Political Advocacy Audiobooks | Politics

Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice

A riveting exploration of how the power of visual media over the last few years has shifted the narrative on race and reignited the push towards justice by the author of the "worthy and necessary" (The New York Times) Nobody Marc Lamont Hill and the bestselling author and acclaimed journalist Todd Brewster. With his signature "clear and courageous" (Cornel West) voice Marc Lamont Hill and New York Times bestselling author Todd Brewster weave four recent pivotal moments in America's racial divide into their disturbing historical context—starting with the killing of George Floyd—Seen and Unseen reveals the connections between our current news headlines and social media feeds and the country's long struggle against racism. For most of American history, our media has reinforced and promoted racism. But with the immediacy of modern technology—the ubiquity of smartphones, social media, and the internet—that long history is now in flux. From the teenager who caught George Floyd's killing on camera to the citizens who held prosecutors accountable for properly investigating the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, ordinary people are now able to reveal injustice in a more immediate way. As broad movements to overhaul policing, housing, and schooling gain new vitality, Seen and Unseen demonstrates that change starts with the raw evidence of those recording history on the front lines. In the vein of The New Jim Crow and Caste, Seen and Unseen incisively explores what connects our moment to the history of race in America but also what makes today different from the civil rights movements of the past and what it will ultimately take to push social justice forward.

Marc Lamont Hill, Todd Brewster (Author), Marc Lamont Hill, Todd Brewster (Narrator)

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Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage

Just about everybody knows the name Rikers Island. A fixture of pop culture and underground prison lore alike, the sprawling East River jail complex has become synonymous with both the horrors of mass incarceration and the structurally-racist class domination at its core. But how did Rikers Island get to be this way? America's Jail represents a scrupulously researched answer to this question, written for a lay audience in an accessible narrative form. Befitting the high stakes of the present Rikers debate, the issues explored in this work have broad implications for the future of mass incarceration in the United States and beyond. Drawing from extensive archival research, decades of journalism, interviews, prisoner testimonials, and firsthand experience, Jarrod Shanahan tells the story of how so many miserable jail facilities ended up on one tiny East River islet, by charting the unwitting cooperation between prison reformers, who built jail infrastructure on the optimistic wager it could be used for social good, and the forces of organized retrenchment, who ensured this would never come to pass. By tracing the failure of jail reform in postwar New York in detail, America's Jail casts considerable doubt on jail reformers' ability to solve the problems of incarceration with better incarceration, even in shiny new jails.

Jarrod Shanahan (Author), Greg Tremblay (Narrator)

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Living the Dream: The Contested History of Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Living the Dream tells the history behind the establishment of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the battle over King's legacy that continued through the decades that followed. Creating the first national holiday to honor an African American was a formidable achievement and an act of resistance against conservative and segregationist opposition. Congressional efforts to commemorate King began shortly after his assassination. The ensuing political battles slowed the progress of granting him a namesake holiday and crucially defined how his legacy would be received. Though Coretta Scott King's mission to honor her husband's commitment to nonviolence was upheld, conservative politicians sought to use the holiday to advance a whitewashed, nationalistic, and even reactionary vision of King's life and thought. This book reveals the lengths that activists had to go to elevate an African American man to the pantheon of national heroes, how conservatives took advantage of the commemoration to bend the arc of King's legacy toward something he never would have expected, and how grassroots causes, unions, and antiwar demonstrators continued to try to claim this sanctified day as their own.

Daniel T. Fleming (Author), L. Malaika Cooper (Narrator)

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Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know

Civil resistance is a method of conflict through which unarmed civilians use a variety of coordinated methods (strikes, protests, demonstrations, boycotts, and many other tactics) to prosecute a conflict without directly harming or threatening to harm an opponent. Sometimes called nonviolent resistance, unarmed struggle, or nonviolent action, this form of political action is now a mainstay across the globe. It was been a central form of resistance in the 1989 revolutions and in the Arab Spring, and it is now being practiced widely in Trump's America. If we are going to understand the manifold protest movements emerging around the globe, we need a thorough understanding of civil resistance and its many dynamics and manifestations. In Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know®, Erica Chenoweth-one of the world's leading scholars on the topic-explains what civil resistance is, how it works, why it sometimes fails, how violence and repression affect it, and the long-term impacts of such resistance. Featuring both historical cases of civil resistance and more contemporary examples such as the Arab Awakenings and various ongoing movements in the United States, this book provides a comprehensive yet pithy overview of this enormously important subject.

