Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives―and How We Break Free
by Tricia Rose
Basic Books, 2024
[Publication date: March 5, 2024]
The definitive book on how systemic racism in America really works, revealing the vast and often hidden network of interconnected policies, practices, and beliefs that combine to devastate Black lives
In recent years, condemnations of racism in America have echoed from the streets to corporate boardrooms. At the same time, politicians and commentators fiercely debate racism’s very existence. And so, our conversations about racial inequalities remain muddled.
In Metaracism, pioneering scholar Tricia Rose cuts through the noise with a bracing and invaluable new account of what systemic racism actually is, how it works, and how we can fight back. She reveals how—from housing to education to criminal justice—an array of policies and practices connect and interact to produce an even more devastating “metaracism” far worse than the sum of its parts. While these systemic connections can be difficult to see—and are often portrayed as “color-blind”—again and again they function to disproportionately contain, exploit, and punish Black people.
By helping us to comprehend systemic racism’s inner workings and destructive impacts, Metaracism shows us also how to break free—and how to create a more just America for us all.
REVIEWS
“Throughout
this trenchant book, Rose’s analysis is rigorous, insightful, and
lucid, and her language glimmers with lyrical clarity…A brilliant guide
to a systemic malady that cannot be denied.”―Kirkus (starred review)
“Marshalling
extensive evidence into a lucid and powerful narrative, Rose provides
an essential new look at American inequality. Even readers well versed
in the topic will have their eyes opened by this cogent analysis.”―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Tricia
Rose has long set the bar for what it means to be a leading public
intellectual. Brilliant, astute, and fearless, she has taken on the
difficult task of demystifying ‘systemic racism’ from a catchphrase that
merely asserts racial disparities are the result of hidden forces,
explaining exactly how systemic racism works in the United States. With
great clarity and precision, she moves beyond the shocking story, the
point of trauma, or the dizzying statistics to expose the system as a
whole; apprehending its operations by revealing each part, policy, and
practice, and the myriad ways they conjoin. In the face of relentless
attacks on the mere mention of racism, and the nonsense spewing from the
new ‘anti-racism industry,’ Metaracism offers the clear-eyed analysis we urgently need.”―Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams
“Rose is one of our most dynamic and thoughtful public intellectuals today, and in her new book, Metaracism,
she gives us the gift of sight. At a time when terms like ‘structural
racism’ and ‘systemic racism’ are tossed around in the political fires
with little rigor or reflection, Metaracism provides
a much-needed primer on the real-world meaning of the problem. From
housing to education, economic inequality to the criminal justice
system, Rose invites us to see that the roots of racism run deep and are
pervasive in the traumatic suffering we have witnessed in our time—of
Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Kelley Williams-Bolar, and so many
others. We must not only say their names. We must be able to name the
reasons why. In this critical text, Rose helps us to do just that.”―Henry Louis Gates Jr., New York Times–bestselling author of Stony the Road
“Rose
is a brilliant scholar who has been on the cutting edge of every
concept she’s touched. I read everything she writes and always learn
from her insights and analyses.”―Imani Perry, National Book Award–winning author of South to America
“This
book will be the most definitive and comprehensive treatment of
systemic racism we have from the academy for the larger culture in
America! There is simply no one better equipped to write this
magisterial text than Rose! She brings together the best of sociological
analysis, cultural criticism, and brilliant prose!”―Cornel West, New York Times–bestselling author of Democracy Matters
“Rose
is one of our most powerful and profound public intellectuals. Her work
on systemic racism is groundbreaking in its ability to elucidate the
myriad ways in which we are still blind to how race operates under the
surface of every American encounter. This book will become essential
reading for anyone seriously interested in understanding the ways racism
is seamlessly reproduced in this culture.”―Michael Eric Dyson, New York Times–bestselling author of Tears We Cannot Stop
“Rose shook the ground with Black Noise
in 1994, calling a field into existence and making rigorous work in the
history and rhythms of Black popular culture possible. She wrote the
groundbreaking Longing to Tell, setting a new standard for how to talk about the sexual lives of Black women. And The Hip Hop Wars
inaugurated an entirely new generation of students into what it means
to critically engage the music we bop to. When Rose takes to her pen, we
listen for the record scratch, for the invitation to read closely. We
do so because we know things will be different and we will be different
after picking up whatever Rose is putting down.”―Brittney Cooper, New York Times–bestselling author of Eloquent Rage
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Tricia Rose
is Chancellor’s Professor of Africana Studies and the director of the
Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown
University. The author of three books, including The Hip Hop Wars,
she has received fellowships from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations,
and her research has been funded by the Mellon and Robert Wood Johnson
Foundations.
