Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2017 -

This measured yet powerful philosophical and moral analysis of African American ghetto life and the injustices suffered by its denizens deserves to be widely read. Any educated citizen, any student, and any academic in economics, the social sciences, or philosophy can read it with profit. While Shelby (African and African American studies and philosophy, Harvard) does not opt for any overarching political philosophy, he does make trenchant arguments about the nature and conditions of community, family, work, crime, and punishment, and the right to resist deeply unjust and humiliating laws and practices. With regard to work, for example, Shelby's subtle analysis explores not only how the white majority frames the lives of those who don't work and cannot find work (e.g., "freeloaders," "lazy"), he also explores what work means in the lives of most people, coupled with how work, and its absence, affects family and civic life. While Shelby advocates abolishing the ghetto, he does not mean abolishing black neighborhoods. Rather, he urges a fundamental reform of the basic structure of society. This has implications for policing and the creation of employment opportunities, and much more.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.

An extraordinary work of feminist theorizing, this monograph combines close reading of classic texts of intersectionality with nuanced critiques of the variety of ways the term has been used in both intellectual and political contexts. Putting critical race theorist Kimberle Crenshaw's much-cited law articles of 1989 and 1991 in the center of her own analysis, Carastathis engages with accounts that instead credit intersectionality to prior black feminist and socialist feminist arguments about class, race, and gender as systems of oppression and identity. She then takes on subsequent critiques that insist that intersectionality is a meaningless buzzword, an achieved criterion of valid feminist thought, or an internally incoherent political claim to represent marginalized identities. By avoiding unnecessary jargon and defining the relatively esoteric terms as she proceeds, the author achieves a degree of readability that is unusual for a book this sophisticated. Mandatory reading for anyone working on intersectionality as either an academic concept or an organizing tool, the book quotes arguments in sufficient depth that it does not demand prior deep familiarity with the texts it analyzes. For advanced courses in women's studies, political theory, and critical race studies.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

Put simply, border patrolling is the social mechanism people employ to categorize multiracial individuals into specific racial groups, especially when such individuals identify themselves as belonging to racial classifications that the "border patroller" does not perceive should be claimed. Mills (gender and women's studies, Castleton Univ.) undertakes a comprehensive study of 60 multiracial individuals to learn "how they make sense of and situate themselves across ... color lines" and navigate interactions with strangers, families, and friends, including the commonly asked, arguably insensitive question, "What are you?" or its seemingly less-intrusive twin, "Where are you from?" According to the 2010 US Census, the fastest-growing racial classification is "multiracial," yet remarkably few scholarly works exist examining the complex issues of self-identity biracial and multiracial people face. Fewer still include a spectrum of racial combinations other than that of half-black/half-white. As a result, the clearest comparison text is from 15 years earlier--editors Loretta Winter and Herman DeBose's New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century (2002). Mills's work is indispensable for institutions with sociology, social work, or anthropology programs, or any library serving racially and ethnically diverse populations.Summing Up: Essential. All public and academic levels/libraries.