Lamar Public Library

"In Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man, Acho takes on all the questions, large and small, insensitive and taboo, many white Americans are afraid to ask--yet which all Americans need the answers to, now more than ever. With the same open-hearted generosity that has made his video series a phenomenon, Acho explains the vital core of such fraught concepts as white privilege, cultural appropriation, and "reverse racism." In his own words, he...

""The only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it -- and then dismantle it." Ibram X. Kendi's concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America -- but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an...

A serial murderer called the Indian Killer is terrorizing Seattle, hunting and scalping white men and adorning their bodies with owl feathers. As the city is paralyzed with fear and racial brutality skyrockets, a prime suspect emerges--John Smith. Born to Indian parents but raised by white parents, Smith yearns for his lost heritage.

"Raised in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens--improbably smack in the middle of downtown L.A.--the narrator of The Sellout resigned himself to the fate of all other middle-class Californians: "to die in the same bedroom you'd grown up in, looking up at the crack in the stucco ceiling that had been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist at Riverside Community College, he spent his childhood as the subject in psychological...

Americans like to insist that we are living in a postracial, color-blind society. In fact, racist thought is alive and well; it has simply become more sophisticated and more insidious. And as historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas in this country have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit. Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course...

The New York Times Bestseller!

"An absolute page turner, I'm Not Dying with You Tonight is a compelling and powerful novel that is sure to make an impact. " —Angie Thomas, New York Times bestselling author of The Hate U Give

An NAACP Image Award Nominee, I'm Not Dying with You Tonight follows two teen girls—one black, one white—who have to confront their own assumptions about racial inequality

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"From the New York Times bestselling author of Tears We Cannot Stop, a passionate call to America to finally reckon with race and start the journey to redemption. The night of May 25, 2020 changed America. George Floyd, a 43-year-old Black man, was killed during an arrest in Minneapolis when a white cop suffocated him. The video of that night's events went viral, sparking the largest protests in the nation's history and the sort of social unrest we...

For more than three centuries, slave ships carried millions of people from the coasts of Africa to the New World. Here, award-winning historian Rediker creates a detailed history of these vessels and the human drama acted out on their rolling decks. Rediker restores the slave ship to its rightful place alongside the plantation as a formative institution of slavery, as a place where a profound and still haunting history of race, class, and modern capitalism...

"America likes to tell itself that it inhabits a postracial world, yet nearly every empirical measure-wealth, unemployment, incarceration, school segregation-reveals that racial inequality has barely improved since 1968, when Richard Nixon became our first zlaw and ordery president. Hayes contends our country has fractured in two: the Colony and the Nation. In the Nation, we venerate the law. In the Colony, we obsess over order, fear trumps civil...

"1937. Naomi Vargas is Mexican American. Wash Fuller is Black. These teens know the town's divisive racism better than anyone. But sometimes the attraction between two people is so powerful it breaks through even the most entrenched color lines. And the consequences can be explosive. Naomi and Wash dare to defy the rules, and the New London school explosion serves as a ticking time bomb in the background. Can their love survive both prejudice and...