Description
Book SynopsisAddresses the important issue of our time with insights forged by a lifetime of confronting racial oppression in America. This book explores the nature of biracial relationships, the issue of transracial adoption, violence particularly black-on-black violence the endangered black male, racism as power, and the relationship between Blacks and Jews.
Trade Review“The first consciousness of race comes early. It is not something you learn in the same way you learn about stinging caterpillars or poison ivy. You do not have to learn it from some overt experience. It is a pervasive awareness, an insidious thing that seeps into the soil of consciousness, sending its toxic tendrils deep into the walls of the mind. It is like a mold, a blight. If you scrape it away here, you find it mockingly virulent there. Once the concept of race takes root in the mind, it is there to stay. You cannot run away from it because it is
inside you. . . . In the South, where I was raised, the pervasive awareness of race was helped along by a series of ‘lessons’ learned in the process of growing up. These lessons were sometimes impromptu, and often impersonal, but they were never unplanned or unintended. They were always there in the arsenal of race and place waiting for the most effective moment for inculcation.”—From
Coming through the FireTable of ContentsI. Notes on Race 1
II. The Fire in Alabama 11
III. Mind and Countermind: Race and Place in Context 39
IV. Polyps of Prejudice 69
V. Search for identity: The Whatness of Who 91
VI. Human Values and Inhuman Systems 113
VII. Into the Multiculture 135
