By C. Eric Lincoln. Foreword by Gordon Allport

FROM THE JACKET: “This is the first full study of the Black Muslims - an organization of more than 100,000 Negroes Who preach black autonomy, black supremacy, black union against the white world. The Black Muslim Movement has been characterized as melodramatic and extremist, but in chis book Dr. Lincoln shows that it is an accurate gauge of racial tension in the United States today. Behind an array of myths and ritual, behind an alleged tie to Islam, this new form of black nationalism reflects the American Negro's rising discontent with the way things are and his determination to change them.”

Boston. Beacon Press. 1961. 292p.

USED BOOK. ,AY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Gaddis Smith

FROM THE FOREWORD: “"The United States always wins the war and loses the peace," runs a persistent popular complaint. Neither part of the statement is accurate. The United States barely escaped the War of 1812 with its territory intact, and in Korea in the 1950sthe nation was forced to settle for a stalemate on the battlefield. At Paris in 1782, and again in 1898, American negotiators drove hard bargains to win notable diplomatic victories. Yet the myth persists, along with the equally erroneous American belief that we are a peaceful people. Our history is studded with conflict and violence…”

NY. Knopf. 1985. 213p.

By Frana, Philip L.

From the webpage: "Generative AI language models currently operate only within the controlled environments of computer systems and networks, and their capabilities are constrained by training datasets and human uses. The generative transformer architecture [hyperlink] that is powering the current wave of artificial intelligence may reshape many areas of daily life. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been making a global tour to engage with legislators, policymakers, and industry leaders about his company's pathbreaking Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) series of large language models (LLMs). While acknowledging that AI could inflict damage on the world economy, disrupt labor markets, and transform global affairs in unforeseen ways, he emphasizes that responsible use and regulatory transparency will allow the technology to make positive contributions [hyperlink] to education, creativity and entrepreneurship, and workplace productivity."

Atlantic Council Of The United States. 2023. 21p.

By Mckillop, Matt; Lieberman, Dara Alpert

From the document: "The United States spends trillions of dollars annually on healthcare, but U.S. residents are not getting healthier and tend to experience worse health outcomes than residents of other high-income countries that spend comparably less money on healthcare. Keeping everyone safe from diseases, disasters, the health impacts of climate change, and bioterrorism requires a public health system focused on prevention, equity, preparedness, and surveillance. Investment to ensure foundational public health capabilities is key. Foundational public health capabilities include assessment and surveillance, emergency preparedness and response, community partnership development, communications, policy development and support, organizational accountability and performance management, and a focus on equity. Interagency and jurisdictional planning and cooperation are also critical, as are efforts to address the needs of population groups or communities at greatest risk. All of these activities require dedicated and sustained funding and a well-resourced public health infrastructure and workforce, one that has the resources to deal with its everyday work and that is well-positioned to quickly pivot and scale up during emergencies. [...] To advance equity, successful public health systems promote structural conditions that support optimal health for all and work to remove systemic barriers that have resulted in health disparities. In addition, a strong public health system comprises federal, state, tribal, territorial, and local health agencies working within a network that includes healthcare providers, public safety agencies, human service and charity organizations, education and youth development organizations, recreation and arts-related organizations, economic and philanthropic organizations, and environmental agencies and organizations. [...] Experts agree that increased and sustained funding to strengthen the country's public health system is urgently needed, particularly in the areas of data infrastructure and workforce." The associated Fact Sheets are available here: www.tfah.org/chronic-underfunding-in-public-health-fact-sheets/

Trust For America's Health. 2023. 52p.

By Paul J. Wright

Social scientific interest in pornography use and effects dates back to at least the mid-twentieth century. Despite this, recent meta-analyses reveal a need for additional longitudinal studies, in general; a need for attitudinal studies, specifically; and a need for studies of U.S. consumers, in particular. In response to these needs and recent calls for the fields of communication and psychological science to prioritize replication, the present study probed whether Wright et al. (Psychol Pop Media 3(2):97–109, 2014) novel longitudinal findings on pornography consumption and extramarital sex attitudes among married U.S. adults were replicable. As in Wright et al., a distal assessment of extramarital sex attitudes did not predict interindividual increases in the likelihood of pornography consumption. Contrary to Wright et al., a distal assessment of pornography consumption also failed to predict interindividual increases in positive attitudes toward extramarital sex. However, more proximal measures of extramarital sex attitudes and pornography consumption did predict over time interindividual change in pornography use and attitudinal positivity, respectively, even after adjusting for participants’ age, divorce history, education, race, sex, general unhappiness, marital unhappiness, liberal-conservative political orientation, and religiosity. These results are consistent with prior panel studies in the pornography literature in the macro, but also highlight a need for theoretical development (and testing) on the duration and time-course of selection and socialization effects in the context of pornography use and sexual attitudes.

