The Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery - Hardcover

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9780814345146: The Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 081434514X ISBN 13: 9780814345146

Publisher: Wayne State Univ Pr

The Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery is a plea to America to understand what life post-slavery remains like for many African Americans, who are descended from people whose unpaid labor built this land, but have had to spend the last century and a half carrying the dual burden of fighting racial injustice and rising above the lowered expectations and hateful bigotry that attempt to keep them shackled to that past.

The Burden, edited by award-winning Detroit newspaper columnist Rochelle Riley, is a powerful collection of essays that create a chorus of evidence that the burden is real. As Nikole Hannah-Jones states in the book's foreword, "despite the fact that black Americans remain at the bottom of every indicator of well-being in this country-from wealth, to poverty, to health, to infant mortality, to graduation rates, to incarceration-we want to pretend that this current reality has nothing to do with the racial caste system that was legally enforced for most of the time the United States of America has existed." The Burden expresses the voices of other well-known Americans, such as actor/director Tim Reid who compares slavery to a cancer diagnosis, former Detroit News columnist Betty DeRamus who recounts the discrimination she encountered as a young black Detroiter in the south, and the actress Aisha Hinds who explains how slavery robbed an entire race of value and self-worth. This collection of essays is a response to the false idea that slavery wasn't so bad and something we should all just "get over."

The descendants of slaves have spent over 150 years seeking permission to put this burden down. As Riley writes in her opening essay, "slavery is not a relic to be buried, but a wound that has not been allowed to heal. You cannot heal what you do not treat. You cannot treat what you do not see as a problem. And America continues to look the other way, to ask African Americans to turn the other cheek, to suppress our joy, to accept that we are supposed to go only as far as we are allowed." The Burden aims to address this problem. It is a must-read for every American.

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Book Description:

Examines the continued emotional, economic, and cultural enslavement of African Americans in the twenty-first century.

About the Author:

Rochelle Riley, who always works with two phones, is a columnist for the Detroit Free Press, where she is a leading voice for children, education, competent government and race. She is author of "The Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery" (Wayne State University Press, 2018). She also is a co-founder of Letters to Black Girls, project that grew from a single presentation to a national mission to pass words of encouragement from black women to girls. She makes frequent television and radio appearances, including on National Public Radio and MSNBC and Fox2. She has won numerous national, state and local honors, including a National Headliner Award for local column writing. Her debut column for The (Louisville) Courier-Journal called on the city of Louisville to build a museum to honor native son Muhammad Ali. It helped spur an $80 million to build the Muhammad Ali Center, which now sits on the Ohio River. Her columns on the text message scandal that led to the imprisonment of former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick were part of the Free Press' 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning entry for local news. She received the 2017 Eugene C. Pulliam Editorial Fellowship from the Society of Professional Journalists and the 2017 Ida B. Wells Award from the National Association of Black Journalists for her outstanding efforts to make newsrooms and news coverage more accurately reflect the diversity of the communities they serve. And she has received the Will Rogers Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists for community service. Rochelle is a global traveler who has been to 28 countries and counting. She was a 2007-2008 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, where she studied online communities and film. She was a 2016 inductee into the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame and will be a 2019 inductee into the N.C. Media and Journalism Hall of Fame. She is currently completing her second non-fiction book and her first novel.

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