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Book Summaries

bell hooks – ‘Teaching to Transgress’. In this book, hook presents her philosophy of the classroom and her conception of education as a practice of freedom – in which students transgress against racial, sexual, and class boundaries to become more fully free. Heavily influenced by the likes of Paulo Freire and Frantz Fanon, but much more accessible to your average reader, hooks presents us with new ways of thinking about theory and practice both in and outside of the classroom. (Rest in Power O7).

Charles Cobb Jr. – ‘This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed’. Pushing back against prevailing narratives of the “nonviolent” civil rights movement, this book shows us the crucial role played by firearms, and those who were willing and able to use them, in the black liberation movement in the US. Drawing on his own experiences at the time, as well as those of others, Cobb gives voice to the black gun owners who aided the movement – who patrolled their neighbourhoods, garrisoned their homes, and formed armed self-defence groups to protect themselves and others from the violence of white supremacy.

Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields – ‘Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life’. Most people assume that racism grows from a perception of human difference: the physical features that supposedly make up “race” give rise to the practice of racism. Sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields argue otherwise: There is no scientific basis for racism or in fact race, but the practice of racism produces the illusion of race, through what they call “racecraft.” So pervasive are the devices of racecraft in American history, economic doctrine, politics, and everyday thinking that the presence of racecraft itself goes unnoticed.

Gerald Horne – ‘The Dawning of the Apocalypse’. Gerald Horne’s new history of early colonialism, white supremacy, enslavement, and capitalism, during the "long 16th Century" reveals to us how structures of racism were constructed to support the development of capitalism. Horne traces the rise of "whiteness" as a reaction to the threat imposed by Muslim conquerors in North Africa and the Mediterranean and, later, the fierce resistance from Africans and Indigenes to the colonial endeavours of European powers that would weaken Spain and enable London to dispatch settlers to Virginia in 1607 – laying the groundwork for what would eventually become the United States of America that we know today.