A "deeply spiritual and socially radical" (Dr. Obery Hendricks, PhD) guide to uplift our spirits as we work for justice in these politically turbulent times--from Reverend Otis Moss, III, Senior Pastor at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ and one of the country's most renowned and beloved spiritual and civil rights leaders. Once again, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. first observed in the 1960s, it is midnight in America--a dark time of division and anxiety, with threats of violence looming in the shadows. In 2008, the Trinity United Church in Chicago received threats when one of its parishioners, Senator Barack Obama, ran for president. "We're going to kill you" rang in Reverend Otis Moss's ears when he suddenly heard a noise in the middle of the night. He grabbed a baseball bat to confront the intruder in his home. When he opened the door to his daughter's room, he found that the source of the noise was his own little girl, dancing. She was simply practicing for her ballet recital. At that moment, Pastor Moss saw that the real intruder was within him. Caught in a cycle of worry and anger, he had allowed the darkness inside. But seeing his daughter evoked Pslam 30: "You have turned my mourning into dancing." He set out to write the sermon that became this inspiring and transformative book. Dancing in the Darkness is a "life-affirming" (Dr. Teresa L. Fry Brown) guide to the practical, political, and spiritual challenges of our day. Drawing on the teachings of Dr. King, Howard Thurman, sacred scripture, southern wisdom, global spiritual traditions, Black culture, and his own personal experiences, Dr. Moss instructs you on how to practice spiritual resistance by combining justice and love. This collection helps us tap into the spiritual reserves we all possess but too often overlook, so we can slay our personal demons, confront our civic challenges, and reach our highest goals.

‘Without free speech there is no true thought.' -Jordan Peterson

‘You're telling me I'm being sensitive, and students looking for safe spaces that they're being hypersensitive. If you're white, this country is one giant safe space.' -Michael Eric Dyson

Is political correctness an enemy of free speech, open debate and the free exchange of ideas? Or is it a progressive force, eroding the dominant power relationships and social norms that exclude marginalised groups from society?

"Dyson's incisive analysis of JAY-Z's brilliance not only offers a brief history of hip-hop's critical place in American culture, but also hints at how we can best move forward." --Questlove JAY-Z: Made in America is the fruit of Michael Eric Dyson's decade of teaching the work of one of the greatest poets this nation has produced, as gifted a wordsmith as Walt Whitman, Robert Frost and Rita Dove. But as a rapper, he's sometimes not given the credit he deserves for just how great an artist he's been for so long. This book wrestles with the biggest themes of JAY-Z's career, including hustling, and it recognizes the way that he's always weaved politics into his music, making important statements about race, criminal justice, black wealth and social injustice. As he enters his fifties, and to mark his thirty years as a recording artist, this is the perfect time to take a look at JAY-Z's career and his role in making this nation what it is today. In many ways, this is JAY-Z's America as much as it's Pelosi's America, or Trump's America, or Martin Luther King's America. JAY-Z has given this country a language to think with and words to live by.

In many ways, race has come to the forefront of contemporary American life. From the Black Lives Matter movement sparked by unarmed police shootings of black people to the health and economic disparities exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans have been forced to reckon with our country’s fraught history – and present – of racial bias and inequality. Now that we have scratched the surface on courageous conversations about race, many are wondering: what is the next step towards healing and justice? Lies About Black People: Challenging Common Racist Stereotypes on Our Path to Common Antiracist Understanding is designed for anyone who wants to examine their own biases and behaviors with a deeper critical lens in order to take action, make change, and engage positively in the fight for racial equality. In this honest and welcoming book, diversity and inclusion expert, professor, and award-winning speaker Dr. Omekongo Dibinga argues that we must embark on a massive undertaking to re-educate ourselves on the stereotypes that have proven harmful, and too often deadly, to the black community. Through personal anecdotes, nuanced historical inquiry, and engaging analysis of modern-day events and their historical context and implications, this invaluable guide will break down some of the most powerful lies told about black people. Whether those lies are pernicious, like the idea that “most black people are criminals,� or seemingly innocuous, like “black people can’t swim,� all of the lies and stereotypes combatted in this book are rooted in hate and continue to undermine not only black people in America, but our society as a whole. Beyond combatting these harmful lies, Dr. Dibinga also provides readers with powerful insights on our racial vocabulary, reflective hands-on exercises that will allow readers to confront and change their own biases, and an honest discussion about how to move beyond misplaced shame and use privilege to serve others. Featuring personal surveys alongside real-life interviews with those who have been affected by racial biases first-hand, this open and thoughtful guide will lead readers on a path to understanding, action, and change.

In this provocative book, writer and cultural critic Toure explores the concept of Post-Blackness: the ability for someone to be rooted in but not restricted by their race. Drawing on his own experiences and those of 105 luminaries, he argues that racial identity should be understood as fluid, complex, and self-determined.

