Care and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy in Online Settings by
As enrollment numbers continue to grow for online education classes, it is imperative instructors be prepared to teach students from diverse groups. Students who engage in learning in classrooms where their backgrounds are recognized and the instruction is welcoming and all-inclusive perform better. Individuals who teach in online settings must endeavor to create caring and culturally appropriate environments to encourage learning among all students irrespective of their demographic composition. Care and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy in Online Settings is a collection of innovative research on the incorporation of culturally sensitive teaching practices in online classrooms, and how these methods have had an impact on student learning. While highlighting topics including faculty teaching, restorative justice, and nontraditional students, this book is ideally designed for instructors, researchers, instructional designers, administrators, policymakers, and students seeking current research on online educators incorporating care and culturally responsive pedagogy into practice.
Culturally and Linguistically by
Written to address all grade levels, this K-12 classroom resource provides teachers with strategies to support their culturally and linguistically diverse students. This highly readable book by Dr. Sharroky Hollie explores the pedagogy of culturally responsive teaching, and includes tips, techniques, and activities that are easy to implement in today's classrooms. Both novice and seasoned educators will benefit from the helpful strategies described in this resource to improve on the following five key areas: classroom management, academic literacy, academic vocabulary, academic language, and learning environment. This updated 2nd edition is grounded in the latest research, and includes an updated reference section and resources for further reading.
Culturally Responsive Pedagogy by
This book convincingly argues that effective culturally responsive pedagogies require teachers to firstly undertake a critical deconstruction of Self in relation to and with the Other; and secondly, to take into account how power affects the socio-political, cultural and historical contexts in which the education relation takes place. The contributing authors are from a range of diaspora, indigenous, and white mainstream communities, and are united in their desire to challenge the hegemony of Eurocentric education and to create new educational spaces that are more socially and environmentally just. In this venture, the ideal education process is seen to be inherently critical and intercultural, where mainstream and marginalized, colonized and colonizer, indigenous and settler communities work together to decolonize selves, teacher-student relationships, pedagogies, the curriculum and the education system itself. This book will be of great interest and relevance to policy-makers and researchers in the field of education; teacher educators; and pre- and in-service teachers.
Culturally Responsive Pedagogy by
"In Culturally Responsive Pedagogy: Promising Practices for African American Male Students, I take us on a journey into teachers perceptions of the impact of implementing culturally responsive pedagogical (CRP) practices on the student learning outcomes of African American male students. The book also helps to identify teachers perceptions of the CRP strategies needed in the elementary school setting to address the diverse needs of African American male students. I share the story of educators from a large, diverse elementary school in an urban school district, who have made it their mission to provide African American male students with culturally responsive learning environments where they can thrive. Throughout the book, I make it clear that the implementation of CRP practices has a direct impact on the student learning outcomes of African American male students. The book provides additional research into the existing literature on CRP practices. Through a case study approach, my work allows for additional insight into the potential impact of CRP practices on the student learning outcomes of African American male students in an urban elementary school setting. The book takes us on a journey of highs and lows, ups and downs, and failures and successes. Throughout the book, rich, detailed stories and descriptions are shared based on classroom observations, interviews, and student learning outcomes collected from three elementary school teachers from diverse backgrounds and various years of experience. Classroom observations were conducted using the Culturally Responsive Instruction Observation Protocol (CRIOP) instrument to assess the practices being implemented in the classroom. As I focused on the hard realities that face African American male students in todays classrooms, I identified six emerging themes, including one overarching emerging theme, and three promising practices that surfaced during my research. The CRP practices implemented proved helpful toward increasing learning outcomes for African American male students, and, ultimately, closing the achievement gap. As an African American educator, I have been able to see how the lack of culturally responsive practices creates learning obstacles for African American male students. These learning obstacles continue to plague a group that has been historically marginalized in our society. The implementation of CRP practices provides educators with an avenue to remedy a social justice issue that has plagued our nation for years. The information shared in this book can be beneficial for all those invested in closing the achievement gap and increasing student learning outcomes through the use of culturally responsive practices, including pre-service and in-service teachers, administrators, caregivers, community advocates, educational researchers, and policy makers"--
Culturally Responsive Teaching and Reflection in Higher Education by
Culturally Responsive Teaching and Reflection in Higher Educationexplores how postsecondary educators can develop their own cultural awareness and provide inclusive learning environments for all students. Discussing best practices from the Cultural Literacy Curriculum Institute at Lesley University, faculty and administrators who are committed to culturally responsive teaching reflect on how to create an inclusive environment and how educators can cultivate the skills, attitudes, and knowledge necessary for implementing culturally responsive curriculum and pedagogy. Rather than a list of "right answers," essays in this important resource integrate discussion and individual reflection to support educators to enhance skills for responding effectively to racial, cultural, and social difference in their personal and professional contexts. This book is as an excellent starting point or further enrichment resource to accompany program or institutional diversity and inclusion efforts. .
Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain by
The achievement gap remains a stubborn problem for educators of culturally and linguistically diverse students. Diverse classrooms need a proven framework for optimizing student engagement and facilitating deeper learning. Culturally responsive pedagogy has shown great promise in meeting this need, but many educators still struggle with its implementation. In this book, Zaretta Hammond draws on cutting-edge neuroscience research to offer an innovative approach for designing and implementing brain-compatible culturally responsive instruction.
The Impact of Classroom Practices by
Debates regarding the qualities, skills, and dispositions of culturally relevant teachers and teaching have raged in teacher education for several decades. Ladson-Billings' (2009) The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children was a groundbreaking work that has become a foundational study that informs the work of culturally-relevant (Ladson-Billings, 2009) and culturally-sustaining (Paris & Alim, 2017) teaching. In her book The Dreamkeepers she describes effective teachers who are able to draw from the cultural wealth, knowledges, and heritage of Black communities. The Dreamkeepers ensured that their Black students were academically successful, retained, and grew both in terms of their cultural competence and their sociopolitical awareness. In other words, according to research by Ladson-Billings (2009), effective teachers possessed both pedagogical and relational dispositions, which leave lifelong impacts on the academic and social lives of the students they teach. While being a foundational text, what remains missing from the research on culturally-relevant and even culturally-sustaining teachers are "narratives" (read: stories, testimonios, etc.) related to how the race of particular E-12 teachers positively impact the lives of their students. For instance, Dr. Antonio Ellis (the first editor of the proposed book) describes his high school music teacher Mr. Linard McCloud) as "a highly effective African American music educator who changed the course of his life" (p. 170). Ellis (2016) describes McCloud as being loving, caring, creative, culturally sensitive, attuned, hopeful, flexible, organized, and thoughtful. Because Mr. McCloud possessed the aforementioned characteristics and dispositions, Ellis contends that he was motivated to achieve academically and socially in his urban high school. In addition, according to Ellis (2016), Mr. McCloud was a highly impactful educator because he went beyond the call of duty as a teacher-a practice that is not so common in schools, particularly urban ones. Not only did McCloud teach in the classroom setting, but he also built strong relationships with families, community members, and external stakeholders including local businesses, colleges, and universities. Mr. McCloud used these networks to leverage opportunities for his students academically, personally, and professionally. Like many of his high school classmates, Ellis (2016) contends that he would not have graduated from high school if it were not for the care and mentorship he received from Mr. McCloud. In this proposed edited volume, it is the editors' goal to honor teachers like Mr. McCloud who have made a difference in the lives of their students by learning from their impactful practices. Employing a "critical storytelling" methodology (see Hartlep & Hensley, 2015; Hartlep, Hensley, Braniger, & Jennings, 2017), each chapter contributor will use his or her own narrative to show the power of influential teachers in classrooms. While this framework centers race, lived and learned experiences, the storyteller is the most important unit of narrative; hence, The Impact of Classroom Practices: Reflections on Culturally Relevant Teachers will include African-American storytellers who reflect on the impact of classroom practices of teachers from diverse backgrounds who they deemed culturally relevant and responsive to both their academic and social needs. This work will offer recommendations to pre-service teachers and in-service teachers who desire to leave a lasting impact on the students they teach.
Race, Equity and the Learning Environment by
At a time of impending demographic shifts, faculty and administrators in higher education around the world are becoming aware of the need to address the systemic practices and barriers that contribute to inequitable educational outcomes of racially and ethnically diverse students. Focusing on the higher education learning environment, this volume illuminates the global relevance of critical and inclusive pedagogies (CIP), and demonstrates how their application can transform the teaching and learning process and promote more equitable educational outcomes among allstudents, but especially racially minoritized students. The examples in this book illustrate the importance of recognizing the detrimental impact of dominant ideologies, of evaluating who is being included in and excluded from the learning process, and paying attention to when teaching fails to consider students' varying social, psychological, physical and/or emotional needs. This edited volume brings CIP into the realm of comparative education by gathering scholars from across academic disciplines and countries to explore how these pedagogies not only promote deep learning among students, but also better equip instructors to attend to the needs of diverse students by prioritizing their intellectual and social development; creating identity affirming learning environments that foster high expectations; recognizing the value of the cultural and national differences that learners bring to the educational experience; and engaging the "whole" student in the teaching and learning process.
