Showing results by narrator "Diontae Black" in All Categories

The music that would come to be known as hip-hop was born at a party in the Bronx in the summer of 1973. Now, fifty years later, it’s the most popular music genre in America. Just as jazz did in the first half of the twentieth century, hip-hop and its groundbreaking DJs and artists—nearly all of them people of color from some of America’s most overlooked communities—pushed the boundaries of music to new frontiers, while transfixing the country’s youth and reshaping fashion, art, and even language.

Who else wants their dream book written today? If you can speak out loud, then you have what it takes to become a lightning-fast, best-selling author. Most people dream of writing a book, but those manuscripts end up shoved away in dusty drawers, half-finished and abandoned to be eaten by moths. Many of them are great writers, many of them have great ideas. Yet so many people come to the conclusion that they'll never finish their books.

The God of the Querancy Cult has been defeated. The School of Spirit Power in the First Tier has begun to recover, demons have been driven away, traitors found, and criminals punished. The First Tier of the human world has achieved an idyllic state of peace for the first time in over a thousand years! But does idyll suit Seekers? The Second Tier of the human world remains closed to Zander and Vyllea, so the Seekers' attention turns to the demon world.

As a Black autistic pastor and disability scholar, Lamar Hardwick lives at the intersection of disability, race, and religion. Tied to this reality, he heeded the call to write How Ableism Fuels Racism to help Christian communities engage in critical conversations about race by addressing issues of ableism. Hardwick believes that ableism—the idea that certain bodies are better than others—and the disability discrimination fueled by this perspective are the root causes of racial bias and injustice in American culture and in the church.

The law of the jungle declares: it's every man for himself! This principle applies not only to the human world, but also the domain of their greatest adversaries—the demons. Their world's Tier Zero differs little from the Tier Zero of the human world. The resources are just as scarce, the creatures just as vicious, and the absence of law just as blatant. Yet the Heavens show no mercy when the push comes to shove. When it's time to conquer the Tier Zero of an alien world, retreat is not an option. For the privilege of ascending to immortality is reserved only for the strong.

Stuart Ridge has a problem. When his bigoted father discovers he's gay, he tries to kill him. Thankfully, his mom steps in and helps him get away, but what's a 17-year-old boy supposed to do when all he's ever known is home? Eden Raleigh's got nothing left, just a guitar and a backpack with some clothes. After his parents died, it left him and his sister to fend for themselves. Now they're about to lose the family home and be on the streets. There's nothing left to do but get out while he can. However, everything changes when he meets Stuart at a bus station in the middle of nowhere.

In Data-Driven DEI: The Tools and Metrics You Need to Measure, Analyze, and Improve Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Dr. Randal Pinkett, a renowned diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) thought leader, delivers a practical and evidence-based blueprint to achieving lasting impact with your DEI initiatives. Dr. Pinkett has created a simple, step-by-step process to assess the current state of your DEI, analyze that data to create a personal and organizational action plan, and implement data-driven, science-based, and technology-enabled interventions for greater diversity, equity, and inclusion.

A school of ascension once again. But now, instead of the energy-starved Tier Zero, the Seekers have taken on the First Tier, so this school's a whole different beast. It's massive. It's majestic. It strikes awe into the hearts of the students and nips any thoughts of breaking the rules in the bud. The Seekers are unwelcome here, for they don't play by anyone's rules. But aren't rules there to be broken?

African Americans have had every reason to doubt America’s democratic experiment. Yet African American activists, intellectuals, and artists who have sought to transform the United States into a racially just society have put forward some of the most original and powerful ideas about how to make America live up to its democratic ideals. In The Darkened Light of Faith, Melvin Rogers provides a bold new account of African American political thought through the works and lives of individuals who built this vital tradition, which is urgently needed today.