Archives of Sexual Behavior (2023) 52:1953–1960

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Jack Temple Kirby

FROM THE PREFACE: “The New South Entered the American language at least as early as 1866, when Georgia's Benjamin H. Hill proclaimed the miraculous transformation of the former Confederacy to a New York audience. By new Hill meant a South unburdened of slavery, secessionist feeling, and a host of habits and practices out of step with industrializing, urbanizing America. Hill's successor as New South spokesman, the Alanta publisher Henry W. Grady went much furtier. During the 1880s Grady and like-minded colleagues declared that southerners had become creatures of the bourgeois world-entrepreneurs, mechanics, hustlers--progressives who had put the primitive worlds of the village, farm, and plantation behind them. So positive and eloquent were Grady and his generation of publicists that after most of them were dead, serious scholars of the early twentieth century ac- cepted their proclamations as truth. Subsequently, the hyperbole and fraud of this rhetorical New South….”

Baton Rouge and London. Louisiana State University Press. 1987. 407p.

By Julian Nida-Rümelin and Nathalie Weidenfeld

Deals with cultural and philosophical aspects of artificial intelligence and pleads for a “digital humanism.” Philosophically sound and yet written in a way that will make it accessible for everybody interested in the subject. Provides a vision of what it means to live in a world where AI is a central technology for a more humane civilization.

Cham: Springer Nature, 2022. 129p.

Edited by Nissa Finney, James Nazroo, Laia Bécares, Dharmi Kapadia and Natalie Shlomo

This book provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date evidence on ethnic inequalities in Britain. This is highly pertinent to contemporary social and political race debates and policy agendas in the post-pandemic recovery context. The COVID-19 pandemic brought ethnic inequalities to the fore as it became evident that infection and mortality rates were higher among ethnic minorities than the population as a whole (ICNARC, 2020; Nazroo and Bécares, 2020; ONS, 2020; Platt and Warwick, 2020). In May 2020, as the devastating and unequal impacts of the pandemic were being realised, the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota in the US saw a resurgence of Black Lives Matter (BLM) movements globally (Alexander and Byrne, 2020). In response, the UK government published the Sewell Report in 2021 which relayed the conclusions of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, 2021), and, subsequently, the Inclusive Britain report in 2022 which laid out policy recommendations (Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, 2022).

Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2023. 234p.

Edited by Andreas Sudmann 

After a long time of neglect, Artificial Intelligence is once again at the center of most of our political, economic, and socio-cultural debates. Recent advances in the field of Artifical Neural Networks have led to a renaissance of dystopian and utopian speculations on an AI-rendered future. Algorithmic technologies are deployed for identifying potential terrorists through vast surveillance networks, for producing sentencing guidelines and recidivism risk profiles in criminal justice systems, for demographic and psychographic targeting of bodies for advertising or propaganda, and more generally for automating the analysis of language, text, and images. Against this background, the aim of this book is to discuss the heterogenous conditions, implications, and effects of modern AI and Internet technologies in terms of their political dimension: What does it mean to critically investigate efforts of net politics in the age of machine learning algorithms?

Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2019. 335p.

By  Nestar Russell

Horrified by the Holocaust, social psychologist Stanley Milgram wondered if he could recreate the Holocaust in the laboratory setting. Unabated for more than half a century, his (in)famous results have continued to intrigue scholars. Based on unpublished archival data from Milgram’s personal collection, volume one of this two-volume set introduces readers to a behind the scenes account showing how during Milgram’s unpublished pilot studies he step-by-step invented his official experimental procedure—how he gradually learnt to transform most ordinary people into willing inflictors of harm. The open access volume two then illustrates how certain innovators within the Nazi regime used the very same Milgram-like learning techniques that with increasing effectiveness gradually enabled them to also transform most ordinary people into increasingly capable executioners of other men, women, and children. Volume two effectively attempts to capture how step-by-step these Nazi innovators attempted to transform the Führer’s wish of a Jewish-free Europe into a frightening reality. By the books’ end the reader will gain an insight into how the seemingly undoable can become increasingly doable

Cham: Springer Nature, 2019. 333p.

