Radical reparations
forthcoming with HarperCollins (Amistad)
America is a beautiful mansion with many rooms on a beautiful block. Gleaming beauty from the outside, America on the inside, reveals a different story. So thoroughly impressed with America's exterior, those who enter inside are often aghast. Across its many rooms are piles of wall-to-wall dirty filthy laundry.
Piles everywhere:
Political reparations, restorative and reparative historically informed advocacy transforming government and political representation and participation;
Intellectual reparations, the purposeful and public recognition and acknowledgment of the creations, inventions, and ideas of formerly enslaved people and their descendants;
Legal reparations, restorative justice, and racial equity established and authorized in-laws and policies;
Economic reparations, pecuniary and/or monetary assistance, subsidy, restitution, and debt relief;
Social reparations, restoration, and repair of the social contract to end racism and mindsets premised on racial and ethnic hierarchy, thus affirming the dignity of human beings;
Spatial reparations, restorative and reparative geography of socioeconomic and political opportunity, particularly for those displaced and dispossessed by American slavery and their descendants; and
Spiritual reparations, the purposeful and intentional recognition, representation, and recovery of the religious and spiritual cosmologies, practices, and beliefs harmed and lost in the Triangle slave trade and American slavery.
Within these seven forms of reparations, or P.I.L.E.S3, we can unlock a new foundation and new pathway to truth, love, justice, and freedom in America and everywhere Black people are heretofore Radical Reparations.
In addition to developing educational resources, Radical Reparations™ also provides consulting services and legal consultations to communities, advocates, policymakers, and educational institutions to bolster programming and activities involving racial equity and justice.
CHOCOLATE CITIES
From Central District Seattle to Harlem to Holly Springs, Black people have built a dynamic network of cities and towns where Black culture is maintained, created, and defended. But imagine—what if current maps of Black life are wrong?
Chocolate Cities offers a refreshing and persuasive rendering of the United States— a “Black map” that more accurately reflects the lived experiences and the future of Black life in America. Drawing on film, fiction, music, and oral history, Marcus Anthony Hunter and Zandria F. Robinson trace the Black American experience of race, place, and liberation, mapping it from Emancipation to now.
As the United States moves toward a majority-minority society, Chocolate Cities provides a provocative, broad, and necessary assessment of how racial and ethnic minorities make and change America’s social, economic, and political landscape.
Publication, January 10, 2018
The new black sociologist
The New Black Sociologists follows in the footsteps of 1974’s pioneering text Black Sociologists: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, by tracing the organization of its forbearer in key thematic ways.
This new collection of essays revisit the legacies of significant Black scholars including James E. Blackwell, William Julius Wilson, Joyce Ladner, and Mary Pattillo, but also extends coverage to include overlooked figures like Audre Lorde, Ida B. Wells, James Baldwin and August Wilson - whose lives and work have inspired new generations of Black sociologists on contemporary issues of racial segregation, feminism, religiosity, class, inequality and urban studies.
Publication,July 3, 2018
Black citymakers
W.E.B. DuBois immortalized Philadelphia's Black Seventh Ward neighborhood, one of America's oldest urban Black communities, in his 1899 sociological study The Philadelphia Negro. In the century after DuBois's study, however, the district has been transformed into a largely white upper middle-class neighborhood.
Black Citymakers revisits the Black Seventh Ward, documenting a century of banking and tenement collapses, housing activism, Black-led anti-urban renewal mobilization, and post-Civil Rights political change from the perspective of the Black Seventh Warders. Drawing on historical, political, and sociological research, Marcus Hunter argues that Black Philadelphians were by no means mere casualties of the large-scale social and political changes that altered urban dynamics across the nation after World War II. Instead, Hunter shows that black Americans framed their own understandings of urban social change, forging dynamic inter- and intra-racial alliances that allowed them to shape their own migration from the old Black Seventh Ward to emergent Black urban enclaves throughout Philadelphia. These Philadelphians were not victims forced from their homes - they were citymakers and agents of urban change.
Black Citymakers explores a century of socioeconomic, cultural, and political history in the Black Seventh Ward, creating a new understanding of the political agency of Black residents, leaders, and activists in twentieth-century urban change.
Publication, April 15, 2015
