BOOKS WE SHARE: UNDERSTANDING EVERYDAY RACISM

This year, Patta and The Black Archives are joining forces, making hidden stories and history around Hip Hop and street culture visible. Patta was born out of a passion for Hip Hop, sneakers and street culture. The Black Archives is a unique historical archive for inspiring conversations, activities and literature from Black and other perspectives that are often overlooked elsewhere, and was founded on passion for black history, culture and literature. Hip Hop is a culture created Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean and Latin American youth in 1970s New York that is now being embraced by billions of people worldwide. Hip Hop, street culture, black literature and history are inextricably linked. Because we care about Eternal Education we will be sharing one book from The Black Archives on black history, culture and literature (nearly) every month. 

This Month: 

 Why you should read it: "In the book 'Understanding Everyday Racism' Philomena Essed compares contemporary racism in the US and the Netherlands through in-depth interviews with fifty-five black women. Essed problematises and questions many of the everyday practices and meanings that the majority of Dutch society takes for granted. She addresses crucial but largely neglected dimensions of racism: how it is experienced; how black women recognise its covert manifestations; how they acquire this knowledge; and how they challenge racism in everyday life. To answer these questions, over two thousand experiences of black women are analysed within a theoretical framework that integrates the disciplines of macro- and micro-sociology, social psychology, discourse analysis, race relations theory and women's studies. The samples include only black women with higher education. Many of their experiences of racism involve the elite' among the dominant group. The book seriously challenges both the notion of Dutch tolerance and the idea that US racism is a problem of the past. 'Understanding Everyday Racism' is thus urgent reading."