By Carrie James

Social networking, blogging, vlogging, gaming, instant messaging, downloading music and other content, uploading and sharing their own creative work: these activities made possible by the new digital media are rich with opportunities and risks for young people. This report, part of the GoodPlay Project, undertaken by researchers at Harvard Graduate School of Education's Project Zero, investigates the ethical fault lines of such digital pursuits. The authors argue that five key issues are at stake in the new media: identity, privacy, ownership and authorship, credibility, and participation. Drawing on evidence from informant interviews, emerging scholarship on new media, and theoretical insights from psychology, sociology, political science, and cultural studies, the report explores the ways in which youth may be redefining these concepts as they engage with new digital media. The authors propose a model of "good play" that involves the unique affordances of the new digital media; related technical and new media literacies; cognitive and moral development and values; online and offline peer culture; and ethical supports, including the absence or presence of adult mentors and relevant educational curricula. This proposed model for ethical play sets the stage for the next part of the GoodPlay project, an empirical study that will invite young people to share their stories of engagement with the new digital media.

Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009. 127p.

Edited by Sven Quadflieg, Klaus Neuburg, Simon Nestler

Algorithms are not to be regarded as a technical structure but as a social phenomenon - they embed themselves, currently still very subtle, into our political and social system. Algorithms shape human behavior on various levels: they influence not only the aesthetic reception of the world but also the well-being and social interaction of their users. They act and intervene in a political and social context. As algorithms influence individual behavior in these social and political situations, their power should be the subject of critical discourse - or even lead to active disobedience and to the need for appropriate tools and methods which can be used to break the algorithmic power.

Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2022. 381p.

Edited by: Juliet Pietsch, Haydn Aarons

The latter years of the first decade of the twenty-first century were characterised by an enormous amount of challenge and change to Australia and Australians. Australia’s part in these challenges and changes is borne of our domestic and global ties, our orientation towards ourselves and others, and an ever increasing awareness of the interdependency of our world. Challenges and changes such as terrorism, climate change, human rights, community breakdown, work and livelihood, and crime are not new but they take on new variations and impact on us in different ways in times such as these.

In this volume we consider these recent challenges and changes and how Australians themselves feel about them under three themes: identity, fear and governance. These themes suitably capture the concerns of Australians in times of such change. Identity is our sense of ourselves and how others see us. How is this affected by the increased presence of religious diversity, especially Islamic communities, and increased awareness of moral and political obligations towards Indigenous Australians? How is it affected by our curious but changing relationship with Asia? Fear is an emotional reaction to particular changes and challenges and produces particular responses from individuals, politicians, communities and nations alike; fear of crime, fear of terrorism and fear of change are all considered in this volume.

Canberra: ANU Press, 2012;   204p.

By Randolph Hohle

This book explains the emergence of two competing forms of black political representation that transformed the objectives and meanings of local action, created boundaries between national and local struggles for racial equality, and prompted a white response to the civil rights movement that set the stage for the neoliberal turn in US policy. Randolph Hohle questions some of the most basic assumptions about the civil rights movement, including the importance of non-violence, and the movement’s legacy on contemporary black politics. Non-violence was the effect of the movement’s emphasis on racially non-threatening good black citizens that, when contrasted to bad white responses of southern whites, severed the relationship between whiteness and good citizenship. Although the civil rights movement secured new legislative gains and influenced all subsequent social movements, pressure to be good black citizens and the subsequent marginalization of black authenticity have internally polarized and paralyzed contemporary black struggles. This book is the first systematic analysis of the civil rights movement that considers the importance of authenticity, the body, and ethics in political struggles. It bridges the gap between the study of race, politics, and social movement studies.

New York; London: Routledge, 2013. 188p.

Edited by Vishwas Satgar

"Racism after Apartheid, volume four of the Democratic Marxism series, brings together leading scholars and activists from around the world studying and challenging racism. In eleven thematically rich and conceptually informed chapters, the contributors interrogate the complex nexus of questions surrounding race and relations of oppression as they are played out in the global South and global North. Their work challenges Marxism and anti-racism to take these lived realities seriously and consistently struggle to build human solidarities."

Johannesburg " Wits University Press. 2019. 264p.

