In celebration of Black History Month, SUP is pleased to offer this list of recommended reading. These titles span across sociology, personal accounts, history, anthropology, law, human rights, and education.
Black Privilege: Modern Middle-Class Blacks with Credentials and Cash to Spend »
"A rich and nuanced portrait of the black middle class. Pittman Claytor's insightful analysis should be read widely by college students and wider audiences, for it skillfully and beautifully mobilizes the sociological imagination to make the familiar and taken-for-granted visible."
—Michèle Lamont, co-author of Getting Respect
New York City has the largest population of black Americans out of any metropolitan area in the United States. It is home to a steadily rising number of socio-economically privileged blacks. In Black Privilege Cassi Pittman Claytor examines how this economically advantaged group experiences privilege, having credentials that grant them access to elite spaces and resources with which they can purchase luxuries, while still confronting persistent anti-black bias and racial stigma.
Drawing on the everyday experiences of black middle-class individuals, Pittman Claytor offers vivid accounts of their consumer experiences and cultural flexibility in the places where they live, work, and play. Whether it is the majority white Wall Street firm where they're employed, or the majority black Baptist church where they worship, questions of class and racial identity are equally on their minds. They navigate divergent social worlds that demand, at times, middle-class sensibilities, pedigree, and cultural acumen; and at other times pride in and connection with other blacks.
The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans »
"Anjali Vats delivers a damning polemic on the racist scripts and tropes that have animated American intellectual property law and rhetoric, shaping understandings of citizenship and structures of national feeling in three distinct eras of racial political economy. The Color of Creatorship is destined to be a touchstone and lightning rod in critical race legal theory for years to come."
—Rosemary J. Coombe, author of The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation and the Law
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