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PRA's Year in Books

A Gift Guide and/or Reading List to Close Out 2021
Published on
December 17, 2021
Last Updated
August 4, 2023
White Skin, black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism by Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective

White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism

By Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective

Read PRA’s review here.

The book, coauthored by an international group of scholars and activists known as the Zetkin Collective, marks the first systemic inquiry into the Far Right’s interventions in the climate crisis. Using case studies from 13 countries in Europe, as well as in the U.S. and Brazil, Malm and the collective explore the links between climate denial, racism, and Generically used to describe factions of right-wing politics that are outside of and often critical of traditional conservatism. Learn more intersections with the environment and fossil fuels. 

Purchase your copy of the book here


A Wider Type of Freedom: How Struggles for Radical Justice Liberate Everyone by Daniel Martinez HoSang

A Wider Type of Freedom: How Struggles for Radical Justice Liberate Everyone

By Daniel Martinez HoSang

Read PRA’s interview with HoSang here.

Daniel Martinez HoSang looks at movements across the last three centuries—from fights against forced sterilizations, for domestic workers’ rights, and the environmental justice movement today—that illustrate the need to dismantle failed systems in order to rebuild an equitable society. HoSang talked to PRA this June about the limitations of liberal ideas of freedom, and what a wider conception of liberation means.

Purchase your copy of the book here.


Blood Red Lines: How Nativism Fuels the Right by Brendan O'Connor

Blood Red Lines: How Nativism Fuels the Right

By Brendan O’Connor

Read PRA’s interview with O’Connor here.

“Drawing upon existing myths and ideas about race and nationhood,” O’Connor writes, “the A form of far-right populist ultra-nationalism that celebrates the nation or the race as transcending all other loyalties. Learn more of our era is a border fascism.” It’s one defined by a constant focus on A term widely used in both academia and media to indicate beliefs, movements, and policies that limit or discourage immigration, particularly from racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse countries of origin. Learn more and the border, and upheld by a coalition of White nationalist movements, A term used to describe organizations, movements, ideas, and policies that oppose immigrants and immigration. Learn more organizations, corporate profiteers, and far-right and centrist politicians alike. In a recent conversation, PRA asked O’Connor how he thinks border fascism will evolve under the Biden administration—which has already reneged on campaign promises, deporting thousands and refusing to eliminate Trump-era restrictions on refugee admissions—and how progressives can counter these challenges.

Purchase your copy of the book here.


Free City!: The Fight for San Francisco's City College and Education for All

Free City!: The Fight for San Francisco’s City College and Education for All

By Marcy Rein, Mickey Ellinger, and Vicki Legion

Read PRA’s interview with the authors here.

Free City! The Fight for San Francisco’s City College and Education for All tells the story of the five years of organizing that turned a seemingly hopeless defensive fight into a victory for the most progressive free college measure in the US. In 2012, the accreditor sanctioned City College of San Francisco, one of the biggest and best community colleges in the country, and a year later proposed terminating its accreditation, leading to a state takeover. Free City! follows the multipronged strategies of the campaign and the diverse characters that carried them out.

Purchase your copy of the book here.


Red Pill, Blue Pill by David Neiwert

Red Pill, Blue Pill: How to Counteract the Conspiracy Theories That Are Killing Us

By David Neiwert

Read PRA’s interview with the author here.

Author David Neiwert guides us through the origins and implications of the world of right-wing conspiracism. Within that world, baseless conspiracist narratives serve to perpetuate racist and xenophobic rhetoric, uphold Both a system of beliefs that holds that White people are intrinsically superior and a system of institutional arrangements that favors White people as a group. Learn more , undermine public health, transform already heated political disagreements into an epic battle between good and evil, as well as make select conspiracist leaders profit as they monetize their theories online. Increasingly, these conspiracy theories are strung together into a seamless, lonely, and paranoid worldview.

Purchase your copy of the book here.


Prisons Make Us Safer by Victoria Law

“Prisons Make Us Safer” and 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration 

By Victoria Law

Read an excerpt from Law’s book here.

The United States incarcerates more of its residents than any other nation. Though home to 5% of the global population, the United States has nearly 25% of the world’s prisoners—a total of over 2 million people. This number continues to steadily rise. Over the past 40 years, the number of people behind bars in the United States has increased by 500%. Journalist Victoria Law explains how racism and social control were the catalysts for mass incarceration and have continued to be its driving force: from the post-Civil War laws that states passed to imprison former slaves, to the laws passed under the “War Against Drugs” campaign that disproportionately imprison Black people.

Purchase your copy of the book here.


