Transformable Race

Focusing on writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Franklin, Samson Occum, Charles Brockden Brown, and others, Transformable Race tells the story of how early Americans imagined, contributed to, and challenged the ways that one's racial identity could be formed in the time of the nation's founding.

How to grow our inner capacity to face racial ignorance and suffering with a wise and caring heart “Racism is a heart disease,” writes Ruth King, “and it's curable.” Exploring a crucial topic seldom addressed in meditation instruction, this revered teacher takes to her pen to shine a compassionate, provocative, and practical light into a deeply neglected and world-changing domain profoundly relevant to all of us. With Mindful of Race, Ruth King offers: Tend first to our suffering, listen to what it is trying to teach us, and direct its energies most effectively for change. Here, she invites us to explore: Ourselves as racial beings, the dynamics of oppression, and our role in racismThe power of paying homage to our most turbulent emotions, and perceiving the wisdom they holdKey mindfulness tools to understand and engage with racial tensionIdentifying our “soft spots” of fear and vulnerability—how we defend them and how to heal themEmbracing discomfort, which is a core competency for transformationHow our thoughts and emotions “rigidify” our sense of self—and how to return to the natural flow of who we areBody, breath, and relaxation practices to befriend and direct our inner resourcesIdentifying our most sensitive “activation points” and tending to them with caring awareness“It’s not just your pain”—the generational constellations of racial rage and ignorance and how to work with themAnd many other compelling topics Drawing on her expertise as a meditation teacher and diversity consultant, King helps readers of all backgrounds examine with fresh eyes the complexity of racial identity and the dynamics of oppression. She offers guided instructions on how to work with our own role in the story of race and shows us how to cultivate a culture of care to come to a place of greater clarity and compassion.

Challenges us to replace attitudes and institutions that promote and perpetuate social suffering with those that foster relationships

Ultimately, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America not only rewrites all dominant scholarly narratives of eighteenth-century sexual behavior but poses a major intervention into queer theoretical understandings of the relationship between sex and the subject.

"In Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric, Virginia Jackson argues that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Black poetics, in antagonism with White poetics, produced the conditions for the invention of modern American poetry. This is not a history of American poetry that begins with the Puritans and stretches to the present, or that jumps from the British Romantics to Walt Whitman, or that restricts the influence of African American poetry to a separate tradition; instead, this book emphasizes the many ways in which early Black poets invented what Phillis Wheatley Peters called "the deep design" of American lyric. Through readings of the poetics of Wheatley Peters, George Moses Horton, James Monroe Whitfield, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper-as well as the poetics of now-neglected but once-popular White poets William Cullen Bryant and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow-Jackson suggests that Black poetics inspired the direction that American poetics has taken for the last two centuries. Thus this book represents not only a new history but a new theory of American poetry. Over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as an idea of poetry based on genres of poems (ballads, elegies, odes, hymns, drinking songs, epistles, etc.) gave way to an idea of poetry based on genres of people (Black, White, male, female, Indigenous, etc.), almost all poetry became lyric poetry. Like everything else in America, what we now think lyric is can be traced back to the twisted paths that have determined what we now think people are and can be. This book tells that story, the story of American lyric"--

Inter sectionality, or the consideration of race, class, and gender, is one of the prominent contemporary theoretical contributions made by scholars in the field of women's studies that now broadly extends across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Taking stock of this transformative paradigm, The Intersectional Approach guide...

A study of the racial-ethnic history of the United States and the perpetuation of racial hierarchy. Race is a known fiction—there is no genetic marker that indicates someone’s race—yet the social stigma of race endures. In the United States, ethnicity is often positioned as a counterweight to race, and we celebrate our various hyphenated-American identities. But Vilna Bashi Treitler argues that we do so at a high cost: ethnic thinking simply perpetuates an underlying racism. In The Ethnic Project, Bashi Treitler considers the ethnic history of the United States from the arrival of the English in North America through to the present day. Tracing the histories of immigrant and indigenous groups—Irish, Chinese, Italians, Jews, Native Americans, Mexicans, Afro-Caribbeans, and African Americans—she shows how each negotiates America’s racial hierarchy, aiming to distance themselves from the bottom and align with the groups already at the top. But in pursuing these “ethnic projects” these groups implicitly accept and perpetuate a racial hierarchy, shoring up rather than dismantling race and racism. Ultimately, The Ethnic Project shows how dangerous ethnic thinking can be in a society that has not let go of racial thinking. Praise for The Ethnic Project “An outstanding work that makes an important contribution to our understanding of the past and present racial history of the United States. The book is very well written (Bashi Treitler’s prose is a delight to read) and meticulously researched . . . . The Ethnic Project should definitely be part of the conversation as we press forward with the task of understanding race in the United States.” —Ashley “Woody” Doane, American Journal of Sociology “Treitler offers a succinct history and diagnosis of racial grouping in the U.S., from the nation’s origin to the contemporary moment . . . . The text has solid promise as an introductory ethnic studies course reading . . . . Highly recommended.” —N. B. Barnd, CHOICE “With her ingenious concept of ‘ethnic projects,’ Vilna Bashi Treitler brings a new optic to the study of race . . . . [and] provides an authoritative answer to those who ask the tired question, ‘We made it, why haven’t they?’” —Stephen Steinberg, author of Race Relations: A Critique “Treitler masterfully weaves race and ethnicity into a single historical narrative that reveals the ugly reality of exploitation and stratification that has always undergirded American society.” —Douglas S. Massey, Princeton University

Examines how information technologies are affecting jobs, skills, wages, and the economy.