"Pride goeth before destruction, a hoaughty spirit before a mighty fall." As the biblical fall of Satan suggests, pride as a defining symptom of self-preoccupation follows a paradoxical route at which end lies self-destruction. Dyson explores the fate of pride from Christian theology to the social responsibilities of self-regard and regard for the society as a whole. Pride is also vain glory, or the inordinate obsession with one's existence, body and intellect, which becomes the playground for human vanity. Dyson examines how pride, within black communities, becomes a necessary and ironic defense against a culture that at once formally rejected it in their vreligious beliefs but embraced it in their social realtions. As a result, blacks were ensconced, implicated, even embroiled, in the West's schizophrenic views of the deadly sin. Dyson will explore all these moments of pride, attempting to probe the contradictory facets of a vice that in some instances became a celebrated virtue, and a virtue among some cultures that ultimately became a vice.

Dyson was granted an exclusive interview with the president for this book, and Obama's own voice shines through. Along with interviews with Eric Holder, Al Sharpton, Maxine Waters, and others, this intimate access provides a unique depth to this engrossing analysis of the nation's first black president, and how race shapes and will shape our understanding of his achievements and failures alike. "Michael Eric Dyson combines cutting-edge theoretical acuity with the passionate, engaged, and accessible stance of a public intellectual" - Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

An honest and courageous examination of what it means to navigate the in-between Cole has heard it all before-token, bougie, oreo, Blackish-the things we call the kids like him. Black kids who grow up in white spaces, living at an intersection of race and class that many doubt exists. He needed to get far away from the preppy site of his upbringing before he could make sense of it all. Through a series of personal anecdotes and interviews with his peers, Cole transports us to his adolescence and explores what it's like to be young and in search of identity. He digs into the places where, in youth, a greyboy's difference is most acutely felt: parenting, police brutality, Trumpism, depression, and dating, to name a few. Greyboy: Finding Blackness in a White World asks an important question: What is Blackness? It also provides the answer: Much more than you thought, dammit.

Barack Obama is widely considered one of the most powerful and charismatic speakers of our age. Without missing a beat, he often moves between Washington insider talk and culturally Black ways of speaking-as shown in a famous YouTube clip, where Obama declined the change offered to him by a Black cashier in a Washington, D.C. restaurant with the phrase, "Nah, we straight." In Articulate While Black, two renowned scholars of Black Language address language and racial politics in the U.S. through an insightful examination of President Barack Obama's language use-and America's response to it. In this eloquently written and powerfully argued book, H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman provide new insights about President Obama and the relationship between language and race in contemporary society. Throughout, they analyze several racially loaded, cultural-linguistic controversies involving the President-from his use of Black Language and his "articulateness" to his "Race Speech," the so-called "fist-bump," and his relationship to Hip Hop Culture. Using their analysis of Barack Obama as a point of departure, Alim and Smitherman reveal how major debates about language, race, and educational inequality erupt into moments of racial crisis in America. In challenging American ideas about language, race, education, and power, they help take the national dialogue on race to the next level. In much the same way that Cornel West revealed nearly two decades ago that "race matters," Alim and Smitherman in this groundbreaking book show how deeply "language matters" to the national conversation on race-and in our daily lives.

Twenty-five years of writings by the religious thinker and activist Pauli Murray   The religious thought and activism that shaped the late twentieth century is typically described in terms of Black men from the major Black denominations, a depiction that fails to account for the voices of those who not only challenged racism but also forced a confrontation with class and gender. Of these overlooked voices, none is more important than that of Pauli Murray (1910–1985), the nonbinary Black lawyer, activist, poet, and Episcopal priest who influenced such icons as Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Thurgood Marshall.   Anthony B. Pinn has collected Murray’s most important sermons, lectures, and speeches from 1960 through 1985, showcasing her religious thought and activism as well as her original and compassionate literary voice. In highlighting major themes in Murray’s writing—including the strength and rights of women, faithfulness, religious community, and suffering—Pinn’s collection reveals the evolution in Murray’s religious ideas and her sense of ministry, unpacking her role in a tumultuous period of American history, as well as her thriving legacy.

Between God and Gangsta Rap is an exploration of the ongoing debate about African-American identity which embraces the hopes of the church and the cool reality of hip-hop.

PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX FOR BEGINNERS is a graphic narrative project that attempts to distill the fundamental components of what scholars, activists and artists have identified as the Mass Incarceration movement in the United States. As far back as the early 1990s, activist critics of the US prison system, marked its emergence as a complex in a manner comparable to how President Eisenhower marked the Military Industrial Complex. Like its institutional cousin, the Prison Industrial Complex features a critical combination of political ideology, far-reaching federal policy and the neo-liberal directive to privatise institutions traditionally within the purview of the government.

