Against Civility
The Hidden Racism in Our Obsession with Civility
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- USD 13.99
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- USD 13.99
Descripción editorial
The first history of racial injustice to examine how civility and white supremacy are linked, and a call for citizens who care about social justice to abandon civility and practice civic radicalism
The idea and practice of civility has always been wielded to silence dissent, repress political participation, and justify violence upon people of color. Although many progressives today are told that we need to be more polite and thoughtful, less rancorous and angry, when we talk about race in America, civility maintains rather than disrupts racial injustice.
Spanning two hundred years, Zamalin’s accessible blend of intellectual history, political biography, and contemporary political criticism shows that civility has never been neutral in its political uses and impacts. The best way to tackle racial inequality is through “civic radicalism,” an alternative to civility found in the actions of Black radical leaders including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Audre Lorde. Civic radicals shock and provoke people. They name injustice and who is responsible for it. They protest, march, strike, boycott, and mobilize collectively rather than form alliances with those who fundamentally oppose them.
In Against Civility, citizens who care deeply about racial and socioeconomic equality will see that they need to abandon this concept of discreet politeness when it comes to racial justice and instead more fully support disruptive actions and calls for liberation, which have already begun with movements like #MeToo, the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, and Black Lives Matter.
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Zamalin (Antiracism: An Introduction), director of the African American Studies Program at the University of Detroit Mercy, argues in this brisk and provocative treatise that "civility is the central term through which racial inequality has been maintained" in America. According to Zamalin, pundits and politicians who view civility as the most effective means of opposing President Trump are echoing the language of "slaveholders, segregationists, lynch mobs, and eugenicists." Zamalin notes that proslavery politicians described the debate over slavery as a "lovers' quarrel between a hostile, hateful North and a genteel South," examines how conservatives in the 1970s and '80s justified severe cuts to welfare programs by drawing public attention to "uncivil black citizens" like "welfare queen" Linda Taylor, and discusses how George W. Bush evoked "compassionate conservatism" to facilitate the gentrification of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Zamalin's alternative to civility is "civic radicalism," a somewhat amorphous concept of disruption and resistance that he locates in the activism of Martin Luther King Jr., radical abolitionist John Brown, poet Audre Lorde, and the Black Lives Matter movement, among others. Progressives will be galvanized by this urgent and incisive call for a stiffer resistance to the status quo.