Lisa Bloom

straight talk for women to stay smart in a dumbed-down world

Think

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.

The Inside Story of the Trayvon Martin Injustice and Why We Continue to Repeat It

Suspicion Nation

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Eleanor Antin

Howard N. Fox

In this wakeup call for parents about the real world boys inhabit right now, Bloom explains how to teach your boy humility (the swagger anti-venom), to "making your home a reading mecca," creating an expectation of college graduation, and how to teach your boy to be critical of the media onslaught in his life.

10 Urgent Rules for Raising Boys in an Era of Failing Schools, Mass Joblessness, and Thug Culture

Swagger

Explains how women can break free from the dumbed-down culture of reality TV and celebrity obsession and instead learn to think for themselves and live an intellectual life.

Straight Talk for Women to Stay Smart in a Dumbed-down World

'In this book, Bloom takes what might seem a very localized subject and shows how it opens up to all the central questions today in cultural studies around gender, nationhood, the politics of imperialism, race, male homosocial behavior, and the sociality of science. Gender on Ice has an eloquence and elegance that positively refreshing and the prose is stylish, engaging, and direct.' -Dana Polan, University of Pittsburgh

American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions

Gender on Ice

With Other Eyes demonstrates how feminist, postcolonial, and antiracist concerns can successfully be incorporated into the study of art.

Lisa Bloom

Books

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