Free Speech

Free Speech
Author: Jonathan Zimmerman
Publisher: City of Light Publishing
Total Pages: 84
Release: 2021-05-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1952536111

In America we like to think we live in a land of liberty, where everyone can say whatever they want. Throughout our history, however, we have also been quick to censor people who offend or frighten us. We talk a good game about freedom of speech, then we turn around and deny it to others. In this brief but bracing book, historian Jonathan Zimmerman and Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Signe Wilkinson tell the story of free speech in America: who established it, who has denounced it, and who has risen to its defense. They also make the case for why we should care about it today, when free speech is once again under attack.Across the political spectrum, Americans have demanded the suppression of ideas and images that allegedly threaten our nation. But the biggest danger to America comes not from speech but from censorship, which prevents us fromfreely governing ourselves. Free speech allows us to criticize our leaders. It lets us consume the art, film, and literature we prefer. And, perhaps most importantly, it allows minorities to challenge the oppression they suffer. While any of us are censored, none of us are free.

Suspicion Nation

Suspicion Nation
Author: Lisa Bloom
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2014-02-25
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1619023911

Many thought the election of our first African American president put an end to the conversation about race in this country, and that America had moved into a post–racial era of equality and opportunity. Then, on the night of February 26, 2012, a black seventeen–year–old boy walking to a friend's home carrying only his cell phone, candy, and a fruit drink, was shot and killed by a neighborhood watch coordinator. And in July 2013, the trial of Zimmerman for murder captivated the public, as did his eventual acquittal. In her provocative and landmark book, Suspicion Nation, Lisa Bloom, who covered the trial from gavel to gavel, posits that none of this was a surprise: Our laws, culture, and blind spots created the conditions that led to Trayvon Martin's death, and made George Zimmerman's acquittal by far the most likely outcome. America today holds an unhealthy preoccupation with firearms that has led to the expansion of gun rights to surreal extremes. America now has not only the highest per capita gun ownership rate in the world (almost one gun per American), but the highest rate of gun deaths. Despite the strides America has made, fighting a bloody Civil War to end slavery, eradicating Jim Crow laws, teaching tolerance, and electing an African American president, racial inequality persists throughout our country, in employment, housing, education, the media, and most institutions. And perhaps most destructively of all, racial biases run deep in every level of our criminal justice system. Suspicion Nation captures a court system and a country conflicted and divided over issues of race, violence, and gun legislation.

'If I Had a Son'

'If I Had a Son'
Author: Jack Cashill
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Neighborhood watch programs
ISBN: 9781938067211

His friends called George Zimmerman Tugboat, the one who always came to the rescue. An Hispanic-American civil rights activist, he helped a black homeless man find justice. He helped guide two black teens through life. He helped a terrified mother secure her house. He helped his wary neighbors secure their community.

The Essential Kerner Commission Report

The Essential Kerner Commission Report
Author: Jelani Cobb
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2021-07-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1631498932

Recognizing that an historic study of American racism and police violence should become part of today’s canon, Jelani Cobb contextualizes it for a new generation. The Kerner Commission Report, released a month before Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 assassination, is among a handful of government reports that reads like an illuminating history book—a dramatic, often shocking, exploration of systemic racism that transcends its time. Yet Columbia University professor and New Yorker correspondent Jelani Cobb argues that this prescient report, which examined more than a dozen urban uprisings between 1964 and 1967, has been woefully neglected. In an enlightening new introduction, Cobb reveals how these uprisings were used as political fodder by Republicans and demonstrates that this condensed edition of the Report should be essential reading at a moment when protest movements are challenging us to uproot racial injustice. A detailed examination of economic inequality, race, and policing, the Report has never been more relevant, and demonstrates to devastating effect that it is possible for us to be entirely cognizant of history and still tragically repeat it.

Trauma and the Discourse of Climate Change

Trauma and the Discourse of Climate Change
Author: Lee Zimmerman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2020-03-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000049604

The more the global north has learned about the existential threat of climate change, the faster it has emitted greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In Trauma and the Discourse of Climate Change, Lee Zimmerman thinks about why this is by examining how "climate change" has been discursively constructed, tracing how the ways we talk and write about climate change have worked to normalize a generalized, bipartisan denialism more profound than that of the overt "denialists." Suggesting that we understand that normalized denial as a form of cultural trauma, the book explores how the dominant ways of figuring knowledge about global warming disarticulate that knowledge from the trauma those figurations both represent and reproduce, and by which they remain inhabited and haunted. Its early chapters consider that process in representations of climate change across a range of disciplines and throughout the public sphere, including Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, Barack Obama’s speeches and climate plans, and the 2015 Paris Agreement. Later chapters focus on how literary representations especially, for the most part, participate in such disarticulations, and on how, in grappling with the representational difficulties at the climate crisis’s heart, some works of fiction—among them Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker—work against that normalized rhetorical violence. The book closes with a meditation centered on the dream of the burning child Freud sketches in The Interpretation of Dreams. Highlighting the existential stakes of the ways we think and write about the climate, Trauma and the Discourse of Climate Change aims to offer an unfamiliar place from which to engage the astonishing quiescence of our ecocidal present. This book will be essential reading for academics and students of psychoanalysis, environmental humanities, trauma studies, literature, and environmental studies, as well as activists and others drawn to thinking about the climate crisis.