Barry Friedman - The Old Folks At Home: Warehouse Them or Leave Them on the Ice Floe

Barry Friedman - The Old Folks At Home: Warehouse Them or Leave Them on the Ice Floe

Barry Friedman

Nonfiction / Politics / Race

Henry and Harriet Callins, discovering that all that glitters is not Golden Age, move into a senior retirement residence. Among the exciting events they experience are: waiting for the mailman each day, going to meetings where problems are solved by planning more meetings... well, you get the idea. Henry suspects that the residents in the Assisted Living section of the facility are receiving an assist that is detrimental to their health. His curiosity puts himself and his wife in mortal danger.
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Algorithms of Oppression

Algorithms of Oppression

Safiya Umoja Noble

Nonfiction / Race / Science

A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms Run a Google search for "black girls"—what will you find? "Big Booty" and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in "white girls," the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about "why black women are so sassy" or "why black women are so angry" presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society.In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search...
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Water Tossing Boulders

Water Tossing Boulders

Adrienne Berard

History / Nonfiction / Race

A generation before Brown v. Board of Education struck down America's "separate but equal" doctrine, one Chinese family and an eccentric Mississippi lawyer fought for desegregation in one of the greatest legal battles never told.On September 15, 1924, Martha Lum and her older sister Berda were barred from attending middle school in Rosedale, Mississippi. The girls were Chinese American and considered by the school to be "colored"; the school was for whites. This event would lead to the first US Supreme Court case to challenge the constitutionality of racial segregation in Southern public schools, thirty years before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. In this case confronting the "separate but equal" doctrine, the Lum family, along with an eccentric Mississippi lawyer, fought for the right to educate Chinese Americans in the white schools of the Jim Crow South. Through extensive research in historical documents and family correspondence,...
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An African American and Latinx History of the United States

An African American and Latinx History of the United States

Paul Ortiz

History / Nonfiction / Race

An intersectional history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil rightsSpanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history arguing that the "Global South" was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress, as exalted by widely taught formulations such as "manifest destiny" and "Jacksonian democracy," and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms American history into the story of the working class organizing against imperialism.In precise detail, Ortiz traces this untold history from the Jim Crow-esque racial segregation of the Southwest, the rise and violent fall of a powerful tradition of Mexican labor organizing in the twentieth century, to May 1, 2006, International Workers' Day, when migrant...
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