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

Daniel HoSang

Univ of California Press, Sep 21, 2021 - History - 224 pages

A sweeping history of transformative, radical, and abolitionist movements in the United States that places the struggle for racial justice at the center of universal liberation.
 
In Where Do We Go From Here? (1967), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., described racism as "a philosophy based on a contempt for life," a totalizing social theory that could only be confronted with an equally massive response, by "restructuring the whole of American society." A Wider Type of Freedom provides a survey of the truly transformative visions of racial justice in the United States, an often-hidden history that has produced conceptions of freedom and interdependence never envisioned in the nation's dominant political framework.

A Wider Type of Freedom brings together stories of the social movements, intellectuals, artists, and cultural formations that have centered racial justice and the abolition of white supremacy as the foundation for a universal liberation. Daniel Martinez HoSang taps into moments across time and place to reveal the longstanding drive toward a vision of universal emancipation. From the nineteenth century's abolition democracy and the struggle to end forced sterilizations, to the twentieth century's domestic worker organizing campaigns, to the twenty-first century's environmental justice movement, he reveals a bold, shared desire to realize the antithesis of "a philosophy based on a contempt for life," as articulated by Martin Luther King Jr. Rather than seeking "equal rights" within failed systems, these efforts generated new visions that embraced human difference, vulnerability, and interdependence as core productive facets of our collective experience.

Contents

• A New Humanity: 1
• 1: 18
• Young Women United rally 2011: 27
• Committee to Stop Forced Sterilization protest 1974: 42
• My Rise Does: 46
• Ella Baker addressing Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party 1964 Striking teachers protest 2012: 53
• Youthled civil disobedience in support of the DREAM Act 2012: 73
• Ethel Ennis sings the national anthem 1973: 94
• Rally at global conservation meeting to address the environmental: 109
• Sing No More of War 4 Labor To Enjoy and Create the Values of Humanity Conclusion A New Recipe: 113
• DRUM flyer for wildcat strike and rally 1969: 127
• Workers and supporters rally in front of Assi Market 2002: 134
• Dorothy Bolden speaking at National Domestic Workers Union: 140
• Acknowledgments: 155
• Bibliography: 177
• Index: 203

About the author

Daniel Martinez HoSang is Associate Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University. He is author of Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California and coauthor of Producers, Patriots, and Parasites: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity.

Bibliographic information

• Title: A Wider Type of Freedom: How Struggles for Racial Justice Liberate Everyone
• Author: Daniel HoSang
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Univ of California Press, 2021
• ISBN: 0520321421, 9780520321427
• Length: 224 pages
• Subjects: History / Social History; History / United States / 19th Century; History / United States / 20th Century; History / United States / 21st Century; Social Science / Feminism & Feminist Theory; Social Science / Race & Ethnic Relations