The Prison Industrial Complex relies on the law and order ideology fomented by President Nixon and developed at least partially in response to the unrest generated through the Civil Rights Movement. It is (and has been) enhanced and emboldened via the US war on drugs, a slate of policies that by any account have failed to do anything except normalise the warehousing of nonviolent substance abusers in jails and prisons that serve more as criminal training centres then as redemptive spaces for citizens who might re-enter society successfully. Sadly, this mix of ideology, policy and privatisation has facilitated the US leading the world in the rate at which it incarcerates its own citizens.

PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX FOR BEGINNERS is a primer for how these issues emerged and how our awareness of the systems at work in mass incarceration might be the first step in reforming an institution responsible for some of our most egregious contemporary civil rights violations.

The night of May 25, 2020 changed America. George Floyd, a 43-year-old Black man, was killed during an arrest in Minneapolis when a white cop suffocated him. The video of that night's events went viral, sparking the largest protests in the nation's history and the sort of social unrest we have not seen since the sixties. While Floyd's death was certainly the catalyst, (heightened by the fact that it occurred during a pandemic whose victims were disproportionately of color) it was in truth the fuse that lit an ever-filling powder keg. Long Time Coming grapples with the cultural and social forces that have shaped our nation in the brutal crucible of race. In five beautifully argued chapters - each addressed to a black martyr from Breonna Taylor to Rev. Clementa Pinckney - Dyson traces the genealogy of anti-blackness from the slave ship to the street corner where Floyd lost his life - and where America gained its will to confront the ugly truth of systemic racism. Ending with a poignant plea for hope, Dyson's exciting new book points the way to social redemption.

Twenty years after his assassination, what is it about Malcolm X's life and words that speaks so powerfully to so many?

In Making Malcolm, Michael Eric Dyson probes the myths and meanings of Malcolm X for our time. From Spike Lee's film biography to Eugene Wolfenstein's psychobiographical study, from hip-hop culture to gender and racial politics, Dyson cuts a critical swathe through both the idolization and the vicious caricatures that have undermined appreciation of Malcolm's greatest accomplishments.

A rare and important book, Making Malcolm casts new light not only on the life and career of a seminal black leader, but on the aspirations and passions of the growing numbers who have seized on his life for insight and inspiration.

Barack Obama is widely considered one of the most powerful and charismatic speakers of our age. Without missing a beat, he often moves between Washington insider talk and culturally Black ways of speaking--as shown in a famous YouTube clip, where Obama declined the change offered to him by a Black cashier in a Washington, D.C. restaurant with the phrase, "Nah, we straight."
In Articulate While Black, two renowned scholars of Black Language address language and racial politics in the U.S. through an insightful examination of President Barack Obama's language use--and America's response to it. In this eloquently written and powerfully argued book, H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman provide new insights about President Obama and the relationship between language and race in contemporary society. Throughout, they analyze several racially loaded, cultural-linguistic controversies involving the President--from his use of Black Language and his "articulateness" to his "Race Speech," the so-called "fist-bump," and his relationship to Hip Hop Culture.
Using their analysis of Barack Obama as a point of departure, Alim and Smitherman reveal how major debates about language, race, and educational inequality erupt into moments of racial crisis in America. In challenging American ideas about language, race, education, and power, they help take the national dialogue on race to the next level. In much the same way that Cornel West revealed nearly two decades ago that "race matters," Alim and Smitherman in this groundbreaking book show how deeply "language matters" to the national conversation on race--and in our daily lives.

Our generation made hip-hop. But hip-hop also made us. Why are suburban kids referring to their subdivision as "block"? Why has the pimp become a figure of male power? Why has dodging the feds become an act of honor long after one has made millions as a legitimate artist? What happens when fantasy does more harm than reality?--"From the Introduction"
Hip-hop culture has been in the mainstream for years. Suburban teens take their fashion cues from Diddy and expect to have Three 6 Mafia play their sweet-sixteen parties. From the "Boogie Down Bronx" to the heartland, hip-hop's influence is major. But has the movement taken a wrong turn? In "Beats Rhymes and Life," hot journalists Kenji Jasper and Ytasha Womack have focused on what they consider to be the most prominent symbols of the genre: the fan, the turntable, the ice, the dance floor, the shell casing, the buzz, the tag, the whip, the ass, the stiletto, the (pimp's) cane, the coffin, the cross, and the corner. Each is the focus of an essay by a journalist who skillfully dissects what their chosen symbol means to them and to the hip-hop community.The collection also features many original interviews with some of rap's biggest stars talking candidly about how they connect to the culture and their fans. With a foreword by the renowned scholar Michael Eric Dyson, "Beats Rhymes and Life" is an innovative and daring look at the state of the hip-hop nation.

A private citizen who transformed the world around him, Martin Luther King, Jr., was arguably the greatest American who ever lived. Now, after more than thirty years, few people understand how truly radical he was. In this groundbreaking examination of the man and his legacy, provocative author, lecturer, and professor Michael Eric Dyson restores King's true vitality and complexity and challenges us to embrace the very contradictions that make King relevant in today's world.