10 Good Choices That Empower Black Women's Lives


Book Description

"It's time to take back your power and your life--take it back from the bad relationships, bad careers, bad investments, bad company, and bad memories. It's time for you to live a fuller, happier, more productive, and wholesome life. This is your time to claim your blessings. God has given you a choice. Choose wisely, sis--choose to win, and enjoy every moment of it." With her national bestseller, 10 Bad Choices That Ruin Black Women's Lives, beloved television personality, lecturer, and author Dr. Grace Cornish wrote a self-help classic for black women who wanted to face and erase the relationship problems. Now, in her 10 Good Choices That Empower Black Women's Lives, Dr. Grace takes readers beyond healing just their romantic relationships--she's ready to show black women how to incorporate new, empowering, good choices into every aspect of their lives. Inspiring and insightful, this is Dr. Grace's tried-and-true prescription for finding the right balance between work, love, and spirituality. From "Trust Your Intuition" to "Taking Calculated Chances" and "Embracing the Skin You're In," Dr. Grace outlines ten positive choices that will help black women move onward and upward in their personal and professional lives. Full of first-person anecdotes from Dr. Grace's patients, friends, and fans, this is a real book about real people in tough situations and the choices they have made that led to renewed success, happiness, and peace of mind. With her trademark brand of smart, sympathetic, sister-to-sister counseling, Dr. Grace Cornish's 10 Good Choices That Empower Black Women's Lives is destined to become a classic of self-help for African-American women of all ages and backgrounds.




Black Women's Lives


Book Description

Kristal Brent Zook explores the lives of contemporary African America women from all walks of life. Based on her travels across America and years of interviewing and building relationships with women from a wide variety of socio-economic backgrounds, she offers vivid archetypal portraits of a school principal in Georgia, a filmmaker in Los Angeles, a factory worker in Mississippi, a corporate executive in New York City, a prisoner in Seattle, and an organic farmer in Vermont, among others. Through these portraits, Black Women's Lives explores common overlapping themes while highlighting the shared dreams, hopes, and disappointments of ordinary women. This book also reveals the many challenges and inequalities that black women still face, and how far this nation has yet to travel if it is to live up to its promise to create an equal and just society for all citizens.




The Heart of the Race


Book Description

A powerful document of the day-to-day realities of Black women in Britain The Heart of the Race is a powerful corrective to a version of Britain’s history from which black women have long been excluded. It reclaims and records black women’s place in that history, documenting their day-to-day struggles, their experiences of education, work and health care, and the personal and political struggles they have waged to preserve a sense of identity and community. First published in 1985 and winner of the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize that year, The Heart of the Race is a testimony to the collective experience of black women in Britain, and their relationship to the British state throughout its long history of slavery, empire and colonialism. This new edition includes a foreword by Lola Okolosie and an interview with the authors, chaired by Heidi Safia Mirza, focusing on the impact of their book since publication and its continuing relevance today




To ÕJoy My Freedom


Book Description

As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women workers made their way to Atlanta--the economic hub of the newly emerging urban and industrial south--in order to build an independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter traces their lives in the postbellum era and reveals the centrality of their labors to the African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Household laborers and washerwomen were constrained by their employers' domestic worlds but constructed their own world of work, play, negotiation, resistance, and community organization. Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former masters. We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally, we understand the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring women to migrate north. Hunter weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of the culture and experience of black women workers in the post-Civil War south. Through anecdote and data, analysis and interpretation, she manages to penetrate African-American life and labor and to reveal the centrality of women at the inception--and at the heart--of the new south.




