Rastafari is an Afrocentric social and religious movement that emerged among Afro-Jamaican communities in the 1930s and has many adherents in the Caribbean and worldwide today. This book is a groundbreaking account of Rastafari, demonstrating that it provides a normative conception of Blackness for people of African descent that resists Eurocentric and colonial ideas. Vivaldi Jean-Marie examines Rastafari’s core beliefs and practices, arguing that they constitute a distinctively Black system of norms and values—at once an ethos and a cosmology. He traces Rastafari’s origins in enslaved people’s strategies of resistance, Jamaican Revivalism, and Garveyism, showing how it incorporates ancestral religious traditions and emancipatory politics. An Ethos of Blackness draws out the significance of practices such as avoiding technological exploitation of natural artifacts and the belief in living in harmony with the natural order. Jean-Marie considers Rastafari’s theology, exploring its reinterpretation of biblical scriptures and its foundations in the rejection of Christianity’s Eurocentrism and racism. However, he insists, before Rastafari can fulfill its promise of liberation for people of African descent, it must confront its failure to include women and redress sexism. Through rigorous and sensitive reflections on Rastafari culture and cosmology, this book offers deeply original insights into the Black theological imagination.

The Ethos of Black Motherhood in America: Only White Women Get Pregnant examines the ethos of Black and white mothers in America's racialized society. Kimberly C. Harper argues that the current Black maternal health crisis is not a new one, but an existing one rooted in the disregard for Black wombs dating back to America's history with chattel slavery. Examining the reproductive laws that controlled the reproductive experiences of black women, Harper provides a fresh insight into the “bad black mother” trope that Black feminist scholars have theorized and argues that the controlling images of black motherhood are a creation of the American nation-state. In addition to a discussion of black motherhood, Harper also explores the image of white motherhood as the center of the landscape of motherhood. Scholars of communication, gender studies, women’s studies, history, and race studies will find this book particularly useful.

WARS CHANGE, WARRIORS DON'T We are all warriors. Each of us struggles every day to define and defend our sense of purpose and integrity, to justify our existence on the planet and to understand, if only within our own hearts, who we are and what we believe in. Do we fight by a code? If so, what is it? What is the Warrior Ethos? Where did it come from? What form does it take today? How do we (and how can we) use it and be true to it in our internal and external lives? The Warrior Ethos is intended not only for men and women in uniform, but artists, entrepreneurs and other warriors in other walks of life. The book examines the evolution of the warrior code of honor and "mental toughness." It goes back to the ancient Spartans and Athenians, to Caesar's Romans, Alexander's Macedonians and the Persians of Cyrus the Great (not excluding the Garden of Eden and the primitive hunting band). Sources include Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch, Xenophon, Vegetius, Arrian and Curtius--and on down to Gen. George Patton, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, and Israeli Minister of Defense, Moshe Dayan.

How do we make sense of what it means to be Black in a world with room for both Michelle Obama and Precious? Tour , an iconic commentator and journalist, defines and demystifies modern Blackness with wit, authority, and irreverent humor. In the age of Obama, racial attitudes have become more complicated and nuanced than ever before. Americans are searching for new ways of understanding Blackness, partly inspired by a President who is unlike any Black man ever seen on our national stage. This book aims to destroy the notion that there is a correct or even definable way of being Black. It’s a discussion mixing the personal and the intellectual. It gives us intimate and painful stories of how race and racial expectations have shaped Tour ’s life as well as a look at how the concept of Post-Blackness functions in politics, psychology, the Black visual arts world, Chappelle’s Show, and more. For research Tour has turned to some of the most important luminaries of our time for frank and thought-provoking opinions, including Rev. Jesse Jackson, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Malcolm Gladwell, Harold Ford, Jr., Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, Chuck D, and many others. Their comments and disagreements with one another may come as a surprise to many readers. Of special interest is a personal racial memoir by the author in which he depicts defining moments in his life when he confronts the question of race head-on. In another chapter—sure to be controversial—he explains why he no longer uses the word “nigga.” Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? is a complex conversation on modern America that aims to change how we perceive race in ways that are as nuanced and spirited as the nation itself.

An explanation of the digital practices of the black Internet From BlackPlanet to #BlackGirlMagic, Distributed Blackness places blackness at the very center of internet culture. André Brock Jr. claims issues of race and ethnicity as inextricable from and formative of contemporary digital culture in the United States. Distributed Blackness analyzes a host of platforms and practices (from Black Twitter to Instagram, YouTube, and app development) to trace how digital media have reconfigured the meanings and performances of African American identity. Brock moves beyond widely circulated deficit models of respectability, bringing together discourse analysis with a close reading of technological interfaces to develop nuanced arguments about how “blackness” gets worked out in various technological domains. As Brock demonstrates, there’s nothing niche or subcultural about expressions of blackness on social media: internet use and practice now set the terms for what constitutes normative participation. Drawing on critical race theory, linguistics, rhetoric, information studies, and science and technology studies, Brock tabs between black-dominated technologies, websites, and social media to build a set of black beliefs about technology. In explaining black relationships with and alongside technology, Brock centers the unique joy and sense of community in being black online now.

Amidst the violent racism prevalent at the turn of the twentieth century, African American cultural elites, struggling to articulate a positive black identity, developed a middle-class ideology of racial uplift. Insisting that they were truly representative of the race's potential, black elites espoused an ethos of self-help and service to the black masses and distinguished themselves from the black majority as agents of civilization; hence the phrase 'uplifting the race.' A central assumption of racial uplift ideology was that African Americans' material and moral progress would diminish white racism. But Kevin Gaines argues that, in its emphasis on class distinctions and patriarchal authority, racial uplift ideology was tied to pejorative notions of racial pathology and thus was limited as a force against white prejudice. Drawing on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Hubert H. Harrison, and others, Gaines focuses on the intersections between race and gender in both racial uplift ideology and black nationalist thought, showing that the meaning of uplift was intensely contested even among those who shared its aims. Ultimately, elite conceptions of the ideology retreated from more democratic visions of uplift as social advancement, leaving a legacy that narrows our conceptions of rights, citizenship, and social justice.