RE-ALIGNING THE POWER CODES
TEN WINNERS OF THE 22ND ANNUAL MYERS OUTSTANDING BOOK AWARDS

December 10^th, 2006 - Boston, MA

Ten new books have been added into the Gustavus Myers Center winners circle. Timed to the December 10, 2006 global celebrations of International Human Rights Day, the center announced the Myers Outstanding Book Awards 2006.

There is a "remarkable confluence in themes and messages," said Loretta J. Williams, Director of the national center. "People can - and must -- resist the power codes placing them in harm's way." The books selected this year speak to codes grounded in racism, sexism, and economic exploitation that play out in public policies and discriminatory practices.

Louise Derman-Sparks; Patricia G. Ramsey; with Julie Olsen Edwards
What If All The Kids Are White? Anti-Bias Multicultural Education with Young Children and Families
(Teachers College Press 2006)

Written for early childhood teachers, this innovative guidebook has a much broader audience as it offers ways to counteract the seductive appeal for white children of absorption within white advantages. Eye-opening for white parents, and for persons interacting in predominately white institutions, this book offers fresh possibilities and a sound template for change.

Matthew Frye Jacobson,
Roots, Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights in America
(Harvard University Press 2006)

Astute analysis of the politicized and racialized development of the Ellis Island icon of white ethnicity starting in the 1960s as a way to blunt pressures from the freedom movement to accept responsibility for the nation's racist sins. Plymouth Rock narratives were jettisoned as whiteness, and American nationalism, came to be connected to downtrodden Ellis Island immigrants who arrived after slavery was prohibited and who virtuously pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. Jacobson deftly leads the reader through the cultural shifts.

Meizhu Lui; Barbara Robles; Betsy Leondar Wright; Rose M. Brewer; Rebecca Adamson,
The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide
(The New Press 2006)

Multicultural history of the U.S. wealth divide, and how government policies have put "white families on an escalator to asset ownership while keeping people of color stuck on an economic treadmill." Racially diverse co-authors, connected variously with the United For a Fair Economy organization renowned for its focus on economic justice, offer clear strategies to bring about movement towards equity.

Nancy MacLean,
Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace
(Russell Sage/Harvard University Press 2006)

Fifty years ago, the workplace population looked very different from today. What steps forward and backwards, in the freedom movement's long-standing quest for jobs and justice led to new race, gender and other more inclusive reconfigurations? MacLean's contemporary history chronicles the chipping away at exclusion and resistance. It also importantly reveals the resurgent conservative organized rights machinations to maintain race and gender hierarchies.

Tram Nguyen,
We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities after 9/11
(Beacon Press 2005)

The human toll paid by those entombed in shadowy immigration prisons exponentially exacted from and through Arab, Muslim and dark-skinned peopled communities. Nguyen, editor of ColorLines magazine, shares the voices of those experiencing homeland security policies and practices which exacerbated already-existing anti-immigrant hatred and "managed" abuse.

Annelise Orleck,
Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty
(Beacon Press 2005)

Reclaims the full story of audacious women who operated a community anti-poverty program that truly made a difference in the 1960s and 70s. Despite Sisyphean obstacles, Operation Life, Las Vegas, NV, run by African American welfare mothers, operated child care facilities, a community medical clinic, library, voter education and registration efforts and more. Conservatives warring against "big government" brought down this vibrant grass-roots initiative. Many lessons for economic and racial justice advocates today.

Nell Irvin Painter,
Creating Black Americans: African-American History & Its Meaning: 1619 to the Present
(Oxford University Press 2006)

Spectacular retelling of the history of the African Diaspora in America engaged with the arts. The eras discussed go from before enslavement through to hip-hop culture today. Citing the Black community's self-creation, Painter interweaves 150 mostly full-color art works with her narrative of the tragedies, joys and creativity of a diverse people. The passion of the visual representations, travails and triumphs, shines through this vibrant book.

Justin Richardson; Peter Parnell; Henry Cole,
And Tango Makes Three
(Simon and Schuster 2005)

This marvelously illustrated children's book fictionalizes a true family story from NYC's Central Park zoo. Two male penguins mated for life, built a nest, and were taking turns trying to hatch a stone egg. The zookeeper unobtrusively placed a real egg in their nest. A chick was born as a result of their co-tending behavior. The proud parents fed Tango from their beaks and nurtured her. The messages: be inclusive; accept differences; be about acceptance, love and co-parenting.

Karenna Gore Schiff,
Lighting the Way: Nine Women Who Changed Modern America
(Miramax 2006)

The women whose stories are told with great warmth and respect in this remarkable book all were (or are) change agents. All variously perfected influence with or without authority to an art form. They were intricately involved in the defining crusades of the late 19th and full 20th centuries. The women chronicled: Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mother Jones, Frances Perkins, Alice Hamilton, Septima Poinsette Clark, Dolores Huerta, Helen Rodriguez-Trias, Virginia Durr and Gretchen Buchenholz. Their progressive break-throughs, accomplishments and failures are portrayed in all their complexity within their historical and personal contexts.

Kenji Yoshino,
Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights
(Random House 2006)

Toning down one's identity behavior to make others less uncomfortable is part and parcel of pressures from US norms placed on those outside the mainstream. Yoshino names this covering behavior. Arguing persuasively for freedom of self-expression as a universal human right, he shares his evolving gay male story, as well as astute analyses of civil rights laws today protecting a person's being but not doing that associated with the particular group-identity. Examples: restrictions on same-sex public expressions of affection, the banning of dreadlocks by employers; the pressure to anglicize names, etc.

"The books honored by the Myers award uniquely cut through denials of myriad forms of bigotry in America, and distinctively speak of alternative possibilities," says Williams. The struggle for justice must continue, mindful more than ever of the fact that it is not the laziness of the poor, or the foreignness of the immigrant, or the different sexuality of the GLBT community members that is always with us, but the oppression of those categorized as "different".

Simmons College President Susan C. Scrimshaw lauded the Myers awards for inspiring us to "a reflective life...one where we do more than go with the flow."

Congratulations to all the winners! Please support them at your bookstore and libraries.