Restless and disillusioned with his life, Aiden McCarstle is ready for a night out at The Moonlight Cafe with his best friend Penelope: one night to not think about how much he hates grad school, to watch queer people make fools of themselves singing karaoke. But when it's not Penelope who walks through the door, but the high school nemesis Aiden hasn't seen in years—things get complicated.

In the second book of the Queer History Project, The Gender Binary Is a Big Lie: Infinite Identities around the World, author Lee Wind uses historical evidence and primary sources—poetry, ancient burial sites, firsthand accounts, and news stories—to explore gender roles and identities.

All over the city, they are watching: Black men paid to stand guard, invisible among the wealthy flâneurs and yet the only ones who truly see. From Les Grands Moulins to a Sephora on the Champs-Élysees, Ferdinand, Ossiri, and Kassoum find their way as undocumented workers amidst political infighting and the ever-changing landscape of immigration policy. Fast-paced and funny, poignant and sharply satirical, Standing Heavy is a searing deconstruction of colonial legacies and capitalist consumption and an unforgettable account of everything that passes under the security guards' all-seeing eyes.

What does it mean to be an American? The story of the African American past demonstrates the difficulty of answering this seemingly simple question. This book illuminates the US's core paradoxes, inviting profound questions about what it means to be an American, a citizen, and a human being. This book considers how, for centuries, African Americans have fought for what the black feminist intellectual Anna Julia Cooper called "the cause of freedom." It begins in Jamestown in 1619, when the first shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in that settlement.

New Suns 2 brings you fresh visions of the strange, the unexpected, the shocking-breakthrough stories, stories shining with emerging truths, stories that pierce stale preconceptions with their beauty and bravery.

The law of the jungle is straightforward—all means are justified in one's pursuit of ascension. After all, it's the result that matters—not how you achieve it. And yet the end doesn't always justify the means—especially when the ascension of one requires the suffering of hundreds. The Heavens do not take kindly to such acts. And so it came to pass that the Seekers have been forced to take matters into their own hands, bringing light to places where it had never shone before. However, the Bohao Cult has turned out to be far stronger than initially thought.

To wage war against the Bohao cultists, who have essentially taken control of both worlds, you need to think strategically. Eliminating the leadership seems logical, but with no access to the central region where the cult's leaders hide, that's a dead end. Hunting down individual cultists would take centuries, and they'd just recruit more in the meantime. So what do we do? The best approach would be to cut off all supply lines of the ancient substance they rely on and destroy every concentration camp where they keep the unfortunates they intend to sacrifice on their altar.

For the fan of good poetry interested in the diversity of American expression. The anthology provides an understanding of the history and contemporary vitality of the poetry and poetics of the non-normative body. Three sections—"Foremothers and Forefathers," "The Disability Poetics Movement," and "A Language of New Embodiment"—gather the poems and statements on poetics together in a meaningful whole.

A heinous murder sends Florida tabloid reporter Rayne Dawson sniffing for details. But when he discovers that a supernatural force may be responsible for both this death and a string of others, he enlists the help of the beautiful owner of the local history center. Together, they learn of an explosive element to the case that, like the tragic race riot that happened in the town a century before, the local citizenry wishes to bury and forget.

Celebrating the vast breadth and scope of Black excellence, Make Your Own History spotlights the principles of success exemplified by the lives of 120 Black role models who have blazed trails throughout American history. Make Your Own History gathers together motivational quotes, historical contexts, and enlightening precepts from Black trailblazers spanning the eighteenth century to the present. These insights encompass twelve central themes: courage, self-discipline, compassion, perseverance, teamwork, integrity, industriousness, self-reliance, optimism, purposefulness, civility, and faith.

Jimi Hendrix, Francis Bacon, the boxer Jack Johnson, Miles Davis, and a space-age Muhammad Ali find themselves in the otherworldly hands of Jeffery Renard Allen, reimagined and transformed to bring us news of America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The two strands in this brilliant story collection—speculative history and tender, painful depictions of Black life in urban America—are joined by African notions of circular time in which past, present, and future exist all at once.