Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

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About Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Taylor's writing and scholarship engage issues of contemporary Black politics, the history of Black social movements and Black radicalism, and issues concerning public policy, race and racial inequality. Taylor's writing has been published in New York Times, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Al Jazeera America, Jacobin, In These Times, New Politics, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, and beyond. Taylor is also author of the award-winning From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation published by Haymarket Books in 2016. She is also author of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective which won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction. Taylor's forthcoming book with the University of North Carolina Press, titled Race For Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership will be published in October of 2019.

Taylor received her PhD in African American Studies at Northwestern University in 2013.

Robin D. G. Kelley

Ibram X. Kendi

Angela Y. Davis

Mehrsa Baradaran

Isabel Wilkerson

W. E. B. Du Bois

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Books By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

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How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective Nov 20, 2017

by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

( 226 )

$2.99

Black feminists remind us “that America’s destiny is inseparable from how it treats [black women] and the nation ignores this truth at its peril” (The New York Review of Books).

Winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction

“If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free.” —Combahee River Collective Statement

The Combahee River Collective, a path-breaking group of radical black feminists, was one of the most important organizations to develop out of the antiracist and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. In this collection of essays and interviews edited by activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, founding members of the organization and contemporary activists reflect on the legacy of its contributions to Black feminism and its impact on today’s struggles.

“A striking collection that should be immediately added to the Black feminist canon.” —Bitch Media

“An essential book for any feminist library.” —Library Journal

“As white feminism has gained an increasing amount of coverage, there are still questions as to how black and brown women’s needs are being addressed. This book, through a collection of interviews with prominent black feminists, provides some answers.” —The Independent

“For feminists of all kinds, astute scholars, or anyone with a passion for social justice, How We Get Free is an invaluable work.” —Ethnic and Racial Studies Journal

Other Formats: Audible Audiobook , Hardcover , Paperback

Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (Justice, Power, and Politics) Sep 3, 2019

by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

( 210 )

$8.54

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
FINALIST, 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. Reasoning that the turbulence could be calmed by turning Black city-dwellers into homeowners, they passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and set about establishing policies to induce mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat Black homebuyers equally. The disaster that ensued revealed that racist exclusion had not been eradicated, but rather transmuted into a new phenomenon of predatory inclusion.

Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining's end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners. The federal government guaranteed urban mortgages in an attempt to overcome resistance to lending to Black buyers – as if unprofitability, rather than racism, was the cause of housing segregation. Bankers, investors, and real estate agents took advantage of the perverse incentives, targeting the Black women most likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure, multiplying their profits. As a result, by the end of the 1970s, the nation's first programs to encourage Black homeownership ended with tens of thousands of foreclosures in Black communities across the country. The push to uplift Black homeownership had descended into a goldmine for realtors and mortgage lenders, and a ready-made cudgel for the champions of deregulation to wield against government intervention of any kind.

Narrating the story of a sea-change in housing policy and its dire impact on African Americans, Race for Profit reveals how the urban core was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction.

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From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation Feb 1, 2016

by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

( 300 )

$10.99

The author of Race for Profit carries out “[a] searching examination of the social, political and economic dimensions of the prevailing racial order” (Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow).

In this winner of the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize for an Especially Notable Book, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor “not only exposes the canard of color-blindness but reveals how structural racism and class oppression are joined at the hip” (Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams).

The eruption of mass protests in the wake of the police murders of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City have challenged the impunity with which officers of the law carry out violence against black people and punctured the illusion of a post-racial America. The Black Lives Matter movement has awakened a new generation of activists.

In this stirring and insightful analysis, activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and the persistence of structural inequality, such as mass incarceration and black unemployment. In this context, she argues that this new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for black liberation.

“This brilliant book is the best analysis we have of the #BlackLivesMatter moment of the long struggle for freedom in America. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has emerged as the most sophisticated and courageous radical intellectual of her generation.” —Dr. Cornel West, author of Race Matters

“A must read for everyone who is serious about the ongoing praxis of freedom.” —Barbara Ransby, author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement

“[A] penetrating, vital analysis of race and class at this critical moment in America’s racial history.” —Gary Younge, author of The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Dream

Other Formats: Audible Audiobook , Hardcover , Paperback , Audio CD

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The Anti-Inauguration: Building resistance in the Trump era Jan 30, 2016

by Anand Gopal , Naomi Klein , Jeremy Scahill , Owen Jones , Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

( 1 )

$1.00

Featuring contributions from Naomi Klein, Jeremy Scahill, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Anand Gopal, and Owen Jones.

The five essential speeches presented here are taken from The Anti-Inauguration, held on inauguration night 2017 at the historic Lincoln Theatre in Washington, D.C. The Anti-Inauguration event and ebook are joint projects of Jacobin, Haymarket Books and Verso Books.

Black Lives Matter: Le renouveau de la révolte noire américaine (Contre-feux) (French Edition) Sep 22, 2017

by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor , Célia Izoard

( 3 )

$18.99

« Le meurtre de Mike Brown par un policier blanc a marqué un point de rupture pour les Afro-Américains de Ferguson (Missouri). Peut-être était-ce à cause de l’inhumanité de la police, qui a laissé le corps de Brown pourrir dans la chaleur estivale. Peut-être était-ce à cause de l’arsenal militaire qu’elle a sorti dès les premières manifestations. Avec ses armes à feu et ses blindés, la police a déclaré la guerre aux habitants noirs de Ferguson. »

Comment le mouvement Black Lives Matter a-t-il pu naître sous le mandat du premier président noir ? L’auteure revient sur l’« économie politique du racisme » depuis la fin de l’esclavage, le reflux des mouvements sociaux des années 1960 et l’essor d’une élite noire prompte à relayer les préjugés racistes et anti-pauvres. Elle défend le potentiel universaliste de BLM : afro-américain et tourné contre les violences policières, il peut parfaitement rallier d’autres groupes et s’étendre à une lutte générale pour la redistribution des richesses.

Militante antiraciste, féministe et anticapitaliste, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor enseigne au Département d’études afro-américaines de l’université de Princeton. Black Lives Matter, son premier livre, a reçu de nombreux prix et a été plusieurs fois réimprimé depuis sa sortie aux États-Unis.

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