Washoe County Library System

"Explores the extent to which historical definitions of race continue to shape contemporary racial identities and lived experiences of racial difference"-- Provided by publisher

Nine stories highlight the complexities of being Black in modern America, including a Black son who visits his white father during the 1992 Los Angeles riots and a Black Republican whose skin disease is turning him white.

"In a world without white people, what does it mean to be Black? One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charlie Brunton is a Black man living in an entirely new world. Having served time in prison for a wrongful conviction, he’s now a professor of electric and solar power systems at Howard University when he receives a call from someone he wasn’t even sure existed:...

Now a major motion picture starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga, Nella Larsen's powerful, thrilling, and tragic tale about the fluidity of racial identity that continues to resonate today. Clare Kendry is living on the edge. Light-skinned, elegant, and ambitious, she is married to a racist white man unaware of her African American heritage, and has severed all ties to her past after deciding to "pass" as a white woman. Clare's childhood friend,...

"A 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist and former Wall Street Journal writer exhaustively examines his family’s legacy of post-enslavement trauma and resilience, in this riveting memoir—a soulful, shocking, and spellbinding read that blends the raw power of Natasha Tretheway’s Memorial Drive and the insights of Clint Smith’s How the Word is Passed. I Am Nobody’s Slave tells the story of one Black family's pursuit of the American Dream through...

"A hilariously intimate memoir that gets to the turbulent joys and pains of coming of age and looking for love as a Black woman in America. In the car she’d had since high school—with the boyfriend she’d had just as long riding shotgun—Minda Honey made the cross-country drive to sunny Southern California. By the end of 2008, Obama would be president, she’d be single, and change would be upon us all. Thousands of miles away from her family...

"Scientific research has now established that race should be understood as a social construct, not a true biological division of humanity. In Imagining Black America, Michael Wayne explores the construction and reconstruction of black America from the arrival of the first Africans in Jamestown in 1619 to Barack Obama's reelection. Races have to be imagined into existence and constantly reimagined as circumstances change, Wayne argues, and as a consequence...

"A Little Devil in America is an urgent project that unravels all modes and methods of black performance, in this moment when black performers are coming to terms with their value, reception, and immense impact on America. With sharp insight, humor, and heart, Abdurraqib examines how black performance happens in specific moments in time and space--midcentury Paris, the moon, or a cramped living room in Columbus, Ohio. At the outset of this project,...

"With equal parts candor and humor, Jerald Walker--a recipient of the PEN Award for nonfiction and finalist for the National Book Award--sharply examines and explains Black life and culture in Magically Black and Other Essays"-- Provided by publisher. "In this engaging follow up to How to Make a Slave and Other Essays, the recipient of PEN New England Award for nonfiction and finalist for the National Book Award sharply examines and explains Black...

It tells Lacey Schwartz's story of growing up in a typical upper-middle-class Jewish household in Woodstock, NY, with loving parents and a strong sense of her Jewish identity, despite the open questions from those around her about how a white girl could have such dark skin. She believes her family's explanation that her looks were inherited from her dark-skinned Sicilian grandfather. At age of 18, she finally confronts her mother and learns the truth....