The Half Has Never Been Told by
A groundbreaking history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of slaves Winner of the 2015 Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians Winner of the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution--the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy. Told through intimate slave narratives, plantation records, newspapers, and the words of politicians, entrepreneurs, and escaped slaves, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history. Bloomberg View Top Ten Nonfiction Books of 2014 Daily Beast Best Nonfiction Books of 2014
The Price for Their Pound of Flesh by
Groundbreaking look at slaves as commodities through every phase of life, from birth to death and beyond, in early America In life and in death, slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Fleshis the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives-including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death-in the early American domestic slave trade. Covering the full "life cycle," historian Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments. Illuminating "ghost values" or the prices placed on dead enslaved people, Berry explores the little-known domestic cadaver trade and traces the illicit sales of dead bodies to medical schools. This book is the culmination of more than ten years of Berry's exhaustive research on enslaved values, drawing on data unearthed from sources such as slave-trading records, insurance policies, cemetery records, and life insurance policies. Writing with sensitivity and depth, she resurrects the voices of the enslaved and provides a rare window into enslaved peoples' experiences and thoughts, revealing how enslaved people recalled and responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold throughout the course of their lives. Reaching out from these pages, they compel the reader to bear witness to their stories, to see them as human beings, not merely commodities. A profoundly humane look at an inhumane institution, The Price for Their Pound of Fleshwill have a major impact how we think about slavery, reparations, capitalism, nineteenth-century medical education, and the value of life and death.
North of Slavery by
". . . no American can be pleased with the treatment of Negro Americans, North and South, in the years before the Civil War. In his clear, lucid account of the Northern phase of the story Professor Litwack has performed a notable service."--John Hope Franklin, Journal of Negro Education "For a searching examination of the North Star Legend we are indebted to Leon F. Litwack. . . ."--C. Vann Woodward, The American Scholar
Reconstruction: America's unfinished revolution, 1863-1877 by
This "masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history" (New Republic) made history when it was originally published in 1988. It redefined how Reconstruction was viewed by historians and people everywhere in its chronicling of how Americans -- black and white -- responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. This "smart book of enormous strengths" (Boston Globe) has since gone on to become the classic work on the wrenching post-Civil War period -- an era whose legacy reverberates still today in the United States.
Slavery by Another Name by
In this groundbreaking book, Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history--the re-enslavement of black Americans from the Civil War to World War II--in a moving, sobering account that explores the insidious legacy of white racism that reverberates today.
From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime by
In the United States today, one in every thirty-one adults is under some form of penal control, including one in eleven African American men. How did the "land of the free" become the home of the world's largest prison system? Challenging the belief that America's prison problem originated with the Reagan administration's War on Drugs, Elizabeth Hinton traces the rise of mass incarceration to an ironic source: the social welfare programs of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society at the height of the civil rights era. Johnson's War on Poverty policies sought to foster equality and economic opportunity. But these initiatives were also rooted in widely shared assumptions about African Americans' role in urban disorder, which prompted Johnson to call for a simultaneous War on Crime. The 1965 Law Enforcement Assistance Act empowered the national government to take a direct role in militarizing local police. Federal anticrime funding soon incentivized social service providers to ally with police departments, courts, and prisons. Under Richard Nixon and his successors, welfare programs fell by the wayside while investment in policing and punishment expanded. Anticipating future crime, policymakers urged states to build new prisons and introduced law enforcement measures into urban schools and public housing, turning neighborhoods into targets of police surveillance. By the 1980s, crime control and incarceration dominated national responses to poverty and inequality. The initiatives of that decade were less a sharp departure than the full realization of the punitive transformation of urban policy implemented by Republicans and Democrats alike since the 1960s.
The New Jim Crow by
Despite the triumphant dismantling of the Jim Crow Laws, the system that once forced African Americans into a segregated second-class citizenship still haunts America, the US criminal justice system still unfairly targets black men and an entire segment of the population is deprived of their basic rights. Outside of prisons, a web of laws and regulations discriminates against these wrongly convicted ex-offenders in voting, housing, employment and education. Alexander here offers an urgent call for justice.
