Publisher description

The essential guide to being smart about money and investing Blue Chip Kids: What Every Child (and Parent) Should Know About Money, Investing, and the Stock Market is a fun and easy-to-understand introduction to the world of money and investing for kids and parents. Frustrated by the lack of entertaining financial teaching materials for his 13-year-old son, this book is the result of a father’s commitment to pass on one of life’s most important skills. Written by David W. Bianchi—an investor and lawyer with an economics degree from Tufts University—this hands-on resource demystifies the basic principles about money matters and shows what it takes to spend, save, and invest wisely. Filled with simple examples and numerous illustrations, this easy-to-read book discusses money and investing in 100 bite-size topics. For every parent who wants their children to develop the skills to invest wisely and become responsible money managers, regular savers, and to earn money while they sleep, this book is a must-have.

Black Picket Fences is a stark, moving, and candid look at a section of America that is too often ignored by both scholars and the media: the black middle class. The result of living for three years in "Groveland," a black middle-class neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, sociologist Mary Pattillo-McCoy has written a book that explores both the advantages and the boundaries that exist for members of the black middle class. Despite arguments that race no longer matters, Pattillo-McCoy shows a different reality, one where black and white middle classes remain separate and unequal. "An insightful look at the socio-economic experiences of the black middle class. . . . Through the prism of a South Side Chicago neighborhood, the author shows the distinctly different reality middle-class blacks face as opposed to middle-class whites." —Ebony "A detailed and well-written account of one neighborhood's struggle to remain a haven of stability and prosperity in the midst of the cyclone that is the American economy." —Emerge

Runyon Heights, a community in Yonkers, New York, has been populated by middle-class African Americans for nearly a century. This book—the first history of a black middle-class community—tells the story of Runyon Heights, which sheds light on the process of black suburbanization and the ways in which residential development in the suburbs has been shaped by race and class. Relying on both interviews with residents and archival research, Bruce D. Haynes describes the progressive stages in the life of the community and its inhabitants and the factors that enabled it to form in the first place and to develop solidarity, identity and political consciousness. He shows how residents came to recognize common political interests within the community, how racial consciousness provided an axis for social solidarity as well as partial insulation from racial slights, and how the suburb afforded these middle-class residents a degree of physical and social distance from the ghetto. As Haynes explores the history of Runyon Heights, we learn the ways in which its black middle class dealt with the tensions between the political interests of race and the material interests of class.

As Karyn R. Lacy's innovative work in the suburbs of Washington, DC, reveals, there is a continuum of middle-classness among blacks, ranging from lower-middle class to middle-middle class to upper-middle class. Focusing on the latter two, Lacy explores an increasingly important social and demographic group: middle-class blacks who live in middle-class suburbs where poor blacks are not present. These "blue-chip black" suburbanites earn well over fifty thousand dollars annually and work in predominantly white professional environments. Lacy examines the complicated sense of identity that individuals in these groups craft to manage their interactions with lower-class blacks, middle-class whites, and other middle-class blacks as they seek to reap the benefits of their middle-class status.

Poetry. LGBT Studies. Native American Studies. Chip Livingston confronts and immerses himself into new cultural territories in his second poetry collection, CROW-BLUE, CROW-BLACK, an examination-critical, colloquial, and personal-of identity in terms of geography, experience, and blood quantum. A southern, gay, mixed-blood poet is thrust into the big-city literary life of the New York School artists in Greenwich Village, yet finds "home" in Uruguay with an Argentinean. CROW-BLUE, CROW-BLACK crosses traditional Native American narrative and incantatory styles with the quick-witted street poems of the New York School. It crosses the border into the southern hemisphere and bears witness to the influence of the Rio de la Plata, the grand capitols of Montevideo and Buenos Aires on its shores. From rural coastal roots to urban urgency and back to the rhythm of rivers and ocean, CROW-BLUE, CROW-BLACK maps the continents of the Americas.

In this "important book, significant because it highlights the diversity and richness of Afro-American intellectual life" ("New York Times Book Review"), William Banks offers a centuries-deep analysis of black life in America, from the days of slavery and oppression to intellectuals of the modern age such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Toni Morrison, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Photos.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An urgent primer on race and racism, from the host of the viral hit video series “Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man” “You cannot fix a problem you do not know you have.” So begins Emmanuel Acho in his essential guide to the truths Americans need to know to address the systemic racism that has recently electrified protests in all fifty states. “There is a fix,” Acho says. “But in order to access it, we’re going to have to have some uncomfortable conversations.” In Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man, Acho takes on all the questions, large and small, insensitive and taboo, many white Americans are afraid to ask—yet which all Americans need the answers to, now more than ever. With the same open-hearted generosity that has made his video series a phenomenon, Acho explains the vital core of such fraught concepts as white privilege, cultural appropriation, and “reverse racism.” In his own words, he provides a space of compassion and understanding in a discussion that can lack both. He asks only for the reader’s curiosity—but along the way, he will galvanize all of us to join the antiracist fight.

Clay Tumey conducted a series of bank robberies throughout 2006 before calling it quits soon after the birth of his son. Jett was still a baby when his father went to jail. Growing up, visits with Daddy meant buying Cool Ranch Doritos or blue chips as he called them because of their blue bag from the vending machines and snacking together. Jett didn t realize that the blue chip store was actually prison. "The Blue Chip Store" details the life of a class clown who rarely saw the need to submit to authority as a child. And when those childhood patterns resurfaced as an adult, they only presented bigger problems with greater consequences. For most people, the distinction between prison and freedom is obvious. For Clay, however, the journey to true freedom began with a set of handcuffs. A true story about crime, prison, and second chances, "The Blue Chip Store" is about finding freedom in captivity."

Land of the Cosmic Race is a richly-detailed ethnographic account of the powerful role that race and color play in organizing the lives and thoughts of ordinary Mexicans. It presents a previously untold story of how individuals in contemporary urban Mexico construct their identities, attitudes, and practices in the context of a dominant national belief system. The book centers around Mexicans' engagement with three racialized pillars of Mexican national ideology - the promotion of race mixture, the assertion of an absence of racism in the country, and the marginalization of blackness in Mexico. The subjects of this book are mestizos - the mixed-race people of Mexico who are of Indigenous, African, and European ancestry and the intended consumers of this national ideology. Land of the Cosmic Race illustrates how Mexican mestizos navigate the sea of contradictions that arise when their everyday lived experiences conflict with the national stance and how they manage these paradoxes in a way that upholds, protects, and reproduces the national ideology. Drawing on a year of participant observation, over 110 interviews, and focus-groups from Veracruz, Mexico, Christina A. Sue offers rich insight into the relationship between race-based national ideology and the attitudes and behaviors of mixed-race Mexicans. Most importantly, she theorizes as to why elite-based ideology not only survives but actually thrives within the popular understandings and discourse of those over whom it is designed to govern.