GFP Alum Books

Not Our Kind of Girl- Unravelling the Myths of Black Teenage Motherhood

Elaine Bell Kaplan
1977

Elaine Bell Kaplan- One of the most worrisome images in America today is that of the teenage mother. For the African-American community, that image is especially troubling: All the problems of the welfare system seem to spotlight the black teenage mom. Elaine Bell Kaplan's affecting and insightful book dispels common perceptions of these young women. Her interviews with the women themselves, and with their mothers and grandmothers, provide a vivid picture of lives caught in the intersection of race, class, and gender.

Kaplan challenges the...

Readings in the Sociology of AIDS

Anthony J. Lemelle, Jr.
1999

Anthony J. Lemelle, Jr., Charlene Harrington, and Allen J. Leblanc- This unique and comprehensive book focuses on the sociological (rather than the biomedical and behavioral) issues of HIV/AIDS. It highlights the human consequences of the disease for both groups and established social structures. Exposes the reader to the full range of social, cultural, historical, policy, and economic issues surrounding the HIV/AIDS crisis. Addresses three specific dimensions of HIV/AIDS—transmission, outreach for...

Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation

Jon Cruz
1999

Jon Cruz- In Culture on the Margins, Jon Cruz recounts the “discovery” of black music by white elites in the nineteenth century, boldly revealing how the episode shaped modern approaches to studying racial and ethnic cultures. Slave owners had long heard black song making as meaningless “noise.” Abolitionists began to attribute social and political meaning to the music, inspired, as many were, by Frederick Douglass’s invitation to hear slaves’ songs as testimonies to their inner, subjective...

Home Advantage Social Class and Parental Intervention in Elementary Education

Annette Lareau
2000

Anette Lareau- This historical and sociological survey of two communities looks into the relation between parents and teachers of different social classes and puts forward the argument that social class, independent of ability, does affect schooling, because of the availability of money and time. This book does not concentrate on one social institution, but on family life and school life. With family life, the middle-class parent is more likely to take their work home with them. Yet Lareau’s research also shows that middle-class parents are more inclined to spend more time...

Beyond the Politics of Place: New Directions in Community Organizing in the 1990s

Gary Delgado
1999

Gary Delgado and Applied Research Center

Forced Sacrifice as Ethnic Protest: The Hispano Cause in New Mexico and the Racial Attitude Confrontation of 1933

Phillip B. Gonzales
2001

Phillip B. Gonzales-Forced Sacrifice as Ethnic Protest brings to light important aspects of identity politics by introducing «forced sacrifice» as a type of protest that ethnic minorities in the United States occasionally mount, particularly against liberal regimes in public institutions. Social science concepts and the literature on social sacrifice help define a spontaneous confrontation in which the protest crowd dramatically forces the institution to dismiss – that is, to sacrifice – one of its own agents as a symbolic concession to ethnic...

Ethcaste: Pan African Communalism and the Black Middleclass

Douglas V. Davidson
2001

Douglas V. Davidson- Ethcaste is a theoretical analysis and interpretation of one of the most complex and controversial groups in U.S. society—the black middle class. While this group has received accolades from the liberal journalistic press as well as academia, it has also been highly criticized and oftentimes ridiculed by radical black political activists and intellectuals. This analysis represents an effort to clarify the larger black community as an oppressed group constrained by the capitalist racial dynamics of the dominant white society. In so doing, it...

Bad Boys- Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity

Ann Arnett Ferguson
2001

Ann Arnett Ferguson- Black males are disproportionately "in trouble" and suspended from the nation’s school systems. This is as true now as it was when Ann Arnett Ferguson’s now classic Bad Boys was first published. Bad Boys offers a richly textured account of daily interactions between teachers and students in order to demonstrate how a group of eleven- and twelve-year-old males construct a sense of self under adverse circumstances. This new edition includes a foreword by Pedro A. Noguera, and an afterword and bibliographic...

Engendering Church: Women, Power, and the AME Church

Jualynne E. Dodson
2001

Jualynne E. Dodson- Engendering Church explores the power, processes, and circumstances that brought about the new gender relations in the African Methodist Church—one of the largest African American denominations in the U.S. Dodson tells the heroic stories of women like Sara Hatcher who rose from behind the scenes to confront the hierarchy of male clergy. Dodson's historical account of the church and its many changes show that unless women hold church positions, they are overlooked as proactive agents of organizational power. She also links the church to broader...

Ain't I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race

Maxine Leeds Craig
2002

Maxine Leeds Craig- This book is a study of black women as symbols, and as participants, in the reshaping of the meaning of black racial identity. The meanings and practices of racial identity are continually reshaped as a result of the interplay of actions taken at the individual and institutional levels. In chapters that detail the history of pre-Civil Rights Movement black beauty pageants, later efforts to integrate beauty contests, and the transformation in beliefs and practices relating to black beauty in the 1960s, the book develops a model for...