By Lee D. Baker

In the late nineteenth century, if ethnologists in the United States recognized African American culture, they often perceived it as something to be overcome and left behind. At the same time, they were committed to salvaging “disappearing” Native American culture by curating objects, narrating practices, and recording languages. In Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, Lee D. Baker examines theories of race and culture developed by American anthropologists during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. He investigates the role that ethnologists played in creating a racial politics of culture in which Indians had a culture worthy of preservation and exhibition while African Americans did not. Baker argues that the concept of culture developed by ethnologists to understand American Indian languages and customs in the nineteenth century formed the basis of the anthropological concept of race eventually used to confront “the Negro problem” in the twentieth century. As he explores the implications of anthropology’s different approaches to African Americans and Native Americans, and the field’s different but overlapping theories of race and culture, Baker delves into the careers of prominent anthropologists and ethnologists, including James Mooney Jr., Frederic W. Putnam, Daniel G. Brinton, and Franz Boas. His analysis takes into account not only scientific societies, journals, museums, and universities, but also the development of sociology in the United States, African American and Native American activists and intellectuals, philanthropy, the media, and government entities from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the Supreme Court. In Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, Baker tells how anthropology has both responded to and helped shape ideas about race and culture in the United States, and how its ideas have been appropriated (and misappropriated) to wildly different ends.

Durham, NC: London: Duke University Press, 2010. 294p.

By Jonathan Hsy

How do marginalized communities across the globe use the medieval past to combat racism, educate the public, and create a just world? Jonathan Hsy advances urgent academic and public conversations about race and appropriations of the medieval past in popular culture and the arts. Examining poetry, fiction, journalism, and performances, Hsy shows how cultural icons such as Frederick Douglass, Wong Chin Foo, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Sui Sin Far reinvented medieval traditions to promote social change. Contemporary Asian, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and multiracial artists embrace diverse pasts to build better futures. “Makes the crucial move of tying medievalism studies readings to social and racial justice work explicitly … innovative and greatly needed in the field.” Seeta Chaganti, author of Strange Footing “A major accomplishment that belongs on the shelves of every person who believes in antiracism.” Geraldine Heng, author of The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages

Leeds, UK:  Arc Humanities Press,, 2021. 180p.

By Hannah Noel

Details the appropriation of social justice rhetoric to claim Whiteness as an aggrieved social status, enabling White supremacy and deepening racial inequities.

Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press,  2022.  236p.

Edited by Ayhan Kaya, Ayşenur Benevento and  Metin Koca

This book analyses the factors and processes behind radicalisation of both native and self-identified Muslim youths. It argues that European youth responds differently to the challenges posed by contemporary flows of globalisation such as deindustrialisation, socio-economic, political, spatial, and psychological forms of deprivation, humiliation, and structural exclusion. The book revisits social, economic, political, and psychological drivers of radicalisation and challenges contemporary uses of the term “radicalism”. It argues that neoliberal forms of governance are often responsible for associating radicalism with extremism, terrorism, fundamentalism, and violence. It will appeal to students and scholars of migration, minority studies, nationalisms, European studies, sociology, political science, and psychology.

New York: London: Routledge, 2023. 262p.

By Bjørn Enge Bertelsen

On 29 September 2015 a motorcade comprising a number of cars holding Afonso Dhlakama, his aides, and soldiers drove along a main road from Chimoio in central Mozambique toward the city of Nampula when they were attacked—apparently by the forces of the Mozambican state. Dhlakama, the long-term leader of Renamo, the country’s largest opposition party, had just spoken at a rally in Chimoio. The attack left a number of people dead, but Dhlakama himself allegedly escaped quite spectacularly: He transmogrified into a bird, a partridge—the symbol of his party Renamo—spread his wings, and fl ew off. Various and conflicting accounts of the attack broke on social media a mere hour after it happened. However, a key element in coverage in Mozambican papers and on social media was that so-called traditional leaders confirmed Dhlakama’s transmogrification and escape (Cuna 2015). I spoke with my interlocutors in nearby Chimoio and Honde by telephone in the days that followed, and they also confirmed the story, with one elderly man expressing with some glee, “The state should have known he would escape like that! Dhlakama has a lot of power from tradition.” This book is not only about disentangling key national events such as these—events where forces of the state allegedly seek to eradicate the leader of the political opposition by violence, or about what could easily be labeled beliefs, cosmologies, even ontologies of this particular part of Mozambique. Rather, it examines the multiplex, historical, and contemporary relations between hierarchically oriented structures, state (for short), and what lies beyond: the domain of the social, including what is often referred to as “tradition.”  

New York: London: Berghahn Books, 2016. 360p.