Missionaries of the left, saviors are people of privilege who believe they have all the answers. They want to help, but don’t want to listen; they lead but never follow. From post-Katrina New Orleans, to anti-sex-traficking work, to do-gooder journalists, Flaherty’s book reveals saviors’ misdeeds but also shows how activists can build new, stronger movements.

Organizers, activists, artists and community members share their struggles in New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina.Floodlines is a firsthand account of community, culture, and resistance in New Orleans. The book weaves the stories of gay rappers, Mardi Gras Indians, Arab and Latino immigrants, public housing residents, and grassroots activists in the years before and after Katrina. From post-Katrina evacuee camps to torture testimony at Angola Pri...

Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six is firsthand journalism of struggles for justice and liberation in New Orleans. The book weaves together the stories of queer rappers, immigrant organizers, public housing residents, and grassroots activists in the years before and after Katrina. From post-Katrina evacuee camps and Angola Prison to the family members who laid the ground for Black Lives Matter, Floodlines is a people's history of a crucial time and p...

"A perfect gift for the age of Trump." - Robin D. G. Kelley, Author, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination"In this marvelous, enormously instructive book, Jordan Flaherty explores how we too often allow the struggle for change to be undermined by would-be saviors—and how today’s grassroots social movements, led by communities on the frontlines of crisis, are charting a far more powerful path forward." – Naomi Klein, Author, This Changes Everything and ...

“Roxane Gay is so great at weaving the intimate and personal with what is most bewildering and upsetting at this moment in culture. She is always looking, always thinking, always passionate, always careful, always right there.” — Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?A New York Times BestsellerBest Book of the Year: NPR • Boston Globe • Newsweek • Time Out New York • Oprah.com •

How the government has used the Constitution to deny black Americans their legal rightsFrom the arrival of the first twenty slaves in Jamestown to the Howard Beach Incident of 1986, Yusef Hawkins, and Rodney King, federal law enforcement has pleaded lack of authority against white violence while endorsing surveillance of black rebels and using “constitutional” military force against them. In this groundbreaking study, constitutional scholar Mary Frances Berry analy...

'Every voice raised against racism chips away at its power. We can't afford to stay silent. This book is an attempt to speak'*Updated edition featuring a new afterword*The book that sparked a national conversation. Exploring everything from eradicated black history to the inextricable link between class and race, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race is the essential handbook for anyone who wants to understand race r...

"A hard-hitting sermon on the racial divide, directed specifically to a white congregation." — Kirkus Reviews, starred reviewA New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe BestsellerAs the country grapples with racial division at a level not seen since the 1960s, Michael Eric Dyson's voice is heard above the rest. In Tears We Cannot Stop, a provocative and deeply pe...

**NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In his final years, one of America’s greatest writers envisioned a book about his three assassinated friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. His deeply personal notes for the project had never been published before acclaimed filmmaker Raoul Peck mined them to compose his Academy Award-nominated documentary.“Thrilling…. A portrait of one man’s confrontation with a country that, murder by murder, as he once put it, ‘devastated my universe.’” ...

A deeply reported book that brings alive the quest for justice in the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Freddie Gray, offering both unparalleled insight into the reality of police violence in America and an intimate, moving portrait of those working to end it.Conducting hundreds of interviews during the course of over one year reporting on the ground, Washington Post writer Wesley Lowery traveled from Ferguson, Missouri, to Cleveland, Ohio; Charlest...

“Caroline is a breakthrough—a story so grounded in the ordinary details of life that it almost seems to have discovered a new genre.” –Richard Zoglin, Time“Acute, smart and witty: a telling snapshot focusing with sharp clarity on characters captured at a fraught turning point in history—a culture’s and a family’s.” –Charles Isherwood, Variety“Thrilling. You’ve never seen anything quite like Caroline, or Change and likely won’t again anyti...

The New York Times bestseller, these groundbreaking essays and poems about race—collected by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward and written by the most important voices of her generation—are “thoughtful, searing, and at times, hopeful. The Fire This Time is vivid proof that words are important, because of their power to both cleanse and to clarify” (USA TODAY).In this bestselling, widely lauded collection, Jesmyn Ward gathers our most...