Erica Chenoweth (Author), Erica Chenoweth (Narrator)

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The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism

How Americans learned to wait on time for racial change What if, Joseph Darda asks, our desire to solve racism-with science, civil rights, antiracist literature, integration, and color blindness-has entrenched it further? In The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism, he traces the rise of liberal antiracism, showing how reformers' faith in time, in the moral arc of the universe, has undercut future movements with the insistence that racism constitutes a time-limited crisis to be solved with time-limited remedies. Most historians attribute the shortcomings of the civil rights era to a conservative backlash or to the fracturing of the liberal establishment in the late 1960s, but the civil rights movement also faced resistance from a liberal 'frontlash,' from antiredistributive allies who, before it ever took off, constrained what the movement could demand and how it could demand it. Telling the stories of Ruth Benedict, Kenneth Clark, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Howard Griffin, Pauli Murray, Lillian Smith, Richard Wright, and others, Darda reveals how Americans learned to wait on time for racial change and the enduring harm of that trust in the clock.

Joseph Darda (Author), Andrew Joseph Perez (Narrator)

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No Escape: The True Story of China’s Genocide of the Uyghurs

’Anyone interested in the future of autocracy should buy it’ Anne Applebaum, author of Twilight of Demoracy ‘No Escape is what the world needs to read’ Nathan Law, Nobel Peace Prize nominee A devastating account of China’s genocide of the Uyghurs, by a leading Uyghur activist and Time #100 nominee Nury Turkel was born in a ‘re-education’ camp in China at the height of the Cultural Revolution. He spent the first several months of his life in captivity with his mother, who was beaten and starved while pregnant with him, whilst his father served a penal sentence in an agricultural labour camp. Following this traumatic start – and not without a heavy dose of good fortune – he was later able to travel to the US for his undergraduate studies in 1995 and was granted asylum in the country in 1998 where, as a lawyer, he is now a tireless and renowned activist for the plight of his people. Part memoir, part call-to-action, No Escape will be the first major book to tell the story of the Chinese government’s terrible oppression of the Uyghur people from the inside, detailing the labour camps, ethnic and religious oppression, forced sterilisation of women and the surveillance tech that have made Xinjiang – in the words of one Uyghur who managed to flee – ‘a police surveillance state unlike any the world has ever known’.

Nury Turkel (Author), Stewart Lang (Narrator)

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Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity

Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Finalist Interest in and awareness of the demand for social justice as an outworking of the Christian faith is growing. But it is not new. For five hundred years, Latina/o culture and identity have been shaped by their challenges to the religious, socio-economic, and political status quo, whether in opposition to Spanish colonialism, Latin American dictatorships, US imperialism in Central America, the oppression of farmworkers, or the current exploitation of undocumented immigrants. Christianity has played a significant role in that movement at every stage. Robert Chao Romero, the son of a Mexican father and a Chinese immigrant mother, explores the history and theology of what he terms the 'Brown Church.' Romero considers how this movement has responded to these and other injustices throughout its history by appealing to the belief that God's vision for redemption includes not only heavenly promises but also the transformation of every aspect of our lives and the world. Walking through this history of activism and faith, listeners will discover that Latina/o Christians have a heart after God's own.

Robert Chao Romero (Author), Andre Bellido (Narrator)

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Navalny: Putin's Nemesis, Russia's Future?

A fascinating account of Russia's famous dissident and the politics he embodies. Who is Alexei Navalny? Poisoned in August 2020 and transported to Germany for treatment, the politician returned to Russia in January 2021 in the full glare of the world media. His immediate detention at passport control set the stage for an explosive showdown with Vladimir Putin. But Navalny means very different things to different people. To some, he is a democratic hero. To others, he is betraying the Motherland. To others still, he is a dangerous nationalist. Navalny explores the many dimensions of his political life, from his pioneering anti-corruption investigations to his ideas and leadership of a political movement. It also looks at how his activities and the Kremlin's strategies have shaped one another. Navalny makes sense of this divisive character, revealing the contradictions of a man who is the second most important political figure in Russia-even when behind bars. In order to understand modern Russia, you need to understand Alexei Navalny.

