Does the black struggle for civil rights make common cause with the movement to foster queer community, protest anti-queer violence or discrimination, and demand respect for the rights and sensibilities of queer people? Confronting this emotionally charged question, Ladelle McWhorter reveals how a carefully structured campaign against abnormality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries encouraged white Americans to purge society of so-called biological contaminants, people who were poor, disabled, black, or queer. Building on a legacy of savage hate crimes—such as the killings of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd—McWhorter shows that racism, sexual oppression, and discrimination against the disabled, the feeble, and the poor are all aspects of the same societal distemper, and that when the civil rights of one group are challenged, so are the rights of all.

Sexual desire, often understood as personal erotic preference, is frequently seen as neutral, natural, or inevitable. Countering these commonplace assumptions, Racial Erotics shows how sexual partnering within communities of gay men is deeply embedded within larger social structures that define whiteness as desirable and normative while othering men of color. In queer erotic economies this othering may take the form of sexual rejection or fetishization of men of color, but C. Winter Han argues that the real danger of sexual racism is that it creates a hierarchy of racial worth that extends outside of erotic encounters into the everyday lives of gay men of color. In this way, sexual racism perpetuates a larger project of racial erasing that equates gayness with whiteness to secure acceptance for gay white men at the expense of queers of color. With vivid examples from interviews, media representations, and online dating sites, Han highlights the creative means through which gay men of color, cordoned off in spaces both gay and straight, produce alternative frameworks to combat dominant narratives. Racial Erotics offers a new paradigm for understanding the connection of race and queer desire, demonstrating how race profoundly shapes sexual desires among men while racialized notions of desire construct beliefs about belonging.

The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality. In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’ (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.

The data behind a distinct form of racism in online dating The Dating Divide is the first comprehensive look at "digital-sexual racism," a distinct form of racism that is mediated and amplified through the impersonal and anonymous context of online dating. Drawing on large-scale behavioral data from a mainstream dating website, extensive archival research, and more than seventy-five in-depth interviews with daters of diverse racial backgrounds and sexual identities, Curington, Lundquist, and Lin illustrate how the seemingly open space of the internet interacts with the loss of social inhibition in cyberspace contexts, fostering openly expressed forms of sexual racism that are rarely exposed in face-to-face encounters. The Dating Divide is a fascinating look at how a contemporary conflux of individualization, consumerism, and the proliferation of digital technologies has given rise to a unique form of gendered racism in the era of swiping right—or left. The internet is often heralded as an equalizer, a seemingly level playing field, but the digital world also acts as an extension of and platform for the insidious prejudices and divisive impulses that affect social politics in the "real" world. Shedding light on how every click, swipe, or message can be linked to the history of racism and courtship in the United States, this compelling study uses data to show the racial biases at play in digital dating spaces.

This book brings together a collection of research, personal reflection, and creative work to provide a comprehensive, in-depth account of sexual racism from an international and interdisciplinary perspective. The volume makes the case that sexual racism is in the very foundations of our societies, determining the ideas, bodies, and systems positioned as desirable. From this provocative perspective, Sexual Racism and Social Justice offers a new understanding of the relationship between sex and race, arguing that to undesire whiteness is to help undo sexual racism, which are essential steps in the meaningful advancement of social justice.