The Black male scholars within this important book are painfully aware that the brutal murder of George Floyd was not due to a few "bad apples." They understand that they are perceived as "threats" and "criminals" within a distorted white imaginary that is embedded with processes of mythopoetic construction, racial capitalism, and a deep anti-Black male social ontology. Edited by prominent philosopher George Yancy, Black Men from behind the Veil: Ontological Interrogations emphasizes the importance of Black male epistemic agency and courage to speak the truth regarding an America that values Black male life on the cheap and that attempts to control the movement of Black men, their capacity to breathe, and their being through anti-Black technologies of surveillance, confinement, policing, and white nation-building. There is no single monolithic Black male voice that dominates this crucial and necessary text. Each voice speaks of pain behind the Veil, revealing narrative specificity and an important recursive truth: Black men, within the white American psyche, are both necessary and yet disposable. The existential and sociohistorical weight of this truth is made painfully clear through the voices of these Black men.

In Philosophic Values and World Citizenship: Locke to Obama and Beyond, Alain Locke the central promoter of the Harlem Renaissance, America's most famous African American pragmatist, the cultural referent for Renaissance movements in the Caribbean and Africa is placed in conversation with leading philosophers and cultural figures in the modern world. The contributors to this collection compare and contrast Locke's views on values, tolerance, cosmopolitanism, and American and world citizenship with philosophers and leading cultural figures ranging from Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, James Farmer, William James, John Dewey, Jose Vasconcelos, Hans G. Gadamer, Fredrick Nietzsche, Horace Kallen, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) to the cultural and political figure of Barack Obama. This important collection of essays eruditely presents Locke's views on moral, emotional, and aesthetic values; the principle of tolerance in managing value conflict; and his rhetorical style, which conveyed his views of cultural reciprocity and tolerance in the service of the values of citizenship and cosmopolitanism. For teachers and students of contemporary debates in pragmatism, diversity, and value theory, these conversations define new and controversial terrain.

Crisis and Commonwealth: Marcuse, Marx, McLaren advances Marcuse scholarship by presenting four hitherto untranslated and unpublished manuscripts by Herbert Marcuse from the Frankfurt University Archive on themes of economic value theory, socialism, and humanism. Contributors to this edited collection, notably Peter Marcuse, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Zvi Tauber, Arnold L. Farr and editor, Charles Reitz, are deeply engaged with the foundational theories of Marcuse and Marx with regard to a future of freedom, equality, and justice. Douglas Dowd furnishes the critical historical context with regard to U.S. foreign and domestic policy, particularly its features of economic imperialism and militarism. Reitz draws these elements together to show that the writings by Herbert Marcuse and these formidable authors can ably assist a global movement toward intercultural commonwealth. The collection extends the critical theories of Marcuse and Marx to an analysis of the intensifying inequalities symptomatic of our current economic distress. It presents a collection of essays by radical scholars working in the public interest to develop a critical analysis of recent global economic dislocations. Reitz presents a new foundation for emancipatory practice-a labor theory of ethics and commonwealth, and the collection breaks new ground by constructing a critical theory of wealth and work. A central focus is building a new critical vision for labor, including academic labor. Lessons are drawn to inform transformative political action, as well as the practice of a critical, multicultural pedagogy, supporting a new manifesto for radical educators contributed by Peter McLaren. The collection is intended especially to appeal to contemporary interests of college students and teachers in several interrelated social science disciplines: sociology, social problems, economics, ethics, business ethics, labor education, history, political philosophy, multicultural education, and critical pedagogy.

Crisis and Commonwealth: Marcuse, Marx, McLaren advances Marcuse scholarship by presenting four hitherto untranslated and unpublished manuscripts by Herbert Marcuse from the Frankfurt University Archive on themes of economic value theory, socialism, and humanism. Contributors to this edited collection, notably Peter Marcuse, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Zvi Tauber, Arnold L. Farr and editor, Charles Reitz, are deeply engaged with the foundational theories of Marcuse and Marx with regard to a future of freedom, equality, and justice. Douglas Dowd furnishes the critical historical context with regard to U.S. foreign and domestic policy, particularly its features of economic imperialism and militarism. Reitz draws these elements together to show that the writings by Herbert Marcuse and these formidable authors can ably assist a global movement toward intercultural commonwealth. The collection extends the critical theories of Marcuse and Marx to an analysis of the intensifying inequalities symptomatic of our current economic distress. It presents a collection of essays by radical scholars working in the public interest to develop a critical analysis of recent global economic dislocations. Reitz presents a new foundation for emancipatory practice a labor theory of ethics and commonwealth, and the collection breaks new ground by constructing a critical theory of wealth and work. A central focus is building a new critical vision for labor, including academic labor. Lessons are drawn to inform transformative political action, as well as the practice of a critical, multicultural pedagogy, supporting a new manifesto for radical educators contributed by Peter McLaren. The collection is intended especially to appeal to contemporary interests of college students and teachers in several interrelated social science disciplines: sociology, social problems, economics, ethics, business ethics, labor education, history, political philosophy, multicultural education, and critical pedagogy.

The most broad and general description of critical theory (one of the most important movements in social and political philosophy in the twentieth and now twenty-first century) is that it is a synthesis of Marxist social critique and Freudian psychoanalysis with traces of German idealism. Farr argues that the goal demand for social change by critical theorists is rooted in a desire for the completion of the U.S. democratic experiment. There is too much exploitation, surplus repression, alienation, dehumanization, oppression, and gross economic inequality in the U.S. for us to believe that we have achieved a complete or finished democracy. Herbert Marcuse's form of critical theory provides us with important theoretical tools for addressing the ways in which our attempt to create a democratic society based on fairness, justice, and equality has been de-railed. While Marcuse experienced tremendous popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, his popularity has since waned in academic circles as well as in public political discourse. This book is an attempt to rescue from obscurity some of Marcuse's most helpful insights with respect to progressive, democratic social change. Its unique feature is an attempt to put Marcuse in dialogue with what Farr calls recent liberation philosophies such as feminism and African American philosophy. He takes all of these forms of philosophy to be driven by a democratic impulse whereby we are made to realize that there are many social groups that have been excluded from democratic decision-making processes.