The Black Box
by Henry Louis Gates
Penguin Press 2024
[Publication date: March 19, 2024]
“Henry
Louis Gates is a national treasure. Here, he returns with an
intellectual and at times deeply personal meditation on the hard-fought
evolution and the very meaning of African American identity, calling
upon our country to transcend its manufactured divisions.”
— Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste
“This
is a literary history of Black America, but it is also an argument that
African American history is inextricable from the history of African
American literature.”
—The New York Times
A
magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used
the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the
lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over
the course of the country’s history.
Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race,
is the story of Black self-definition in America through the prism of
the writers who have led the way. From Phillis Wheatley and Frederick
Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, to Zora Neale Hurston
and Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison—these writers used
words to create a livable world—a "home" —for Black people destined to
live out their lives in a bitterly racist society.
It is a book
grounded in the beautiful irony that a community formed legally and
conceptually by its oppressors to justify brutal sub-human bondage,
transformed itself through the word
into a community whose foundational definition was based on overcoming
one of history’s most pernicious lies. This collective act of resistance
and transcendence is at the heart of its self-definition as a
"community." Out of that contested ground has flowered a resilient,
creative, powerful, diverse culture formed by people who have often
disagreed markedly about what it means to be "Black," and about how best
to shape a usable past out of the materials at hand to call into being a
more just and equitable future.
This is the epic story of how,
through essays and speeches, novels, plays, and poems, a long line of
creative thinkers has unveiled the contours of—and resisted confinement
in—the "black box" inside which this "nation within a nation" has been
assigned, willy nilly, from the nation’s founding through to today. This
is a book that records the compelling saga of the creation of a people.
REVIEWS
“The
allure of this book, and the reason for its existence, are the
narrative links he draws among these people and events, and his
insistence that a survey of African American history is incomplete
without a special consideration of how writing has undergirded and
powered it. This is a literary history of Black America, but it is also
an argument that African American history is inextricable from the
history of African American literature.”
—Tope Folarin, The New York Times
“An
absolute tour de force . . . A study in the art, intellect, and
inherent contradictions that define the making of a people.” —Elle
“Gates
tracks questions of class, language, aesthetics, and resistance in a
many faceted, clarifying, era-by-era chronicle propelled by vivid
considerations of such influential Black writers as Phillis Wheatley, W.
E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard
Wright, and Toni Morrison . . . A call to protect the free exchange of
ideas in the classroom and beyond.” —Booklist (starred review)
“A
must for scholars, yet still accessible to general audiences, by
arguably the preeminent scholar of African American studies. This gem
brilliantly reflects multiple depictions of what it means to be a Black
American amid complex, structured interracial and color-based
discrimination discourses, in which writing and language are keys.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“Henry
Louis Gates is a national treasure. Here, he returns with an
intellectual and at times deeply personal meditation on the hard-fought
evolution and the very meaning of African American identity, calling
upon our country to transcend its manufactured divisions.” —Isabel Wilkerson, New York Times bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the
Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard
University. An award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist,
cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored
or coauthored more than twenty books, including Stony the Road, The Black Church, and The Black Box, and created more than twenty documentary films, including his groundbreaking genealogy series Finding Your Roots. His six-part PBS documentary, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, earned an Emmy Award, a Peabody Award, and an NAACP Image Award. This series and his PBS documentary series Reconstruction: America after the Civil War were both honored with the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award.
