Punished for Dreaming

St. Martin’s Press
Hardcover
352 pages • $29.00
ISBN: 9781250280381

How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal

Bettina L. Love

“Blends brilliance, warmth, and a deep commitment to the pursuit of justice for all our nation’s children.”

—Brittney Cooper, bestselling author of Eloquent Rage

In this groundbreaking prequel to The New Jim Crow, award-winning educator Dr. Bettina Love serves up a blistering account of four decades of educational reform through the lens of people who lived it. In Punished for Dreaming, Dr. Love makes the case that Reagan’s presidency ushered in a war on Black children, pathologizing and penalizing them in concert with the war on drugs. New policies punished schools with policing, high-stakes standardized testing, loss of funding, and closure in the name of reform. All the while, white saviors’ efforts increasingly allowed private interests to infiltrate the system. These changes implicated children of color and Black children in particular as low-performing, making it all too easy to turn a blind eye to their disproportionate arrest, conviction, and incarceration, and the harmfulness of reform. There is little national conversation today about a structural overhaul of American schools; instead, education is awash in book and curriculum bans and the attempt to eliminate even the mention of anti-racism or equity. Dr. Love never lets us forget the profound lifetime effect of reform on individuals. She zeroes in on the powerful stories of twenty-five Black Americans, as well as her own educational experiences as a child of the eighties. Finally, she puts a price tag on the miseducation of Black children. With input from leading U.S. economists, Dr. Love offers a road map for repair, arguing for reparations with transformation for all children at its core.

© Tiffany Stubbs

Dr. Bettina L. Love is the William F. Russell Professor at Teachers College at Columbia University and the bestselling author of We Want to Do More Than Survive. In 2022, the Kennedy Center named Dr. Love one of the Next 50 leaders who are making the world more inspired, inclusive, and compassion – ate. She is a cofounder of the Abolitionist Teaching Network (ATN), whose mission is to develop and support teachers and parents fighting injustice within their schools and communities. ATN has granted more than $250,000 to abolitionists around the country. She is also a founding member of the task force that launched the program In Her Hands, distributing more than fifteen million dollars to Black women living in Georgia. Dr. Love is a sought-after public speaker, and in 2018 she was granted a resolution by Georgia’s House of Representatives for her impact on the field of education.

One Person, No Vote

Bloomsbury Publishing
Paperback
368 pages • $18.00
ISBN: 9781635571394

How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

Carol Anderson

“Anderson’s tone, at turns urgent and indignant, seems to arise from the ease with which she can document abundantly—via investigative journalism, popular history and historical scholarship—the GOP’s determined efforts to purge American citizens and cull and homogenize the electorate.”

—Walton Muyumba, Los Angeles Times

In her New York Times bestseller White Rage, Carol Anderson laid bare an insidious history of policies that have systematically impeded black progress in America, from 1865 to our combustible present. With One Person, No Vote, she chronicles a related history: the rollbacks to African American participation in the vote since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Known as the Shelby ruling, this decision effectively allowed districts with a demonstrated history of racial discrimination to change voting requirements without approval from the Department of Justice. Focusing on the aftermath of Shelby, Anderson follows the astonishing story of government-dictated racial discrimination unfolding before our very eyes as more and more states adopt voter suppression laws. In gripping, enlightening detail she explains how voter suppression works, from photo ID requirements to gerrymandering to poll closures. And with vivid characters, she explores the resistance: the organizing, activism, and court battles to restore the basic right to vote to all Americans.

© Stephen Nowland

Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of One Person, No Vote, longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award; White Rage, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; Bourgeois Radicals; and Eyes off the Prize. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow for Constitutional Studies and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

If I Survive You

Picador
Paperback
272 pages • $18.00
ISBN: 9781250872210

Jonathan Escoffery

In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Excluded from society as Black immigrants, the family pushes on through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession, living in a house so cursed that the pet fish launches itself out of its own tank rather than stay. But even as things fall apart, the family remains motivated, often to its own detriment, by what the younger son, Trelawny, calls “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.” Masterfully constructed with heart and humor, the linked stories in Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You center on Trelawny as he struggles to carve out a place for himself amid financial disaster, racism, and flat-out bad luck. After a fight with Topper, Trelawny claws his way out of homelessness through a series of odd, often hilarious jobs. Meanwhile, his brother, Delano, attempts a disastrous cash grab to get his kids back, and his cousin Cukie looks for a father who doesn’t want to be found. As each character searches for a foothold, they never forget the profound danger of climbing without a safety net. Pulsing with vibrant lyricism and inimitable style, sly commentary and contagious laughter, Escoffery’s debut unravels what it means to be in between homes and cultures in a world at the mercy of capitalism and whiteness. With If I Survive You, Escoffery announces himself as a prodigious storyteller in a class of his own, a chronicler of American life at its most gruesome and hopeful.

© Gioncarlo Valentine

Jonathan Escoffery is the recipient of the 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction. His fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, Passages North, Zyzzyva, and Electric Literature, and has been anthologized in The Best American Magazine Writing. He is a fellow in the University of Southern California’s PhD in Creative Writing and Literature Program, and in 2021 he was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. He was raised in Miami, Florida. If I Survive You is his first book.