Yearning

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Phillip Brian Harper

In 1995, popular anxieties about black masculinity became evident in public reactions to the conclusion of the OJ Simpson trial and the Million Man March on Washington. The nation's divided response to the OJ verdict, together with the controversy surrounding Louis Farrakhan's call to black men to come together for a "day of atonement", brought issues of race and gender to the forefront of national debate. In his timely and incisive book Are We Not Men? Phillip Brian Harper explores issues of race and representation and shows that ideas about black masculinity have always played a troubled role both in the formation of African-American identity and in the mass media at large. Using examples from a variety of cultural contests, ranging from sports and pop music to literature and television, Harper shows the ways in which narrow definitions of black manhood have failed to acknowledge real differences within the African-American community - to grave social and political effect.

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Rosa Hernández Sheets, Etta R. Hollins

"This book brings together authors from education and psychology to link racial and ethnic identity to human development and school practices. Racial and ethnic identity issues are brought directly to schooling, so that teaching-learning experiences, psychological services, and counseling practices within the educational process can be made more effective for a greater number of students. Current research and best practices from psychology, educational leadership, counseling, teacher preparation, and classroom teaching are presented. The goal of this book is to help researchers, practitioners, and graduate students to interpret and contextualize relevant research and theory, and to bridge theory into practice."--BOOK JACKET.

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Dinaw Mengestu

Two young friends join an uprising against Uganda's corrupt regime in the early 1970s. As the line blurs between idealism and violence, one of them flees for his life.

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Daniel Walker Howe

Daniel Howe considers the ideas Americans once had about a proper construction of the self. Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Horace Bushnell, Horace Mann, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, William Ellery Channing, Dorothea Dix, Frederick Douglass, among others, engaged in discussion about the composition of human nature, the motivation of human behavior, and what can be done about the social problems these create. They shared a common model of human psychology, in which powerful but base passions must be mastered by reason in the service of virtue. How to accomplish this was often itself a subject of passionate controversy. The story reveals that Americans both distrusted individual autonomy and were enthusiastic about it; passions, reason, and moral sense collided on how to manage it. Howe is empathetic to all the quests - for elites and artisans, blacks and women - seeing in them a basic pursuit of identity. The author demonstrates that aspirations for "self-control" and "self-discipline," grounded in conservatism and evangelical Christianity, also shaped movements that branched leftward to promote social welfare, feminism, and civil rights. The desire for personal autonomy and self-construction is a historical bedrock of the nation's ethos.