NEW ABOLITIONIST BOOKS

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The Invention of the White Race

Racial Oppression and Social Control
Theodore W. Allen
[Verso 1994] Volume 1

First of a two volume study by a former contributing editor of RACE TRAITOR.

List: $20
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The Invention of the White Race

The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America
Theodore W. Allen
[Verso 1997] Volume 2

"Here is an instance where less is more. "Origin" has the desired specificity, as in Darwin's title, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, and Engels', The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. In choosing this sub-title, I meant it to be consistent with the argument of the book, which shows class struggle to have been the origin of racial oppression, rather than ascribing racial oppression to "natural" and/or pre-American "prejudices" as proposed by Carl Degler and Winthrop Jordan, for example."

Theodore W. Allen

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The Shaping of Black America

Lerone Bennett, Jr.
[Penguin 1993]

"A comprehensive developmental history of the African-American struggle for autonomy and power."

George Lipsitz

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Black Reconstruction in America

W.E.B. Du Bois
[Atheneum 1995]

A classic work from W.E.B. Du Bois.

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John Brown: A Biography

W.E.B. Du Bois
[M.E. Sharpe 1997]

W.E.B. Du Bois's classic biography of the abolitionist John Brown.

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White Women, Race Matters

Ruth Frankenburg
[U.Minn. 1993]

"Frankenburg notes that race shapes white women's lives both through the material conditions of their lives and through their conscious and unconscious identity and worldview. Quoting Antonio Gramsci, "The consciousness of what one really is [entails] 'knowing thyself' as a product of the historial process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory," Frankenburg see this book as the beginning of an inventory of whiteness as subjective terrain... a valuable contribution to the white feminist discussion of racism and white skin privilege which has been dominated either by denial or by guilt-ridden personal or collective brow beating."

Maryon Gray, RACE TRAITOR #3

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White By Law The Legal Construction of Race

Ian Haney-Lopez
[NYU 1996] cloth

List: $25
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How the Irish Became White

Noel Ignatiev
[Routledge 1995]

"In the mid-nineteenth century, Irish Catholic immigrants and African Americans (both slave and free) were exploited and despised by Northern and Southern capitalists. United, this biracial proletariat might have broken the chains of both chattel and wage slavery. However, their fatal division ensured the triumph of plutocracy, as well as racism, in both North and South. Written with insight, passion, and sympathy for the Irish and Blacks alike, Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White is an important and stimulating study of the tragic origins and consequences of white ethnic, working-class race prejudice in American Society."

Kerby A. Miller
Professor of History
University of Missouri-Columbia

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Race Traitor Anthology

Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, Editors
[Routledge 1996]

Winner of the 1997 American Book Awards from the Before Columbus Foundation, the anthology contains selections from the first five issues of the journal RACE TRAITOR.

"...when inherited "left" wisdom is revealed as not merely inadequate but a barrier to accomplishing the tasks before us, we have turned to the most radical of all indigenous American traditions - that of John Brown and the 19th-century abolitionists. They, in their day, risked fame and fortune to abolish slavery and racial oppression. We, with little fame or fortune to worry about, seek to move the question of race explicitly to the center of the political stage, and to argue that nothing less than the abolition of the white race will lay the foundation for a new departure... Right now, the only people who seem to hate the meanness of everyday life enough to risk something to change it are in the camp identified as right-wing and even fascist. We can imagine nothing more likely to offer an alternative to those forces than an assault on whiteness and all its ways, by a force including a detachment of renegades - race traitors - who believe that a new world, and nothing less, is worth fighting for."

- Introduction

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Love and Theft Blackface Minstrelsy
and the American Working Class

Eric Lott
[Oxford 1995]

"Love and Theft is a fascinating and provocative account of the multiple meanings that one can read in the history of blackface minstrelsy. As such, it may offer us insights into comtemporary race relations in American life. And New Abolitionists and others concerned with deconstructing contemporary forms of whiteness and the structures of white supremacy may find a great many uses for lott's book by adapting his analysis of nineteenth century white racial feeling to the present... From Elvis to Vanilla Ice, a significant part of the history of rock'n'roll resembles the history of blackface, an ambiguous history of love and theft. As Lott repeatedly, often brilliantly demonstrates, race relations, like all social and cultural relations, are enormouslt complex and contradictory in nature."

Matt Wray, RACE TRAITOR #5

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Parish Boundaries The Catholic Encounter
with Race in the Twentieth Century Urban North

John McGreevy
[Chicago 1996] cloth

"The still world of urban Catholicism was shattered by two developments - the eruption of the Civil Rights Movement and its eventual movement north and the onvocation of the Second Vatican Council. All but overnight, nothing seemed as it was and was always intended to be. Priests were being arrested; nuns were marching; families were being "upset." Perhaps worst of all, there "traitors" in the family... McGreevy balances ahis deeply critical assessment of the complicity of the parish world in the maintenance of race boundaries with an acknowledgement of the ways in which parishes sustained rich communities of faith and mutual support and expresses a hope that parish communities might be reconstituted on a more inclusive basis."

