Social Science : African-American Studies

Terrie Williams knows that Black people are hurting. She knows because she's one of them. Terrie had made it: she had launched her own public relations company with such clients as Eddie Murphy and Johnnie Cochran. Yet she was in constant pain, waking up in terror, overeating in search of relief. For thirty years she kept on her game face of success, exhausting herself daily to satisfy her clients' needs while neglecting her own. Terrie finally collapsed, staying in bed for days. She had no clue what was wrong or if there was a way out. She had hit rock bottom and she needed and got help. She learned her problem had a name -- depression -- and that many suffered from it, limping through their days, hiding their hurt. As she healed, her mission became clear: break the silence of this crippling taboo and help those who suffer. Black Pain identifies emotional pain -- which uniquely and profoundly affects the Black experience -- as the root of lashing out through desperate acts of crime, violence, drug and alcohol abuse, eating disorders, workaholism, and addiction to shopping, gambling, and sex. Few realize these destructive acts are symptoms of our inner sorrow. Black people are dying. Everywhere we turn, in the faces we see and the headlines we read, we feel in our gut that something is wrong, but we don't know what it is. It's time to recognize it and work through our trauma. In Black Pain, Terrie has inspired the famous and the ordinary to speak out and mental health professionals to offer solutions. The book is a mirror turned on you. Do you see yourself and your loved ones here? Do the descriptions of how the pain looks, feels, and sounds seem far too familiar? Now you can do something about it. Stop suffering. The help the community needs is here: a clear explanation of our troubles and a guide to finding relief through faith, therapy, diet, and exercise, as well as through building a supportive network (and eliminating toxic people). Black Pain more...

Price: $17.99

With an all-star cast of contributors, the Black Studies Reader takes on the history and future of this multi-faceted academic field. more...

Price: $39.95

"Blackness without Ethnicity" draws on 15 years of Livio Sansone's research in Bahia, Rio Suriname and Amsterdam. Sansone uses his findings to explore the very different ways that race and ethnicity are constructed in Brazil and the rest of Latin America. more...

Price: $75.00

James Weldon Johnson (June 17, 1871 – June 26, 1938) was an American author, politician, critic, journalist, poet, anthologist, educator, lawyer, songwriter, early civil rights activist, and prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson is best remembered for his writing, which includes novels, poems, and collections of folklore. He was also one of the first African-American professors at New York University. Later in life he was a Professor of Creative Literature and Writing at Fisk University. During his six-year stay in South America he completed his most famous book The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man which was published anonymously in 1912. It was only in 1927 that Johnson admitted his authorship - stressing that it was not a work of autobiography but mostly fictional. Other works include The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925), Black Manhattan (1930), his exploration of the contribution of African-Americans to the cultural scene of New York, and Negro Americans, What Now? (1934), a book calling for civil rights for African Americans. Johnson was also an accomplished anthologist. Johnson's anthologies provided inspiration, encouragement, and recognition to the new generation of artists who would create the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. Adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Weldon_Johnson under the terms of the GNU-FDL] more...

Price: $6.99

With a historian's grasp of events and a novelist's ear for story, Fergus M. Bordewich has written a grand epic of American history -- focusing on the sixty years leading up to the Civil War, which brought to a climax the country's bitter division. But its beginnings can be traced to a clandestine alliance of both black and white abolitionists and slaves, who joined forces to lead tens of thousands of enslaved Americans to freedom in a movement that occupies a legendary place in the nation's imagination, but about which little has been known until now. more...

Price: $11.95