"I am Black," Jane Lazarre's son tells her. "I have a Jewish mother, but I am not 'biracial.' That term is meaningless to me." In this moving memoir, Jane Lazarre, the white Jewish mother of now adult Black sons, offers a powerful meditation on motherhood and racism in America as she tells the story of how she came to understand the experiences of her African American husband, their growing sons, and their extended family. Recounting her education, as a wife, mother, and scholar-teacher, into the realities of African American life, Lazarre shows how although racism and white privilege lie at the heart of American history and culture, any of us can comprehend the experience of another through empathy and learning. This Twentieth Anniversary Edition features a new preface, in which Lazarre's elegy for Mother Emanuel AME in Charleston, South Carolina, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and so many others, reminds us of the continued resonance of race in American life. As #BlackLivesMatter gains momentum, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness is more urgent and essential than ever.

Critics often characterize white consumption of African American culture as a form of theft that echoes the fantasies of 1950s-era bohemians, or "White Negroes," who romanticized black culture as anarchic and sexually potent. In Beyond the White Negro, Kimberly Chabot Davis claims such a view fails to describe the varied politics of racial crossover in the past fifteen years. Davis analyzes how white engagement with African American novels, film narratives, and hip-hop can help form anti-racist attitudes that may catalyze social change and racial justice. Though acknowledging past failures to establish cross-racial empathy, she focuses on examples that show avenues for future progress and change. Her study of ethnographic data from book clubs and college classrooms shows how engagement with African American culture and pedagogical support can lead to the kinds of white self-examination that make empathy possible. The result is a groundbreaking text that challenges the trend of focusing on society's failures in achieving cross-racial empathy and instead explores possible avenues for change.

People of color are eager for white people to deal with their racial ignorance. White people are desperate for an affirmative role in racial justice. Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness helps with conversations the nation is, just now, finally starting to have.

Beyond White Mindfulness: Critical Perspectives on Racism, Well-being, and Liberation brings together interdisciplinary perspectives on mind-body interventions, group-based identities, and social justice. Marshalling both empirical data and theoretical approaches, the book examines a broad range of questions related to mindfulness, meditation, and diverse communities. While there is growing public interest in mind-body health, holistic wellness, and contemplative practice, critical research examining on these topics featuring minority perspectives and experiences is relatively rare. This book draws on cutting edge insights from psychology, sociology, gender, and, critical race theory to fill this void. Major themes include culture, identity, and awareness; intersectional approaches to the study of mindfulness and minority stress; cultural competence in developing and teaching mindfulness-based health interventions, and the complex relationships between mindfulness, inequality, and social justice. The first book of its kind to bring together scholarly and personal reflections on mindfulness for diverse populations, Beyond White Mindfulness offers social science students and practitioners in this area a new perspective on mindfulness and suggestions for future scholarship.

How have ideas about white women figured in the history of racism? Vron Ware argues that they have been central, and that feminism has, in many ways, developed as a political movement within racist societies. Dissecting the different meanings of femininity and womanhood, Beyond the Pale examines the political connections between black and white women, both within contemporary racism and feminism, as well as in historical examples like the anti-slavery movement and the British campaign against lynching in the United States. Beyond the Pale is a major contribution to anti-racist work, confronting the historical meanings of whiteness as a way of overcoming the moralism that so often infuses anti-racist movements.

"I am Black," Jane Lazarre's son tells her. "I have a Jewish mother, but I am not 'biracial.' That term is meaningless to me." She understands, she says--but he tells her, gently, that he doesn't think so, that she can't understand this completely because she is white. Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness is Jane Lazarre's memoir of coming to terms with this painful truth, of learning to look into the nature of whiteness in a way that passionately informs the connections between herself and her family. A moving account of life in a biracial family, this book is a powerful meditation on motherhood and racism in America, the story of an education into the realities of African American culture. Lazarre has spent over twenty-five years living in a Black American family, married to an African American man, birthing and raising two sons. A teacher of African American literature, she has been influenced by an autobiographical tradition that is characterized by a speaking out against racism and a grounding of that expression in one's own experience--an overlapping of the stories of one's own life and the world. Like the stories of that tradition, Lazarre's is a recovery of memories that come together in this book with a new sense of meaning. From a crucial moment in which consciousness is transformed, to recalling and accepting the nature and realities of whiteness, each step describes an aspect of her internal and intellectual journey. Recalling events that opened her eyes to her sons' and husband's experience as Black Americans--an operation, turned into a horrific nightmare by a doctor's unconscious racism or the jarring truths brought home by a visit to an exhibit on slavery at the Richmond Museum of the Confederacy--or her own revealing missteps, Lazarre describes a movement from silence to voice, to a commitment to action, and to an appreciation of the value of a fluid, even ambiguous, identity. It is a coming of age that permits a final retelling of family history and family reunion. With her skill as a novelist and her experience as a teacher, Jane Lazarre has crafted a narrative as compelling as it is telling. It eloquently describes the author's delight at being accepted into her husband's family and attests to the power of motherhood. And as personal as this story is, it is a remarkably incisive account of how perceptions of racial difference lie at the heart of the history and culture of America.

Katie discovers that the valley behind her grandmother's garden is more mysterious than it seems. After tumbling into tenth-century England and encountering Saint Edith of Wilton along with her wild animal menagerie, she is helped home, wondering whether her adventure was truly real. But after Katie, her cousins, and a neighborhood friend are drawn back in time once again, she realizes her grandmother's garden gate is a portal into faraway worlds, where patron saints are real people making real-life decisions.Join Katie and her cousins as they mingle with Rachel and Jacob, meet Saint Mary Magdalene up close, trek across the sand with the matriarchs Naomi and Ruth, and have a nail-biting adventure with the heroic Saint Katherine of Alexandria. In seeing the richness of the family of God, they glimpse how very much they are a part of it all.A chapter book for ages 9 to 15

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Outside the Whale1. Otherworldly Knowledge: Toward a "Language of Perspicuous Contrast"2. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? The Political Morality of Investigating Whiteness in the Gray Zone3. Seeing through Skin/Seeing through Epidermalization4. Wagner and Power Chords: Skinheadism, White Power Music, and the Internet5. Mothers of Invention: Good Hearts, Intelligent Minds, and Subversive Acts6. Syncopated Synergy: Dance, Embodiment, and the Call of the Jitterbug7. Ghosts, Trails, and Bones: Circuits of Memory and Traditions of Resistance8. Out of Sight: Southern Music and the Coloring of Sound9. Room with a ViewNotesIndex Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

A physician's "provocative" (Boston Globe) and "timely" (Ibram X. Kendi, New York Times Book Review) account of how right-wing backlash policies have deadly consequences -- even for the white voters they promise to help. In election after election, conservative white Americans have embraced politicians who pledge to make their lives great again. But as physician Jonathan M. Metzl shows in Dying of Whiteness, the policies that result actually place white Americans at ever-greater risk of sickness and death. Interviewing a range of everyday Americans, Metzl examines how racial resentment has fueled progun laws in Missouri, resistance to the Affordable Care Act in Tennessee, and cuts to schools and social services in Kansas. He shows these policies' costs: increasing deaths by gun suicide, falling life expectancies, and rising dropout rates. Now updated with a new afterword, Dying of Whiteness demonstrates how much white America would benefit by emphasizing cooperation rather than chasing false promises of supremacy. Winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award

George Yancy gathers white scholarship that dwells on the experience of whiteness as a problem without sidestepping the question's implications for Black people or people of color. This unprecedented reversion of the "Black problem" narrative challenges contemporary rhetoric of a color-evasive world in a critically engaging and persuasive study.