Africa and black communities across the world are undoubtedly poor and dysfunctional. Political and economic experts have attributed Africa's problems to factors such as corruption and the absence of strong institutions. The dysfunctionalities in African diaspora are usually attributed to broken family structure. This book demonstrates, however, that these factors are not the causes of Africa's and its diasporas' woes but are symptoms of more fundamental problems. Using empirical and qualitative studies, Black Damage highlights the origins of the endless socio-economic miseries of Africa and global black communities. It shows that the plight of Africa and its diasporas are interwoven, hence it addresses them concurrently. Based on more than ten years of research and insight as an African living in the UK diaspora, Femi Akomolafe takes readers through 500 years of history to uncover the root causes of the current predicaments of black communities across the globe. Solutions are provided.

For over a century, the idea that African Americans are psychologically damaged has played an important role in discussions of race. In this provocative work, Daryl Michael Scott argues that damage imagery has been the product of liberals and conservatives, of racists and antiracists. While racial conservatives, often playing on white contempt for blacks, have sought to use findings of black pathology to justify exclusionary policies, racial liberals have used damage imagery primarily to promote policies of inclusion and rehabilitation. In advancing his argument, Scott challenges some long-held beliefs about the history of damage imagery. He rediscovers the liberal impulses behind Stanley Elkins's Sambo hypothesis and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Negro Family and exposes the damage imagery in the work of Ralph Ellison, the leading anti-pathologist. He also corrects the view that the Chicago School depicted blacks as pathological products of matriarchy. New Negro experts such as Charles Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier, he says, disdained sympathy-seeking and refrained from exploring individual pathology. Scott's reassessment of social science sheds new light on Brown v. Board of Education, revealing how experts reversed four decades of theory in order to represent segregation as inherently damaging to blacks. In this controversial work, Scott warns the Left of the dangers in their recent rediscovery of damage imagery in an age of conservative reform.

"When Sergei, a psychotherapist, discovers that his mother is terminally ill, he decides to leave his practice and his life in Paris to be by her side. In the process of adopting a baby himself, he does not want her to die thinking that one of her children hates her, and he hopes to understand this complicated woman and achieve reconciliation before it is too late. Alternating between Dollsie's last months as she battles pancreatic cancer, and poignant, often hilarious (and at times shocking) scenes from Sergei's childhood, "Damage Control" is a tale of outlandish excess; of wildly glamorous and entitled lives lived above the fray - and in deep denial. From the mountain village of Gstaad, Switzerland, to New York, Miami and Cuba, the memoir explores the emotional and geographical landscapes of a mother and son whose lives are revealed to be poignant parallels. After avoiding her for a lifetime, seeking shelter from her rage and narcissism, Sergei comes face-to-face with Dollsie as she confronts mortality. Through his own experiences as a gay man journeying through the joys and perils of his generation, coming out in the early eighties in the deathly shadow of HIV and AIDS, and his years as an activist and therapist in the field, Sergei helps his mother come to terms with her guilt, her regrets and her fear of dying. "Damage Control" is ultimately a rendering of the cycle of life; saying goodbye to a parent so you can say hello to a child, and finding grace and forgiveness through a mother's love."--Back cover.

Keith Morris is a true punk icon. No one else embodies the sound of Southern Californian hardcore the way he does. With his waist-length dreadlocks and snarling vocals, Morris is known the world over for his take-no-prisoners approach on the stage and his integrity off of it. Over the course of his forty-year career with Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, and OFF!, he's battled diabetes, drug and alcohol addiction, and the record industry . . . and he's still going strong. My Damage is more than a book about the highs and lows of a punk rock legend. It's a story from the perspective of someone who has shared the stage with just about every major figure in the music industry and has appeared in cult films like The Decline of Western Civilization and Repo Man. A true Hollywood tale from an L.A. native, My Damage reveals the story of Morris's streets, his scene, and his music-as only he can tell it.

Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens—and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander Jon Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square “black site” show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Chicago residents. In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public’s complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protesters, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge’s Area Two and follows the city’s networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay—Ralph’s story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protesters, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us—and lending a voice to those long deceased.

List of members in each vol.