A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A powerful, incisive reckoning with the impacts of school desegregation that traces four generations of the author’s family to show how the implementation of integration decimated Black school systems and did much of the Black community a disservice

“Rooks deftly sketches this lamentable, sobering history.”—The Atlantic

An intimate and searching account of the life and legacy of one of America’s towering educators, a woman who dared to center the progress of Black women and girls in the larger struggle for political and social liberation

Longlisted for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction

One of Essence's "7 Political Books By Black Women Authors To Read Now" • A Library Journal Best Book of the Year • One of Bookbub's Best Nonfiction of 2025 • One of the African American Intellectual History Society's Best Black History Books of 2025

"This book is as urgent as it is imperative." —Ibram X. Kendi, best-selling author of How to Be an Antiracist

From the coeditor of the best-selling Four Hundred Souls, a galvanizing anthology for those seeking to build an inclusive democracy.

The definitive book on how systemic racism in America really works, revealing the vast and often hidden network of interconnected policies, practices, and beliefs that combine to devastate Black lives.

Named one of five best books on women in the Civil Rights Movement by Wall Street Journal

Broadly speaking, the traditionally conceptualized mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement and the newer #BlackLivesMatter Movement possess some similar qualities. They both represent dynamic, complex moments of possibility and progress.

Unbordering Migration Studies in the Caribbean and Latin America brings together scholars and artists across regions, generations, disciplines, and modes of expression to decenter the US-Mexico border as both a site and a concept.

In democracies, citizens must accept loss; we can’t always be on the winning side. But in the United States, the fundamental civic capacity of being able to lose is not distributed equally. Propped up by white supremacy, whites (as a group) are accustomed to winning; they have generally been able to exercise political rule without having to accept sharing it.

A groundbreaking history of Africa’s looted architectural heritage—and a bold proposal for the repatriation of the continent’s stolen cultural artifacts.

In Millennial Style, Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman looks at recent experiments in black expressive culture that begin in the place of ruin. By ruin, Abdur-Rahman means the political terror and social abjection that constitute the ongoing peril of black lives.

In Feenin, Alexander Ghedi Weheliye traces R&B music’s continuing centrality in Black life since the late 1970s. Focusing on various musical production and reproduction technologies such as auto-tune and the materiality of the BlackFem singing voice, Weheliye counteracts the widespread popular and scholarly narratives of the genre’s decline and death.

Applied Theatre and Racial Justice: Care, Community, Change documents and amplifies lessons from practitioners and scholars who use performance to create models of transformation, collective learning, and liberation.

Develops novel interpretations of key texts in political theory and black studies - Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, Hannah Arendt's work on antisemitism and antiblack racism.

This special issue offers a glimpse into the rich discourse that took place at the week-long Witch Institute in the Summer of 2021. Part documentation and part intervention, this edition of PUBLIC presents multiple perspectives from those grappling with the complicated histories and current instantiations of the witch, tied together by themes such as invisible forces, the more-than-human, and the magic of images.

It can be enervating, stressful, and occasionally, triumphal—looking for work has never been more of a roller coaster. In compelling testimonies, Search Work shares that experience, giving voice to those on the wild ride of finding a job.

From Rights to Lives critically engages the dynamic relationship between these two moments of liberatory possibility on the Black Freedom Struggle timeline. The book’s contributors explore what we can learn when we place these moments of struggle in dialogue with each other.

Romantic love is not the only sort of love. There are alternative forms—including communal love, which is deeply rooted in collective care and well-being. These ideas of community-wide care and support receive far less attention in American society. They don’t have holidays and entire cultural genres built around them.

As the podcast studies field continues to gain momentum both within academia and in practice, scholars have been mapping and exploring the podcasting landscape from a variety of perspectives. This edited volume highlights the diverse spaces that podcasts embody and create, amplifying the unique and understudied perspectives and voices of podcasting.

Because on any given day, we might imagine, the captive personality did not know where s/he was, we could say that they were culturally "unmade," thrown in the midst of a figurative darkness that exposed their destinies to an unknown course.

—Hortense Spillers, "Mama's Baby: Papa's Maybe"

In this speculative essay, I assess the creative and scholarly practices of Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter, paying particular attention to the disciplinary investments informing their assessment of black religions as either helpful or harmful to the task of black revolt.

As mechanisms of racial domination, colonialism and slavery have long shaped the environment and people of the Caribbean, ensuring that Black and Indigenous communities are most susceptible to environmental disasters.

In the wake of George Jackson's critique of reformism as aiding fascism, abolitionists continue to prescribe non-reformist reforms as a viable approach to dismantling carceral structures. I argue that abolition's attachment to reforms is evidence of an affirmationist drive to insist that the state is not fully overdetermined by an antagonistic oppressive contract.