table of contents
Introduction: Ferguson is the Future
A Culture of Racism
From Kerner to Colorblind
Black Faces in High Places
Hope, Change and “I Can’t Breathe”
Black Liberation and the Struggle for Freedom in the 21st century
$1000 marketing and publicity budget
Excerpts, features and advertising in: A Critical Journal of Black
Politics, Culture and Society, Jacobin, New Politics, The Black
Commentator, Black Agenda Report, Ms. Magazine
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. Her articles have been published in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, Jacobin, New Politics, the Guardian, In These Times, Black Agenda Report, Ms., International Socialist Review, Al Jazeera America, and other publications. Taylor is assistant professor in the department of African American Studies at Princeton University.
"Ultimately, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation is an
essential read for anyone following the movement for Black Lives.
The text chronicles a portion of history we rarely ever see, while
also bringing together data and deep primary source research in a
way that lucidly explains the origins of the current moment."
Los Angeles Review of Books
This brilliant book is the best analysis we have of the
#BlackLivesMatter moment of the long struggle for freedom in
America. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has emerged as the most
sophisticated and courageous radical intellectual of her
generation.”
Dr. Cornel West
"Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's searching examination of the social,
political and economic dimensions of the prevailing racial order
offers important context for understanding the necessity of the
emerging movement for black liberation."
Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
"Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s has not written the average rushed
first-wave book on a social movement. Taylor, a professor of
African American studies at Princeton, is the rare academic writer
whose sense of humor is as sharp as her scholarship. She’s written
a sweeping yet concise history not just of the Black Lives Matter
movement, but of the past seven years under the first black
president and of how the 20th century led to our current state of
woke uprising. It’s full of gems of historical insight and it
fearlessly tackles what black liberation looks like when it happens
in a black-governed city 40 miles from a black-occupied White
House.”
Steven Thrasher, The Guardian
"Class Matters! In this clear-eyed, historically informed account
of the latest wave of resistance to state violence,
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor not only exposes the canard of
color-blindness but reveals how structural racism and class
oppression are joined at the hip. If today’s rebels ever expect to
end inequality and racialized state violence, she warns, then
capitalism must also end. And that requires forging new
solidarities, envisioning a new social and economic order, and
pushing a struggle to protect Black Lives to its logical
conclusion: a revolution capable of transforming the entire
nation."
Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical
Imagination
"With political eloquence, intellectual rigor, and an
unapologetically left analysis,the brilliant scholar-activist
Keeanga Taylor has provided a powerful contribution to our
collective understanding of the current stage of the Black freedom
struggle in the United States, how we arrived at this point, and
what battles we need to fight in order to truly achieve liberation.
From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation is a must read for
everyone who is serious about the ongoing praxis of freedom."
Barbara Ransby, author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom
Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision
"Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has a strong voice, a sharp mind and a
clear, readable style that all come together in this penetrating,
vital analysis of race and class at this critical moment in
America's racial history."
Gary Younge, editor-at-large for the Guardian
"Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor brings the long history of Black radical
theorizing and scholarship into the neoliberal 21st century with
From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Her strong voice is
deeply needed at a time when young activists are once again
reforging a Black liberation movement that is under constant
attack. Deeply rooted in Black radical, feminist and socialist
traditions, Taylor’s book is an outstanding example of the type of
analysis that is needed to build movements for freedom and
self-determination in a far more complicated terrain than that
confronted by the activists of the 20th century. Her book is
required reading for anyone interested in justice, equality and
freedom."
Michael C. Dawson, author of Blacks In and Out of the Left
"Mainstream political discourse right now, not only but
particularly in the US, seems to be on a race to the bottom, eager
to plumb and rehabilitate new depths of vileness. The
#BlackLivesMatter movement has been one inspiring and salutary
dissenting tendency to that and it couldn’t have a better analyst.
Comradely and sympathetic without losing critical edge, Taylor
always combines anger and rigor with rare and clear subtlety. Her
examination of the changing contours of radical race politics is
bound to be indispensable."
China Miéville
"This book should be read widely. It's a powerful, concise account
of why the Black Lives Matter movement has erupted and why it's
needed. It is a clear-eyed and morally righteous work informed by a
deep understanding of history and social policy, one that patiently
and painstakingly illustrates the ways racism and capitalism are
intertwined. Ultimately Taylor presents a powerful argument for
social movements, for building power outside of electoral politics
that can take on structural inequities. I found myself underlining
something on almost every page."
Astra Taylor, author of The People’s Platform
From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation is a profoundly
insightful book from one of the brightest new lights in African
American Studies. Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor invites us to rethink the
postwar history of the US and to place the actions of everyday
people, including the hundreds of thousands of African Americans
who participated in the urban rebellions and wildcat strikes of
1960s and 1970s, at the forefront of American politics. By doing
so, she offers up a usable past” for interpreting the current
anti-state sanctioned violence movement sweeping the U.S. in the
early twenty-first century. This timely volume provides much needed
analysis not only of race and criminalization in modern American
history, but of the specific roles played by a bi-partisan
electoral elite, the corporate sector, and the new black political
class in producing our current onslaught of police killings and
mass incarceration in the years since the Voting Rights Act’s
passage. Yamahtta-Taylor’s fluent voice as historian and political
theorist renders legible the accomplishments and, perhaps most
importantly, the expansive possibilities of a new generation of
black youth activism.”
Donna Murch, author of Living for the City: Migration, Education,
and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California
"Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has given us an important book, one that
might help us to understand the roots of the contemporary policing
crisis and build popular opposition capable of transforming the
current, dismal state of affairs. Equal parts historical analysis
and forceful polemic, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
provides a much-needed antidote to the post-racial patter that has
defined the Obama years, but it also serves as a proper corrective
for the new civil rights movement” posturing of some activists.
Against such nostalgic thinking, Taylor reminds us of the new
historical conditions we face, and the unique challenges created by
decades of African American political integration. From
#BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation sketches a politics that
rightly connects anti-police brutality protests and a broader
anti-capitalist project. Everyone who has grown sick of too many
undeserved deaths at the hands of police and vigilantes should read
and debate this book."
Cedric G. Johnson, author of Revolutionaries to Race Leaders:
Black Power and the Making of African American Politics
“One by one, Taylor traces the origins of concepts such as ‘culture
of poverty’, family breakdown and so on – and demolishes them as
examples of ideological reaction against the threat of civil rights
to establishment power.” –Red Pepper
“This is an important book, from a great writer, featuring powerful
prose, compelling arguments, written very accessibly. It’s an
important and needed message in a sea of racial reaction, tepid
liberal ‘multiculturalism’, and pro-capitalist reformism – and it
deserves a wide audience.” –Dana Williams, California State
University, Chico, Anarchist Studies
“From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation is a must-read for
those interested in understanding racism and inequality in modern
society...a quintessential manifesto for the underrepresented,
unappreciated black peoples and their allies. This book demands not
only a constitutional change, but a revolution that will free black
people from an inherently biased system.” –Luke de Noronha,
Birkbeck College, University of London, Ethnic and Racial
Studies
“Taylor's book is a recommended read. Not only an analysis of
contemporary protest, but an illuminating history of institutional
and structural racism in the USA, an incisive critique of 'Black
Faces In High Places' and a valuable insight on how struggles
against police racism, brutality and murder might be, must be,
broadened and linked to others” –Just Books
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