Solving the Mystery of the Model Minority: The Journey of Asian Americans in America introduces students to current debates surrounding the concept of model minority and its relation to the greater Asian American experience. The book defines the term model minority, examines who is against it, who is for it, and why they feel the way they do, all of which brings to light profound disagreements regarding Asian American identity, as well as the meaning and fate of American democracy. The text uses two comparative perspectives to examine Asian American experiences and, in doing so, explores not only the similarities and differences between Asian Americans and other racial groups, but also the similarities and differences within Asian American ethnic groups. The second edition not only updates the introductory chapters, but also features six new chapters on the topics of Asian American women leaders and barriers to entry in leadership; the new journey of Asian Americans in sports; transnational adoption of Asians; Asian Americans and anti-affirmative action attitudes; anti-Asian American hate crimes; and Asian American political participation in the 21st century. Timely and interdisciplinary in subject matter, Solving the Mystery of the Model Minority is well suited for ethnic studies, political science, sociology, cultural studies, and Asian studies courses.

One of our country's premier cultural and social critics, the author of such powerful and influential books as Ain't I a Woman and Black Looks, Bell Hooks has always maintained that eradicating racism and eradicating sexism must be achieved hand in hand. But whereas many women have been recognized for their writing on gender politics, the female voice has been all but locked out of the public discourse on race. Killing Rage speaks to this imbalance. These twenty-three essays, most of them new works, are written from a black and feminist perspective, and they tackle the bitter difficulties of racism by envisioning a world without it. Hooks defiantly creates positive plans for the future rather than dwell in theories of a crisis beyond repair. The essays here address a spectrum of topics to do with race and racism in the United States: psychological trauma among African Americans; friendship between black women and white women; anti-Semitism and racism; internalized racism in the movies and media. Hooks presents a challenge to the patriarchal family model, explaining how it perpetuates sexism and oppression in black life. She calls out the tendency of much of mainstream America to conflate "black rage" with murderous, pathological impulses, rather than seeing it as a positive state of being. And in the title essay she writes about the "killing rage" - the fierce anger of black people stung by repeated instances of everyday racism - finding in that rage a healing source of love and strength, and a catalyst for productive change. Her analysis is rigorous and her language unsparingly critical, but Hooks writes with a common touch that has made her a favorite of readers far from universities.Bell Hooks's work contains multitudes; she is a feminist who includes and celebrates men, a critic of racism who is not separatist or Afrocentric, an academic who cares about popular culture.

On August 8, 1942, 302 people arrived by train at Vocation, Wyoming, to become the first Japanese American residents of what the U.S. government called the Relocation Center at Heart Mountain. In the following weeks and months, they would be joined by some 10,000 of the more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, incarcerated as "domestic enemy aliens" during World War II. Heart Mountain became a town with workplaces, social groups, and political alliances-in short, networks. These networks are the focus of Saara Kekki's Japanese Americans at Heart Mountain. Interconnections between people are the foundation of human societies. Exploring the creation of networks at Heart Mountain, as well as movement to and from the camp between 1942 and 1945, this book offers an unusually detailed look at the formation of a society within the incarcerated community, specifically the manifestation of power, agency, and resistance. Kekki constructs a dynamic network model of all of Heart Mountain's residents and their interconnections-family, political, employment, social, and geospatial networks-using historical "big data" drawn from the War Relocation Authority and narrative sources, including the camp newspaper Heart Mountain Sentinel. For all the inmates, life inevitably went on: people married, had children, worked, and engaged in politics. Because of the duration of the incarceration, many became institutionalized and unwilling to leave the camps when the time came. Yet most individuals, Kekki finds, took charge of their own destinies despite the injustice and looked forward to the day when Heart Mountain was behind them. Especially timely in its implications for debates over immigration and assimilation, Japanese Americans at Heart Mountain presents a remarkable opportunity to reconstruct a community created under duress within the larger American society, and to gain new insight into an American experience largely lost to official history.