Global White Nationalism: From Apartheid to Trump edited by Daniel Geary, Camilla Schofield, and Jennifer Sutton

Global White Nationalism: From Apartheid to Trump

Edited by Daniel Geary, Camilla Schofield, and Jennifer Sutton

Read PRA’s review here.

This book situates contemporary A social movement based on a belief in biologically determined racial hierarchies, often with the ultimate goal of establishing an all-White nation state. Learn more in the ‘Anglosphere’ within the context of major global events since 1945. White nationalism, it argues, became more global in reaction to the forces of decolonisation, civil rights, mass migration and the rise of international institutions. In this period, assumptions of white supremacy that had been widely held by whites throughout the world were challenged and reformulated, as western elites professed a commitment to colour-blind ideals. The decline in legitimacy of overtly racist political expression produced international alliances among white supremacists and new claims of populist legitimation.

Purchase your copy of the book here.


White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America by Anthea Butler

White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America

By Anthea Butler

Read PRA’s interview with the author here.

One of the myths that Butler discovered in her research is the “conceit that the Often used interchangeably with Christian Right, but also can describe broader conservative religious coalitions that are not limited to Christians. Can include right-wing Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Mormons, and members of the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon. Learn more , fundamentalism, and conservative evangelicals emerged as a political movement in response to the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973.” Instead, she writes, it was racism, not abortion, that melded disparate religious conservatives to one another, with antecedents stretching back to the earliest days of colonial America.

Purchase your copy of the book here.


Sisters in Hate by Seyward Darby

Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism

By Seyward Darby

Read PRA’s interview with the author here. 

After a pro-Trump mob attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, author Seyward Darby pointed out that women—and White nationalist women specifically—played a key role behind the scenes. Like much of “women’s labor,” Darby told NPR, “It’s invisible but essential.” That’s true of the White grievance that lay at the heart of “Stop the Steal” more generally, as the call to overturn the results of the 2020 election were cast as an appeal for White people to preserve a lifestyle and country they perceive as under attack. And that appeal, as Darby documented in Sisters in Hate, is one that can serve as a powerful recruitment tool.

Purchase your copy of the book here.


Culture Warlords by Talia Lavin

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy

By Tal Lavin

Read an excerpt from PRA’s interview with the author here.

This fall, anti-fascist journalist Tal Lavin published his first book, reported in a “gonzo” style that at times involved undercover infiltration of online White supremacist networks and reads almost as a travelogue through the racist Far Right, in both literal and figurative ways. Lavin takes readers with him to Ukraine, where he spent a year on a Fulbright scholarship digging into family history, and into the corners of online ecosystems inhabited by antisemites, movement misogynists, White nationalists and more.

Purchase your copy of the book here.


Reign of Terror by Spencer Ackerman

Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump

By Spencer Ackerman

Read PRA’s review here.

Ackerman’s account takes us on a tour of three administrations, Republican and Democratic, and into the belly of the security state beast. The cumulative effect is a picture of the business-as-usual uses of surveillance, Repression occurs when public or private institutions—such as law enforcement agencies or vigilante groups—use arrest, physical coercion, or violence to subjugate a specific group. Learn more , and violence against Arab and Muslim Americans day after day and year after year, regardless of who sits in the White House. This, he notes, is in stark contrast with the ways in which White nationalist violence, consistently the most deadly, has been neglected or ignored by federal law enforcement.

Purchase your copy of the book here.


A Field Guide to White Supremacy co-edited by Kathleen Belew and Ramon A. Gutierrez

A Field Guide to White Supremacy

Co-edited by Kathleen Belew and Ramón A. Gutiérrez

Read PRA’s interview with Kathleen Belew here.

In her latest book, an anthology co-edited with Gutiérrez, Belew broadens the scope to look at the interlocking ways that White supremacy and The use of violence, intimidation, surveillance, and discrimination, particularly by the state and/or its civilian allies, to control populations or particular sections of a population. Learn more are manifested, including issues of A system of social control characterized by rigid enforcement of binary sex and gender roles. Learn more , attacks on Indigenous sovereignty, attacks on trans and non-binary people, and A form of oppression targeting Jews and those perceived to be Jewish, including bigoted speech, violent acts, and discriminatory policy. Learn more . The anthology includes almost two dozen essays, some reprinted classics but mostly new, illuminating issues such as the complex way the anti-immigrant movement has fueled right-wing politics, or the long history of organized White nationalism that undergirds the modern Alt Right.

Purchase your copy of the book here.

Authors

Political Research Associates (PRA) is a social justice research and strategy center. Since 1981, we have been devoted to supporting organizations, civic leaders, journalists, and social sectors that are building a more just and inclusive democratic society.