"Black People Are My Business"


Book Description

Exploration of Bambara’s practices of liberation that encourage resistance to oppression and solidarity. "Black People Are My Business": Toni Cade Bambara's Practices of Liberation studies the works of Bambara (1939–1995), an author, documentary filmmaker, social activist, and professor. Thabiti Lewis's analysis serves as a cultural biography, examining the liberation impulses in Bambara's writing, which is concerned with practices that advance the material value of the African American experience and exploring the introspection between artist production and social justice. This is the first monograph that focuses on Bambara's unique approach and important literary contribution to 1970s and 1980s African American literature. It explores her unique nationalist, feminist, Marxist, and spiritualist ethos, which cleared space for many innovations found in black women's fiction. Divided into five chapters, Lewis's study relies on Bambara's voice (from interviews and essays) to craft a "spiritual wholeness aesthetic"—a set of principles that comes out of her practices of liberation and entail family, faith, feeling, and freedom—that reveals her ability to interweave ethnic identity, politics, and community engagement and responsibility with the impetus of balancing black male and female identity influences and interactions within and outside the community. One key feature of Bambara's work is the concentration on women as cultural workers whereby her notion of spiritual wholeness upends what has become a scholarly distinction between feminism and black nationalism. Bambara's fiction situates her as a pivotal voice within the Black Arts Movement and contemporary African American literature. Bambara is an understudied and important artistic voice whose aversion to playing it safe both personified and challenged the boundaries of black nationalism and feminism. "Black People Are My Business" is a wonderful addition to any reader's list, especially those interested in African American literary and cultural studies.







Race, Work, and Leadership


Book Description

Rethinking How to Build Inclusive Organizations Race, Work, and Leadership is a rare and important compilation of essays that examines how race matters in people's experience of work and leadership. What does it mean to be black in corporate America today? How are racial dynamics in organizations changing? How do we build inclusive organizations? Inspired by and developed in conjunction with the research and programming for Harvard Business School's commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the HBS African American Student Union, this groundbreaking book shines new light on these and other timely questions and illuminates the present-day dynamics of race in the workplace. Contributions from top scholars, researchers, and practitioners in leadership, organizational behavior, psychology, sociology, and education test the relevance of long-held assumptions and reconsider the research approaches and interventions needed to understand and advance African Americans in work settings and leadership roles. At a time when--following a peak in 2002--there are fewer African American men and women in corporate leadership roles, Race, Work, and Leadership will stimulate new scholarship and dialogue on the organizational and leadership challenges of African Americans and become the indispensable reference for anyone committed to understanding, studying, and acting on the challenges facing leaders who are building inclusive organizations.




Black Business Secrets


Book Description

"Should I lower my price point? Give my new product away for free online? How do I compete when my goods, services, or business model might be duplicated?" In this candid, 21st-century-savvy guide, Dante Lee illustrates how passion can become profit by addressing the questions that every businessperson needs to ask. Black Business Secrets discusses the entrepreneurial skills that African-American business owners must master in order to compete in a world where most new companies fail within three years.Whether you’re a weekend entrepreneur or a career-changing professional, Lee’s motto—"don’t be a worrier, be a warrior"—applies. From personal branding to best practices, this empowering blueprint offers surefire tips and strategies designed to ensure business survival and success.




Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race


Book Description

'Every voice raised against racism chips away at its power. We can't afford to stay silent. This book is an attempt to speak' The book that sparked a national conversation. Exploring everything from eradicated black history to the inextricable link between class and race, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race is the essential handbook for anyone who wants to understand race relations in Britain today. THE NO.1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS NON-FICTION NARRATIVE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2018 FOYLES NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR BLACKWELL'S NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR WINNER OF THE JHALAK PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION LONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR A BOOKS ARE MY BAG READERS AWARD




Pioneering African-American Women in the Advertising Business


Book Description

Much has been written about the men and women who shaped the field of advertising, some of whom became legends in the industry. However, the contributions of African-American women to the advertising business have largely been omitted from these accounts. Yet, evidence reveals some trailblazing African-American women who launched their careers during the 1960s Mad Men era, and went on to achieve prominent careers. This unique book chronicles the nature and significance of these women’s accomplishments, examines the opportunities and challenges they experienced and explores how they coped with the extensive inequities common in the advertising profession. Using a biographical narrative approach, this book examines the careers of these important African-American women who not only achieved managerial positions in major mainstream advertising agencies but also established successful agencies bearing their own names. Based on their words and memories, this study reveals experiences which are intriguing, triumphant, bittersweet and sometimes tragic. These women’s stories comprise a vital part of the historical narrative on women and African-Americans in advertising and will be instructive not only to scholars of advertising and marketing history but to future generations of advertising professionals.




Black Market Business


Book Description

Black Market Business is a grassroots social history of the clandestine market for sex in colonial Tonkin. Lively and well told, it explores the ways in which sex workers, managers, and clients evaded the colonial regulation system in the turbulent economy of the interwar years. Christina Elizabeth Firpo argues that the confluence of economic, demographic, and cultural changes sweeping late colonial Tonkin created spaces of tension in which the interwar black market sex industry thrived. The clandestine sex industry flourished in sites of legal inconsistency, cultural changes, economic disparity, rural-urban division, and demographic shifts. As a nexus of the many tensions besetting late colonial Tonkin, the black market sex industry serves as a useful lens through which to examine these tensions and the ways they affected marginalized populations. More specifically, an investigation of this black market shows how a particular population of impoverished women—a group regrettably understudied by historians—experienced the tensions. Drawing on an astonishingly diverse and multilingual source base, Black Market Business includes detailed cases of juvenile prostitution, human trafficking, and debt bondage arrangements in sex work, as well as cases in Tonkin's bars, hotels, singing houses, and dance clubs. Using GIS technology and big data sets to track individual actors in history, it serves as a model for teaching new methodological approaches to conducting social histories of women and marginalized people.




White Fragility


Book Description

The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality. In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’ (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.




Black Business in the New South


Book Description

At the turn of the century, the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company became the "world's largest Negro business." Located in Durham, North Carolina, which was known as the "Black Wall Street of America," this business came to symbolize the ideas of racial progress, self-help, and solidarity in America. Walter B. Weare's social and intellectual history, originally published in 1973 (University of Illinois Press) and updated here to include a new introduction, still stands as the definitive history of black business in the New South. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including personal papers of the company's leaders and oral history interviews—Weare traces the company's story from its ideological roots in the eighteenth century to its economic success in the twentieth century.




African Americans in Business


Book Description

Many people dream of owning their own business or making it to the top of the corporate ladder. In the pages of this book, you'll meet African Americans who overcame obstacles and stereotypes to make their dreams a reality. Madam C. J. Walker was orphaned at age 7, married at 14, became a mother at 18, and was widowed at 20. She went on make a million dollars selling hair care products. Berry Gordy loved music but went broke after opening a record store. He didn't give up, though. Gordy eventually started Motown Records, which became one of the country's most successful record labels and introduced a host of talented black artists to mainstream American audiences. Stanley O'Neal grew up on a farm without running water or indoor toilets. Through intelligence and hard work he became the head of a $50 billion investment bank. Read about these and other inspiring figures in this book.