus, Ohio Division of Police, she learned that policing was something very different than what she had always dreamed it would be. As a Black woman from the coal country of West Virginia she found herself confronting a big city racist police culture that was born in the slave patrols of Reconstruction, emboldened through the Jim Crow era, challenged in the Civil Rights era and still gaining momentum in the Black Lives Matter era. She walked a thin Black line each day that divided her ability to defend her community against police brutality from her ability to defend herself against discrimination on the job. Her memoir is about her journey through the thicket of racist union contracts, unfair assignment practices, and discriminatory disciplinary decisions. She shares how racism hides within police culture, because the purpose of policing has never shed its original focus-a war on Black people. She never imagined the day that she would be standing in solidarity with young Black activists and their white allies, holding a sign saying Police Reform Now, while shouting BLACK LIVES MATTER! Her voice was silenced for over twenty years of her career through threats of retaliation that included taking her entire pension from her. She has fought, cried, sued, mentored, and demanded justice for her Black colleagues and the Black people of Columbus. And now she can show you her efforts and her failures in hopes that the more you know the more you can be part of the solution that is so long overdue.

A nonfiction collection of the exploits and accomplishments of African American law enforcement officers.

The first comparative history of African American and Black British artists, artworks, and art movements, Stick to the Skin traces the lives and works of over fifty painters, photographers, sculptors, and mixed-media, assemblage, installation, video, and performance artists working in the United States and Britain from 1965 to 2015. The artists featured in this book cut to the heart of hidden histories, untold narratives, and missing memories to tell stories that "stick to the skin" and arrive at a new "Black lexicon of liberation." Informed by extensive research and invaluable oral testimonies, Celeste-Marie Bernier’s remarkable text forcibly asserts the originality and importance of Black artists’ work and emphasizes the need to understand Black art as a distinctive category of cultural production. She launches an important intervention into European histories of modern and contemporary art and visual culture as well as into debates within African American studies, African diasporic studies, and Black British studies. Among the artists included are Benny Andrews, Bessie Harvey, Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, Noah Purifoy, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Joyce J. Scott, Maud Sulter, and Barbara Walker.

This volume investigates the implications of how our brain directs our movements on decision-making. An extensive body of knowledge in chapters from international experts is presented as well as integrative group reports discussing new directions for future research. The understanding of how people make decisions is of central interest to experts working in fields such as psychology, economics, movement science, cognitive neuroscience, neuroinformatics, robotics, and sport science. For the first time the current volume provides a multidisciplinary overview of how action and cognition are integrated in the planning of and decisions about action. * Offers intense, focused, and genuine interdisciplinary perspective * Conveys state-of-the-art and outlines future research directions on the hot topic of mind and motion (or embodied cognition) * Includes contributions from psychologists, neuroscientists, movement scientists, economists, and others

THE BEIGING OF AMERICA, BEING MIXED RACE IN THE 21ST CENTURY, takes on “race matters” and considers them through the firsthand accounts of mixed race people in the United States. Edited by mixed race scholars Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Sean Frederick Forbes and Tara Betts, this collection consists of 39 poets, writers, teachers, professors, artists and activists, whose personal narratives articulate the complexities of interracial life. THE BEIGING OF AMERICA is an absorbing and thought-provoking collection of stories that explore racial identity, alienation, with people often forced to choose between races and cultures in their search for self-identity. While underscoring the complexity of the mixed race experience, these unadorned voices offer a genuine, poignant, enlightening and empowering message to all readers.

There are geniuses in every field of work and all walks of life. Throughout my life, I have seen the geniuses of justice at work in this nation and in faith communities. This book tells the stories of fifty-three “geniuses of justice.” They are Conservative and Reform Jews, Mainline, Pentecostal, Evangelical and Catholic Christians, “spiritual but not religious,” women, men; Black, brown, white, gay and straight, young and old. Each is a powerful witness for justice. Each has the “IT” factor of justice burning in their bones. How did they become who they are? What drives them to “do the right thing” on behalf of others that is translatable to anyone, anywhere? These geniuses of justice are “just folks” who are justice folk. They can empower and teach each of us to change the world right where we are. This book passes on their genius for justice to you to strengthen and empower you for “bending the moral arc of the universe” to justice. This book is for everyone to learn something that will empower them to change the world – in the place where they live and have power to make a difference.