10 Bad Choices That Ruin Black Women's Lives


Book Description

In 10 Bad Choices That Ruin Black Women's Lives, relationship expert Dr. Grace Cornish writes a lively, practical, provocative guide for black women everywhere who want to shed the duds and find the studs who will treat them with respect. According to Dr. Cornish, six out of every ten black women are either in bad relationships, share a man, or are celibate. The problem is not the women themselves but the bad choices they keep making. In her frank and refreshing new book, Dr. Cornish speaks to unique aspects of the African American female psyche by targeting ten of the most common and foolish choices black women make in their lives regarding men, and how they can correct these problems, including: Sisters Dissin' Sisters No Money, No Honey Exchanging "Sexual Dealings" for Loving Feelings Loving the "Married Bachelor" Emotional Dependency Plus Unplanned Pregnancy . . . and much more. Relying on case studies, interviews, and letters she has received, Dr. Cornish gets to the heart of the matter by illuminating why black women, no matter how smart, savvy, and successful, continue to lose at the dating game, and how they can face, erase, and replace the problems that have kept them from finding true love. Why are so many black women alone or in bad relationships? Why do sisters unconsciously use weight, fear, finance, status, skin color, and other barriers to keep themselves from getting the love they want? Why do black women think that there are no eligible black men left--that the good ones are married, dead, or not yet born, and the rest are gay, bisexual, or interested only in white women?




Shifting


Book Description

Commemorating its 2oth year in print with a new Introduction and updated content, Shifting explores the many identities Black women must adopt in various spaces to succeed in America. Based on the African American Women's Voices Project, Shifting reveals that a large number of Black women feel pressure to compromise their true selves as they navigate America's racial and gender bigotry. Black women "shift" by altering the expectations they have for themselves or their outer appearance. They modify their speech. They shift "white" as they head to work in the morning and "Black" as they come back home each night. They shift inward, internalizing the searing pain of the negative stereotypes that they encounter daily. And sometimes they shift by fighting back. In commemoration of its twentieth year in print with a new Introduction and updated content throughout Shifting is a much-needed, clear, and comprehensive portrait of the reality of Black women's lives today.




Black Women's Mental Health


Book Description

Creates a new framework for approaching Black women’s wellness, by merging theory and practice with both personal narratives and public policy. This book offers a unique, interdisciplinary, and thoughtful look at the challenges and potency of Black women’s struggle for inner peace and mental stability. It brings together contributors from psychology, sociology, law, and medicine, as well as the humanities, to discuss issues ranging from stress, sexual assault, healing, self-care, and contemplative practice to health-policy considerations and parenting. Merging theory and practice with personal narratives and public policy, the book develops a new framework for approaching Black women’s wellness in order to provide tangible solutions. The collection reflects feminist praxis and defines womanist peace in terms that reject both “superwoman” stereotypes and “victim” caricatures. Also included for health professionals are concrete recommendations for understanding and treating Black women. “ this book speaks not only to Black women but also educates a broader audience of policymakers and therapists about the complex and multilayered realities that we must navigate and the protests we must mount on our journey to find inner peace and optimal health.” — from the Foreword by Linda Goler Blount




Violence in the Lives of Black Women


Book Description

Break the silence surrounding Black women's experiences of violence! Written from a Black feminist perspective by therapists, researchers, activists, and survivors, Violence in the Lives of Black Women: Battered, Black, and Blue sheds new light on an understudied field. For too long, Black women have been suffering the effects of violence in painful silence. This book—winner of the Carolyn Payton Early Career Award for its contribution to the understanding of the role of gender in the lives of Black women—provides a forum where personal testimony and academic research meet to show you how living at the intersection of many kinds of oppression shapes the lives of Black women. With moving case studies, in-depth discussions of activism and resistance, and helpful suggestions for treatment and intervention, this book will help you understand the impact of violence on the lives of Black women. Topics you'll find in Violence in the Lives of Black Women include: using the arts to deal with sexual aggression in the Black community racial aspects of sexual harassment the consequences of head and brain injuries stemming from abuse domestic violence in African-American lesbian relationships strategies Black women use to escape violent living situations lifelong effects of childhood sexual abuse on Black women's mental health references and resources to help you learn more!







The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain


Book Description

Based on interviews and archival research, this book explores how media is implicated in Black women’s lives in Britain. From accounts of twentieth-century activism and television representations, to experiences of YouTube and Twitter, Sobande's analysis traverses tensions between digital culture’s communal, counter-cultural and commercial qualities. Chapters 2 and 4 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.