Black Evidence: A History and a Warning - REVIEW

by Candis Watts Smith

From Reconstruction to Redemption, from the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation to the execution of the Southern strategy, from 2020’s multiracial protests to the swift elimination of policies etching out a more inclusive society, Americans regularly experience periods of racial reckoning followed by walloping retrenchment.

In Black Evidence, political scientist Candis Watts Smith shows that this pattern is the result of an American habit: denying the truths about our society that Black people experience and remember. Smith then delivers a warning: the effects of this habit ripple out, dulling our ability to identify the signs of authoritarianism and heightening our tolerance for cruelty. Still, she shows how these same truths offer models to overcome our repeated predicament.

Through a curation of critical moments across four centuries, Smith invites us to review the evidence that has been obscured, distorted, and denied. She rigorously investigates the practices that turn Black witnesses into liars in the court room, Black patients into superbodies that don’t feel pain in health care settings, Black people into subhumans in scientific experiments, and Black children into superpredators. She reveals what happens when Black voices are subject to exclusion―their communities are terrorized, their memories are refuted, and their resistance is pathologized.

Written with compassion and tempered optimism, Black Evidence prescribes a cure and encourages readers to practice the skills needed to build a truly multiracial democracy: confront our past, acknowledge the damage of inequality in our present, and listen to the voices of those who experience the problems we wish to solve for an equitable future.

Candis Watts Smith is professor of political science at Duke University. She is the author or coauthor of dozens of articles and books, including Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter and Racial Stasis: The Millennial Generation and the Stagnation of Racial Attitudes in Americans Politics. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation. Smith is a cohost of the Democracy Works podcast, and her TEDx talk on myths about racism has been viewed over two million times. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.

W.W. Norton & Company
ISBN-13: 978-1324036272

Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore - REVIEW

by Emily Lieb

Investigation that traces the birth, plunder, and scavenging of Rosemont, a Black middle-class neighborhood in Baltimore.

In the mid-1950s Baltimore’s Rosemont neighborhood was alive and vibrant with smart rowhouses, a sprawling park, corner grocery stores, and doctor’s offices. By 1957, a proposed expressway threatened to gut this Black, middle-class community from stem to stern.

That highway was never built, but it didn’t matter—even the failure to build it destroyed Rosemont economically, if not physically. In telling the history of the neighborhood and the notional East–West Expressway, Emily Lieb shows the interwoven tragedies caused by racism in education, housing, and transportation policy. Black families had been attracted to the neighborhood after Baltimore’s Board of School Commissioners converted several white schools into “colored” ones, which had also laid the groundwork for predatory real-estate agents who bought low from white sellers and sold high to determined Black buyers. Despite financial discrimination, Black homeowners built a thriving community before the city council formally voted to condemn some nine hundred homes in Rosemont for the expressway, leading to deflated home values and even more predatory real estate deals.

Drawing on land records, oral history, media coverage, and policy documents, Lieb demystifies blockbusting, redlining, and prejudicial lending, highlighting the national patterns at work in a single neighborhood. The result is an absorbing story about the deliberate decisions that produced racial inequalities in housing, jobs, health, and wealth—as well as a testament to the ingenuity of the residents who fought to stay in their homes, down to today.

Emily Lieb is a writer and historian in Seattle, Washington.

University of Chicago Press
ISBN-13: 978-0226844381

Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation - REVIEW

by Maliha Safri, Marianna Pavlovskaya, Stephen Healy, Craig Borowiak

Mapping the transformative effects of America’s urban solidarity economies.

Solidarity economies, characterized by diverse practices of cooperation and mutual support, have long played pivotal but largely invisible roles in fostering shared survival and envisioning alternatives to racial capitalism globally and in the United States. This book maps the thriving existence of these cooperative networks in three differently sized American cities, highlighting their commitment to cooperation, democracy, and inclusion and demonstrating the desire—and the pressing need—to establish alternative foundations for social and economic justice.

Collectively authored by four social scientists, Solidarity Cities analyzes the deeply entrenched racial and economic divides from which cooperative networks emerge as they work to provide unmet basic needs, including food security, affordable housing, access to fair credit, and employment opportunities. Examining entities such as community gardens, credit unions, cooperatives, and other forms of economic solidarity, the authors highlight how relatively small yet vital interventions into public life can expand into broader movements that help bolster the overall well-being of their surrounding communities.

Bringing together insights from geography, political economy, and political science with mapping and spatial analysis methodologies, surveys, and in-depth interviews, Solidarity Cities illuminates the extensive footprints of solidarity economies and the roles they play in communities. The authors show how these initiatives act as bulwarks against gentrification, exploitation, and economic exclusion, helping readers see them as part of the past, present, and future of more livable and just cities.

