Widower Penn Cage returns to his hometown of Natchez, Mississippi, where, finding that his father is being blackmailed, he reopens a notorious murder case that involves powerfully dangerous town forces, the FBI, and his own past.

As they each attempt to overcome their loneliness, an adolescent girl, a boisterous reformer, and a Negro patriarch all look to Singer, a deaf mute, for some answer to what they want from life.

"Based on painstaking research, how Race Is Made is a highly original, always frank, and often disturbing book. After enslaved Africans were initially brought to America, the offspring of black and white sexual relationships (consensual and forced) complicated the purely visual sense of racial typing. As mixed-race people became more and more common and as antebellum race-based slavery and then postbellum racial segregation became central to southern...

"Originally published in 1884, T. Thomas Fortune's Black and White is an insightful and clear-eyed exploration of a post-Reconstruction America--one with issues that are still plaguing the United States to this day. As "the preeminent Black journalist of his age" (Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of The Black Church), and an early agitator for Civil Rights, Fortune astutely and compellingly analyses the relationship between capitalism and racism in...

Born in Korea, raised in the American South, and trying her best to survive British academia, SJ Kim probes her experiences as a writer, a scholar, and a daughter to confront the silences she finds in the world. With curiosity and sensitivity, she writes letters to the institutions that simultaneously support and fail her, intimate accounts of immigration, and interrogations of rising anti-Black and anti-Asian racism. She considers the silences between...

African-American police detective Virgil Tibbs from California solves a murder in a racist Southern small town.

"A descendant of Confederate General Robert E. Lee chronicles his story of growing up with the South's most honored name, and the moments that forced him to confront the privilege, racism, and subversion of human dignity that came with it. The Reverend Robert W. Lee was a little-known pastor at a small church in North Carolina until the Charlottesville protests, when he went public with his denunciation of white supremacy in a captivating speech at...