John Garvey, RACE TRAITOR #7

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Black Wealth/White Wealth
A New Perspective on Racial Inequality

Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro
[Routledge 1995]

"Oliver and Shapiro have written a very fine book. They argue, convincingly, that the true extent of the discrepancy in life circumstances for blacks and whites in America is not revealed by familiar comparsions of income - especially when those comparsions suggest that the gap is narrowing. Instead. they suggest that wealth (measured not by savings account balances or stocks and bonds but, most important, by assets such as homes) reveals far more... The book is indispensable."

John Garvey, RACE TRAITOR #7

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Wages of Whiteness

David Roediger
[Verso 1991]

"David Roediger... explores the problem of white ideology, with specific attention to the working class. He asks "why the white working class settles for being white" and finds the answer in Du Bois's notion of the "public and psychological wage." The "pleasures of whiteness could function as a wage" which led "many workers [to] define themselves as white." To trace the evolution and effects of that wage is the task of The Wages of Whiteness".

Noel Ignatiev
How the Irish Became White
[Routledge 1995]

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Towards the Abolition of Whiteness

David Roediger
[Verso 1994]

"David Roediger has emerged as the leading analyst, critic and interpreter of the role of 'whiteness' in US history and culture. His carefully researched and historically grounded writing shows us that white racism has been a central force in US history, and a key component of Euro-American identity, not just an aberration in an otherwise color-blind society."

George Lipsitz

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The Rise and Fall of the White Republic

Alex Saxton
[Verso 1990]

"[Saxton] sees little difficulty in understanding how the theory of white superiority arose out of the need to vindicate a class of people that grew rich from the slave trade, slavery, and the expropriation of land from nonwhite populations; the more formidable problem is to explain why nonslaveholding whites acquiesed either in planter dominance or its justifications. The Rise and Fall, then is a study of the role of white supremacy in legitimating the changing class coalitions that ruled the U.S. in the nineteenth century."

Noel Ignatiev
How the Irish Became White
[Routledge 1995]

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Memoir of a Race Traitor

Mab Segrest
[South End 1994]

"Mab Segrest, a lesbian born and raised in Alabama, was a leader in the fight against the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist movements in North Carolina during the 1980's. This book is her memoir of that time. But more than that it is a sharing of her search to discover who she is and how she came to believe and act as she does. I recommend it as both a personal and a political memoir."

Maryon Gray, RACE TRAITOR #4

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Turning Back The Retreat from Racial Justice
in American Thought and Policy

Stephen Steinberg
[Beacon 1995]

"A history of social science writing on race relations over the past half-century, by the author of
The Ethnic Myth (1981). The focus is on liberal orthodoxy, beginning with Gunnar Myrdal's classic, An American Dilemma, and going up to the recent back-pedaling by liberals in the face of what the author calls the "scholarship of backlash."

Noel Ignatiev, RACE TRAITOR #6

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Ahead of Her Time Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery

Dorothy Sterling
[Norton 1991]

"Those of us who identify ourselves as new abolitionists need more than anything else to know about our predecessors - not merely the resolutions they passed at conventions (that information is easy to obtain) but the details of their day-today work: what their meetings were like, how they raised money, their relation to the vigilance committees and other ad hoc groups, members' responsibilities, how they divided tasks, how they sustained themselves through periods of disappointment, etc. This biography by Dorthy Sterling does more to open a window on these questions than any other generally available book I know of."

Noel Ignatiev, RACE TRAITOR #6

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Sacred Hunger

Barry Unsworth
[Norton 1992]

"Rarely does a novelist succeed in capturing the spirit of an entire historical age in one work. Rarer still is the novel whose account of our past forces us to face the character of our present society and demands that we take action to change it. Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger is such a novel."

Adam Sabra, RACE TRAITOR #6

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Still the Promised City African-Americans
and New Immigrants in Postindustrial New York

Roger Waldinger
[Harvard 1996] cloth

"In this finely detailed work, Waldinger illuminates the ways in which jobs are distributed in New York City. He asks and answers the questions: Who gets the Good Jobs, and Who gets the Lousy Jobs? People get good jobs and bad jobs in the same way - through the social networks they are part of. The only difference is that just about anyone can be a part of the social network for bad jobs but only white men can be part of the social network for the good ones."

John Garvey, RACE TRAITOR #7

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