Maliha Safri is professor of economics at Drew University. Her writing has been published in Antipode, Signs, and Environmental Policy and Governance.

Marianna Pavlovskaya is professor of geography at Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center. She is coeditor of Rethinking Neoliberalism: Resisting the Disciplinary Regime.

Stephen Healy is associate professor of geography at Western Sydney University and coauthor of Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities (Minnesota, 2013).

Craig Borowiak is professor of political science at Haverford College and author of Accountability and Democracy: The Pitfalls and Promise of Popular Control.

Univ Of Minnesota Press
ISBN-13 978-1517916022

The State of Black Progress: Confronting Government and Judicial Obstacles - REVIEW

Edited by Star Parker

Black Americans have arguably arrived at the height of their cultural prominence. In politics, entertainment, academia, and nearly every sphere of influence, “black issues” dominate the national discussion. Yet many black Americans are suffering more than ever from the blight of poverty, physical and mental health struggles, lack of opportunity, and failing schools.

This edited volume, sponsored by the Center for Urban Renewal and Education and featuring contributions from W.B. Allen, Judge Janice Rogers Brown (ret.), Ian Rowe, Sally Pipes, Stephen Moore, and others, addresses this question in light of American values and the history of constitutional jurisprudence. In the 1860s, black America was promised emancipation but continued to experience subjugation. In the 1960s, black America was promised equality but was frequently exploited. Racial discrimination played a role, but in the intervening decades misguided progressive policies and the normalization of victimhood rhetoric has proven even more disastrous. By failing to live up to American ideals, our nation denied many black Americans their chance at the American Dream.

The scholars and luminaries who contributed to this volume believe that what has been lost can be recovered. If our nation recognizes the history of our current predicament, embraces the founding principles that made America an economic powerhouse, and commits to an agenda of empowering fiscal, educational, and faith and family-affirming policies, then black Americans can overcome the obstacles that most hamper progress in their communities.

Star Parker is President of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE), which she founded in 1995. She serves on the US Commission on Civil Rights California Advisory Committee and previously served on the US Frederick Douglass Bicentennial Commission. In 2017, Parker joined the White House Opportunity Initiative advisory team and has served on the board of directors of the National Religious Broadcasters and the Leadership Institute.

Parker is a nationally syndicated columnist and the author of several books, including Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can Do About It; White Ghetto: How Middle-Class America Reflects Inner City Decay; and Pimps, Whores and Welfare Brats: From Welfare Cheat to Conservative Messenger.

Encounter Books
ISBN-13 978-1641773416

To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care - REVIEW

by Christopher Paul Harris

An incisive portrait of how the new Black politics can forge a future centered on collective action, community, and care

When #BlackLivesMatter emerged in 2013, it animated the most consequential Black-led mobilization since the civil rights and Black power era. Today, the hashtag turned rallying cry is but one expression of a radical reorientation toward Black politics, protest, and political thought. To Build a Black Future examines the spirit and significance of this insurgency, offering a revelatory account of a new political culture-responsive to pain, suffused with joy, and premised on care-emerging from the centuries-long arc of Black rebellion, a tradition that traces back to the Black slave.

Drawing on his own experiences as an activist and organizer, Christopher Paul Harris takes readers inside the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) to chart the propulsive trajectory of Black politics and thought from the Middle Passage to the present historical moment. Carefully attending to the social forces that produce Black struggle and the contradictions that arise within it, Harris illustrates how M4BL gives voice to an abolitionist praxis that bridges the past, present, and future, outlining a political project at once directed inward to the Black community while issuing an outward challenge to the world.

Essential reading for the age of #BlackLivesMatter, this visionary and provocative book reveals how the radical politics of joy, pain, and care, in sharp contrast to liberal political thought, can build a Black future that transcends ideology and pushes the boundaries of our political imagination.

Princeton University Press
ISBN-13 978-0691219066

Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope - REVIEW

Reading Scripture from the perspective of Black church tradition can help us connect with a rich faith history and address the urgent issues of our times. Demonstrating an ongoing conversation between the collective Black experience and the Bible, New Testament scholar Esau McCaulley shares a personal and scholarly testament to the power and hope of Black biblical interpretation.

Growing up in the American South, Esau McCaulley knew firsthand the ongoing struggle between despair and hope that marks the lives of some in the African American context. A key element in the fight for hope was the practice of Bible interpretation coming from his traditional Black church. This ecclesial tradition is often disregarded by much of the wider church and academy, but it has something to say.

