Identity Politics

The 21st century has seen very positive movement for LGBT+ rights. In the last few years, the overturning of DOMA, the SCOTUS ruling in favor of the Marriage Equality Act, American transgender politicians elected to office, and landmark moments such as Apple becoming the most valuable company in the world under the leadership of an openly gay CEO have advanced LGBT awareness and understanding. In a world full of LGBT questions, The ABC's of LGBT+ has the answers.

Happiness has become a serious business. Where 20th-century psychology focused on depression and illness, in the new millennium scientists have begun focusing on "positive psychology" - the study of happiness. Ariel Gore first became intrigued by this subject when she discovered that a class on positive psychology was the most popular course on the Harvard campus.

Deni Todorović never meant to become a poster child for self-love. On their popular Instagram page, Style by Deni, they show their followers what it means to lead a joyous, open-hearted life–but this wisdom has been hard-won, and in this book Deni shares how they’ve learned to live on their own terms. As a queer, non-binary person and as a child of migrants, Deni knows firsthand what it means to exist between worlds and to step into one’s truth.

Investigating attorney Dan Gordon is working for a unit of the U.S. Department of Justice that combats money launderers outside the United States. A routine mission develops into a complex international plot involving murder, espionage, kidnapping, conspiracy, and romance. Gordon, an indefatigable bloodhound, calls on his innate shrewdness, as well as his secret Mossad past and training, to ferret out the truth.

After graduating high school in Scarborough, Morris spent four years in the U.S. on multiple football scholarships and, having spent that time in the States experiencing “the Mecca of hip hop and Black culture,” returned home with a newfound perspective. Now an elementary school teacher himself in Toronto, Morris explores the tension between his consumption of Black culture as a child, his teenage performances of the ideas and values of the culture that often betrayed his identity, and the ways society and the people guiding him received those performances.

Ten linked essays from public intellectual and professor Robert Boyers that elegantly and fiercely address the most relevant and controversial ideas of the day - from identity and privilege to appropriation and diversity - and advocates for loosening the straightjacket of the new liberal orthodoxy.

Transgender men comprise a large, growing proportion of the trans population, yet they remain largely invisible. In this powerful, timely, and eye-opening account, award-winning sociologist Arlene Stein draws from dozens of interviews with transgender people and their friends and families, as well as with activists and medical and psychological experts. Unbound documents the varied ways younger trans men see themselves and how they are changing our understanding of what it means to be male and female in America.

From rediscovering an ancestral village in China to experiencing the realities of American life as a Nigerian, the search for belonging crosses borders and generations. Selected from the archives of Catapult magazine, the essays in A Map Is Only One Story highlight the human side of immigration policies and polarized rhetoric, as 20 writers share provocative personal stories of existing between languages and cultures.

Raised in sleepy English suburbia, Georgina Lawton was no stranger to homogeneity. Her parents were White; her friends were White; there was no reason for her to think she was any different. But over time her brown skin and dark, kinky hair frequently made her a target of prejudice. In Georgina’s insistently color-blind household, with no acknowledgement of her difference or access to Black culture, she lacked the coordinates to make sense of who she was.

Collecting deeply personal conversations with inspirational LGBTQ+ trailblazers (from Troye Sivan to Margaret Cho) about how they leveraged the challenges and insights they had as relative outsiders to succeed in the worlds of business, tech, politics, Hollywood, sports and beyond, Andrew Gelwick’s The Queer Advantage celebrates the unique power of queer identity. Their stories brim with the hard-won lessons gained over their careers.

One of the first studies of the organization, life, and meaning of the Nation of Islam and, by extension, all Black Nationalist movements, this classic work dispels the still-common conception that the movement functioned primarily for political purposes. By observing the daily life of its members, Essien-Udom demonstrates that the Nation of Islam served primarily as a means for poor urban Blacks to attain a national identity, a sense of ethnic consciousness, and empowerment in a society that denied them these privileges.

Talking to key modern influences and thinkers, and drawing inspiration from the Bible and the historical experience of the Jewish people, Sacks argues that there are eight key factors in establishing, maintaining and passing on resilient moral values within a broad group, among them attitudes of lifelong learning and of thanksgiving, the importance of family life and community, and a culture of positive argument in place of destructive conflict.

We are told that love conquers all, but what happens when you don’t have the right passport? Love Across Borders takes listeners through contentious frontiers around the world, from Turkey to Iraq, Syria to Greece, Mexico to the United States, to reveal the wide-spread prejudicial laws intent on dividing us. Lekas Miller tells her own gripping story of meeting Salem Rizk, in Istanbul, where they were both reporting on the Syrian civil war.

Growing up torn between her single Pan Am-stewardess mom and brothel-owning grandmother in 1960s New York City, Robin F. Schepper never imagined that she’d one day have an office in the East Wing of the White House. Her childhood in a German American neighborhood on the Upper East Side was peppered with half-truths, from the family secrets surrounding her grandmother’s immigration to deceptions about her biological father.

¿Es la política de la identidad una amenaza o una contribución en las sociedades modernas? Carlos Peña pone el concepto y el debate al respecto en tensión.

Say good-bye to the crippling stress and anxiety that come with dating in the 2020s with the dating advice all single people need.

Having been drugged, hypnotized, and conditioned, Paul Remmich believes the Tariq'Allah organization is a force for good in the world. Delighted with his performance when stealing documents from the US, the underground Tariq'Allah once again deploy him on a new mission. The scheme is to abduct another man to increase their profits. Major Eric Miller is the target. He extends his military intelligence role and also accepts a position in the CIC, the counterintelligence corps. A temporary transfer to Cuba is both a training exercise and a hunt for AWOL soldiers.

In The Making of White American Identity, Ron Eyerman provides an explanation for how whiteness has become a basis for collective identification and collective action in the United States. Drawing upon his previous work on the formation of African American identity, as well as cultural trauma theory, collective memory, and social movements, he reveals how and under what conditions such a collective identification emerges, as well as how the mobilization of collective action around an ideology of whiteness and white superiority.

Los jóvenes latinos en los Estados Unidos están redefiniendo su identidad, rompiendo moldes establecidos, y despertando políticamente de maneras sorprendentes y poderosas. Muchos de ellos - afrolatinos, indígenas, musulmanes, queer e indocumentados tanto en zonas urbanas como rurales - representan voces históricamente ignoradas en el modo en que la diversa población de casi seis millones de latinos en los Estados Unidos ha sido representada. Hasta ahora.

In the lead-up to every election cycle, pundits predict that Latino Americans will overwhelmingly vote in favor of the Democratic candidate. And it’s true - Latino voters do tilt Democratic. Hillary Clinton won the Latino vote in a “landslide”, and Barack Obama “crushed” Mitt Romney among Latino voters in his reelection. But those numbers belie a more complicated picture. Here, historian and political commentator Geraldo Cadava illuminates the history of the millions of Hispanic Republicans who, since the 1960s, have had a significant impact on national politics.