Below you'll find a collection of books we've compiled from scholars both at UC Berkeley and other institutions on topics related to slavery, race, and other themes of the 400 Year Commemoration. (Go back to Page 1)
Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
By C. Riley Snorton, Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Chicago. (University of Minnesota Press, 2017)
In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence. Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials, Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable.
Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low
By C. Riley Snorton, Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Chicago. (University of Minnesota Press, 2014)
Since the early 2000s, the phenomenon of the “down low”—black men who have sex with men as well as women and do not identify as gay, queer, or bisexual—has exploded in media and popular culture. C. Riley Snorton traces the emergence and circulation of the down low, demonstrating how these portrayals reinforce troubling perceptions of black sexuality generally.
Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology
By Deirdre Cooper Owens, Associate Professor of History at Queens College. (University of Georgia Press, 2018)
In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white "ladies." Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities.
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
By Ibram X. Kendi, Professor, History and International Relations, American University. (PublicAffairs, 2016)
Contrary to popular conceptions, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Instead, they were devised and honed by some of the most brilliant minds of each era. These intellectuals used their brilliance to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation’s racial disparities in everything from wealth to health. And while racist ideas are easily produced and easily consumed, they can also be discredited.
Chokehold: Policing Black Men
By Paul Butler, Professor, Georgetown Law.(New York: The New Press 2017)
In this explosive book, an African American former federal prosecutor shows that the system is working exactly the way it’s supposed to. Black men are always under watch, and police violence is widespread—all with the support of judges and politicians.
Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice
By Paul Butler, Professor, Georgetown Law. (New York: New Press 2009)
Paul Butler was an ambitious federal prosecutor, a Harvard Law grad who gave up his corporate law salary to fight the good fight—until one day he was arrested on the street and charged with a crime he didn’t commit. The book brings Butler’s groundbreaking and highly controversial arguments—jury nullification (voting “not guilty” in drug cases as a form of protest), just saying “no” when the police request your permission to search, and refusing to work inside the system as a snitch or a prosecutor—to a whole new audience.
The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity
Nadine Burke Harris, California Surgeon General.
A pioneering physician reveals how childhood stress can lead to lifelong health problems, and shows us what we can do to break the cycle. After surveying more than 17,000 adult patients, Harris found that the higher a person’s adverse childhood experiences (ACE) score, the worse their health. This led Burke Harris to an astonishing breakthrough—childhood stress changes our neural systems and its impact lasts a lifetime.
Epidemiology and the People’s Health: Theory and Context
By Nancy Krieger, Professor, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. (Oxford University Press, 2011)
This book presents the argument for why epidemiologic theory matters. Tracing the history and contours of diverse epidemiologic theories of disease distribution from ancient societies on through the development of — and debates within — contemporary epidemiology worldwide, it considers their implications for improving population health and promoting health equity.
Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management
By Caitlin C. Rosenthal, Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley Department of History. (2018)
Accounting for Slavery explores the development of business practices on slave plantations and uses this history to understand the relationship between violence and innovation. By showing the many ways that business innovation can be a byproduct of bondage, Rosenthal further erodes the false boundary between capitalism and slavery and illuminates deep parallels between the outlooks of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slaveholders and the ethical dilemmas facing twenty-first-century businesses.
Documentary feature: Meet Mary Pleasant, Mother of Civil Rights in California
Directed by Susheel Bibbs, former faculty, UC Berkeley. (PBS, 2008)
Born a slave, she became an Underground Railroad operative and the most talked about woman in gold-rush San Francisco. A celebrated entrepreneur, she amassed a joint fortune once assessed at $30,000,000. Called "The Black City Hall" for the jobs and appeals she won for African Americans, she risked security to aid the abolitionist John Brown. Her court battle in the California Supreme Court impacted modern-day civil-rights law.
Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave
Edited by Regina Mason and William L. Andrews. (Originally published 1825; Oxford University Press revised edition 2008)
Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave is the first fugitive slave narrative in American history. Because Grimes wrote and published his narrative on his own, without deference to white editors, publishers, or sponsors, his life has an immediacy, candor, and no-holds-barred realism unparalleled in the famous antebellum slave narratives of the period. This edition of Grimes's autobiography represents an historic partnership between noted scholar of the African American slave narrative, William L. Andrews, and Regina Mason, Grimes's great-great-great-granddaughter.