Michael Eric Dyson, author of The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America, explodes onto the YA scene with co-writer Marc Favreau (Crash: The Great Depression and the Fall and Rise of America) in a potent and weighty collection of stories that demonstrate the ubiquity of racial inequality in the United States. With each unsettling case of racial disparity, the authors also introduce their teen audience to freedom-fighting Black Americans determined to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice.
Dyson and Favreau take their readers through the history of the U.S., illustrating how racism shape-shifts and adapts to laws and court decisions. They wind their way through public life into the private home to point out how deeply ingrained the cancer festers and how hard segments of the population work to maintain it. But Dyson and Favreau counter the ugliness with inspiring narratives of people like Ida B. Wells, who exposed lynchings in her newspaper; Pauli Murray, who proposed the idea that would shape Thurgood Marshall's Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case; and Michelle Alexander, who declared the War on Drugs to be the gateway to the new Jim Crow.
Dyson and Favreau, hoping to inspire new freedom fighters, explain, "The first step to changing the world... is to understand what has come before--to see the paths that others have followed." They provide a brilliantly honest, emotionally raw first step and offer suggestions for a second and a third. Unequal is unparalleled and a must-read for social justice advocates of any age. --Jen Forbus, freelancer