Reading While Black is a personal and scholarly testament to the power and hope of Black biblical interpretation. At a time in which some within the African American community are questioning the place of the Christian faith in the struggle for justice, New Testament scholar McCaulley argues that reading Scripture from the perspective of Black church tradition is invaluable for connecting with a rich faith history and addressing the urgent issues of our times. He advocates for a model of interpretation that involves an ongoing conversation between the collective Black experience and the Bible, in which the particular questions coming out of Black communities are given pride of place and the Bible is given space to respond by affirming, challenging, and, at times, reshaping Black concerns. McCaulley demonstrates this model with studies on how Scripture speaks to topics often overlooked by white interpreters, such as ethnicity, political protest, policing, and slavery.

Ultimately McCaulley calls the church to a dynamic theological engagement with Scripture, in which Christians of diverse backgrounds dialogue with their own social location as well as the cultures of others. Reading While Black moves the conversation forward.

Esau McCaulley (PhD, St. Andrews) is assistant professor of New Testament at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. He is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America where he serves as a Canon Theologian in his diocese C4SO (Churches for the Sake of Others). Esau also serves the Province of the ACNA (Anglican Church in North America) as director of the Next Generation Leadership Initiative, a province-wide effort to raise the next generation of Anglican lay and ordains leaders. Esau is a contributing writer for the New York Times and has written for numerous outlets such as Christianity Today, The Witness, and the Washington Post. His publications include Sharing in the Son’s Inheritance and The New Testament in Color (forthcoming). He is a highly sought-after speaker, hosts The Disrupters podcast, and speaks at many conferences.  Throughout his career in ministry and academia, Esau has served in a variety of contexts, including as a pastor at All Souls Episcopal/Anglican Church in Okinawa, Japan, assistant to the pastor at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Portsmouth, Virginia, and assisting priest at All Saints Episcopal Church in St. Andrews, Scotland. He is a military spouse and is married to his beautiful wife, Mandy, a pediatrician. Together, they have four wonderful children

Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope 

by Esau McCaulley

September 1, 2020 \ $20 \ 200 pages \ paperback \ ISBN: 978-0-8308-5486-8 

Contact: Karin DeHaven, academic publicity
800.846.4587 ext. 4096 or kdehaven@ivpress.com
www.ivpress.com/media

BROKE: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promises - REVIEW

In BROKE: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promises, which follows seven Detroiters as they navigate life during and after the city's 2013 bankruptcy, Jodie Adams Kirshner asks: 

    How could policymakers hype bankruptcy as the solution to struggling cities without understanding the efficacy or basic consequences of its use? We had overlooked urban residents and considered the issues all wrong. 

     The individual lives portrayed in BROKE underscore Kirshner's assertions. Reggie loses his savings trying to make a habitable home for his family. Cindy fights drug use, prostitution, and dumping on her block. Lola commutes two hours a day to her suburban job. For them, financial issues are mired within the larger ramifications of poor urban policies, state and federal negligence, and-even before the 2013 decision to declare Detroit bankrupt-the root causes of a city's fiscal demise. 

     Like Matthew Desmond's Evicted, BROKE looks at what municipal distress means in practical and personal terms. More than 35 percent of Detroit's 700,000 residents fall below the poverty line. Post-bankruptcy, they struggle with a broken real estate market, school system, and job market-and their lives have not improved. In his foreword, Michael Eric Dyson sums it up beautifully: 

   The central, trenchant, undeniable argument of BROKE is clear: bankruptcy is neither a fiscally responsible nor morally irresistible response to the myriad challenges faced by the modem American city ... after reading the poignant, heartbreaking, defiant pages of BROKE, no one should question the need for a moral referendum on how policy is created in and for urban America. 

     BROKE's implications extend beyond the city it takes for its subject because Detroit is nationally emblematic. Kirshner makes a powerful argument that cities-the economic engine of our nation­ aren't being given the state or federal government aid they need for their residents to survive, much less flourish. Success for all America's citizens depends on equity of opportunity. 

About the Author: Jodie Adams Kirshner is a research professor at New York University. Previously a law professor at Cambridge University, where she also served as the deputy director of the Cambridge LLM program, the deputy director of the Cambridge Centre for Corporate and Commercial Law, and as a fellow of Peterhouse College, Cambridge, Kirshner also teaches bankruptcy law at Columbia Law School. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute, past term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a technical advisor to the Bank for International Settlements. She received a prestigious multi-year grant from the Kresge Foundation to research BROKE. Kirshner received her undergraduate degree from Harvard University and graduate degrees in law and in journalism from Columbia University. She lives in New York City.

BROKE: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promises
 by Jodie Adams Kirshner
St. Martin's Press. ISBN: 978-1-25-023712-5

"BROKE provides a humane but clear-eyed account of the collapse and rebirth of Detroit that re,reals what a court can and cannot accomplish via a well-managed municipal bankruptcy."
  -Paul Romer, co-recipient, 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and founding director, Marron Institute of Urban Governance, NYU