Ben Noble, Jan Matti Dollbaum, Morvan Lallouet (Author), Rob Heaps (Narrator)

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La patria y la muerte: Los crímenes y horrores del nacionalismo mexicano

Tras la brutalidad de la Revolución, los sobrevivientes necesitaban una esperanza y el nacionalismo se la dio. Pero a un costo altísimo: muerte y mentira. El discurso oficial asienta que el amor a México es obligatorio, eterno, inamovible y perfecto. No es así. El actual nacionalismo mexicano es una invención posrevolucionaria, fomentado para crear un sentido de unidad y de propósito tras la matanza vivida entre 1910 y 1917. Y eso es lo de menos. Ese patriotismo fue una excusa para perpetrar algunas de las peores atrocidades que se han cometido en suelo patrio. Discriminación, racismo, clasismo y exclusión son sus caras menos oscuras. Las peores se llaman odio, expulsión, destierro, asesinato y genocidio. Esta obra señala el negro camino que ha seguido la devoción hacia México y la impunidad de la que ha gozado. Hoy, como nunca, se vuelve necesario reflexionar sobre el tema de esta obra: ¿a qué deliriosnos puede llevar el nacionalismo desatado?

José Luis Trueba Lara (Author), Sergio Mejía (Narrator)

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Black Power and the American Myth: 50th Anniversary Edition

In 1970, C. T. Vivian, a close colleague of Martin Luther King, Jr. and a member of his executive staff, sat down to take stock of the civil rights movement and the progress it had made. His assessment was that it failed, and that the blame lay in the existence of myths about America. As prophetic today as it was fifty years ago, Vivian's voice rings out as a critique and a call to action for a society in deep need of justice and peace. The civil rights struggle that began when Rosa Parks, a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, decided to sit in the front of a bus has deeply altered American society and the American conscience. Yet from several perspectives, that movement has resulted in failure. The Black struggle for independence is more of an uphill climb than ever. Why? C. T. Vivian asserts that the civil rights movement failed because it was built on certain myths about America: - the myth that Americans will do what is right as soon as they know what is right. - the myth that legislation leads to justice. - the myth that America is an open society where any minority group can advance. - the myth that an ethic of love forms the core of the American conscience.

C.T. Vivian (Author), Matthew J. Harris (Narrator)

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The Freedom Riders: The History of the Civil Rights Activists Who Rode Buses around the South to Pro

After a 1960 Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia, bus segregation was made illegal on new grounds: it violated the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution, by regulating the movement of people across state lines. With this victory in hand, the Freedom Rides of 1961 began. Organized primarily by a new group – the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) – the Freedom Rides followed the same guidance that inspired the Montgomery Boycott and the Greensboro Sit-Ins – non-violent direct action. The purpose of the Freedom Rides was the test the Supreme Court's decision by riding from Virginia to Louisiana on integrated busses. This was notably the first major Civil Rights event that included a large segment of white participants. Mobs in places like Birmingham and Montgomery firebombed buses and brutally beat the Freedom Riders, sending dozens to the hospital. Mob violence, orchestrated by the KKK and their segregationist allies, erupted endlessly throughout the summer. White activists, who were viewed by the Ku Klux Klan as betraying their race, took the worst beatings of all. Both black and white Northerners had participated in the Freedom Rides, and civil rights activists sought other ways to harness their energy and activism in 1963. After the Freedom Rides, civil rights leaders initiated voter registration drives that could help register black voters and build community organizations that could help make their votes count. The momentum generated by the Freedom Rides and the following activism would lead to the famous March on Washington and eventually the passage of a historic civil rights bill in 1964.

Charles River Editors (Author), Kc Wayman (Narrator)

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United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis

Psychiatrist Mark McDonald diagnoses our country as suffering from a mass delusional psychosis, driven by a pandemic of fear in response to COVID-19. As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, LA-based psychiatrist Mark McDonald grew increasingly concerned by the negative mental health effects he witnessed among his patients—and Americans nationwide. These negative effects—stress, anxiety, depression, addiction, domestic violence, suicidal ideation—were all directly traceable to the climate of fear being stoked by public health authorities and irresponsibly amplified by national media. These fears in turn drove a hysterical overreaction from government in the form of draconian lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates of questionable value. But the fear did not abate and quickly took on a life of its own, becoming an unstoppable force in all our lives. At last McDonald began to speak out, explaining that America is actually suffering from two pandemics: a viral one and a psychological one, a “pandemic of fear” that is in many ways more dangerous and damaging than the virus itself. Rooted in the natural anxieties of women on behalf of their children and families, inflamed and amplified by sensationalistic media, and driven over the top by hamfisted authoritarian measures from those in power, McDonald diagnoses the country at large as suffering from a mass delusional psychosis. This is not a metaphor. The malady itself is very real. Whether we can regain our collective sanity as a society remains to be seen.

Mark Mcdonald (Author), Axel Bosley (Narrator)

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Political Advocacy Audiobooks in Politics