Just Mercy by
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A powerful true story about the potential for mercy to redeem us, and a clarion call to fix our broken system of justice--from one of the most brilliant and influential lawyers of our time Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn't commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship--and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever. Just Mercy is at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer's coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice. Praise for Just Mercy "A searing, moving and infuriating memoir . . . Bryan Stevenson may, indeed, be America's Mandela. For decades he has fought judges, prosecutors and police on behalf of those who are impoverished, black or both. . . . Injustice is easy not to notice when it affects people different from ourselves; that helps explain the obliviousness of our own generation to inequity today. We need to wake up. And that is why we need a Mandela in this country."--Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times "Inspiring . . . a work of style, substance and clarity . . . Stevenson is not only a great lawyer, he's also a gifted writer and storyteller."--The Washington Post "Unfairness in the justice system is a major theme of our age. . . . This book brings new life to the story by placing it in two affecting contexts: [Bryan] Stevenson's life work and the deep strain of racial injustice in American life. . . . The book extols not his nobility but that of the cause, and reads like a call to action for all that remains to be done. . . . The message of the book, hammered home by dramatic examples of one man's refusal to sit quietly and countenance horror, is that evil can be overcome, a difference can be made. Just Mercy will make you upset and it will make you hopeful."--Ted Conover, The New York Times Book Review "Emotionally profound, necessary reading."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review, Kirkus Prize Finalist) "A passionate account of the ways our nation thwarts justice and inhumanely punishes the poor and disadvantaged."--Booklist (starred review) "Not since Atticus Finch has a fearless and committed lawyer made such a difference in the American South. Though larger than life, Atticus exists only in fiction. Bryan Stevenson, however, is very much alive and doing God's work fighting for the poor, the oppressed, the voiceless, the vulnerable, the outcast, and those with no hope. Just Mercy is his inspiring and powerful story."--John Grisham "This is a book of great power and courage. It is inspiring and suspenseful--a revelation."--Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns "Bryan Stevenson is one of my personal heroes, perhaps the most inspiring and influential crusader for justice alive today, and Just Mercy is extraordinary."--Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860- 1935 by
James Anderson critically reinterprets the history of southern black education from Reconstruction to the Great Depression. By placing black schooling within a political, cultural, and economic context, he offers fresh insights into black commitment to education, the peculiar significance of Tuskegee Institute, and the conflicting goals of various philanthropic groups, among other matters. Initially, ex-slaves attempted to create an educational system that would support and extend their emancipation, but their children were pushed into a system of industrial education that presupposed black political and economic subordination. This conception of education and social order--supported by northern industrial philanthropists, some black educators, and most southern school officials--conflicted with the aspirations of ex-slaves and their descendants, resulting at the turn of the century in a bitter national debate over the purposes of black education. Because blacks lacked economic and political power, white elites were able to control the structure and content of black elementary, secondary, normal, and college education during the first third of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, blacks persisted in their struggle to develop an educational system in accordance with their own needs and desires.
The Color of Law: a forgotten history of how our government segregated America by
In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation--that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation--the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments--that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north.As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Now, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban areas rapidly deteriorated, the great American suburbanization of the post-World War II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally, Rothstein shows how police and prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by supporting violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods.The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did nothing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet recent outbursts of violence in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis show us precisely how the legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest. "The American landscape will never look the same to readers of this important book" (Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), as Rothstein's invaluable examination shows that only by relearning this history can we finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past.
They Can't Kill Us All by
LA Times winner for The Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose A New York Times bestseller A New York Times Editors' Choice A Featured Title in The New York Times Book Review's "Paperback Row" A Bustle "17 Books About Race Every White Person Should Read" "Essential reading."--Junot Diaz "Electric...so well reported, so plainly told and so evidently the work of a man who has not grown a callus on his heart."--Dwight Garner, New York Times, "A Top Ten Book of 2016" "I'd recommend everyone to read this book because it's not just statistics, it's not just the information, but it's the connective tissue that shows the human story behind it." -- Trevor Noah, The Daily Show A deeply reported book that brings alive the quest for justice in the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Freddie Gray, offering both unparalleled insight into the reality of police violence in America and an intimate, moving portrait of those working to end it Conducting hundreds of interviews during the course of over one year reporting on the ground, Washington Post writer Wesley Lowery traveled from Ferguson, Missouri, to Cleveland, Ohio; Charleston, South Carolina; and Baltimore, Maryland; and then back to Ferguson to uncover life inside the most heavily policed, if otherwise neglected, corners of America today. In an effort to grasp the magnitude of the repose to Michael Brown's death and understand the scale of the problem police violence represents, Lowery speaks to Brown's family and the families of other victims other victims' families as well as local activists. By posing the question, "What does the loss of any one life mean to the rest of the nation?" Lowery examines the cumulative effect of decades of racially biased policing in segregated neighborhoods with failing schools, crumbling infrastructure and too few jobs. Studded with moments of joy, and tragedy, They Can't Kill Us All offers a historically informed look at the standoff between the police and those they are sworn to protect, showing that civil unrest is just one tool of resistance in the broader struggle for justice. As Lowery brings vividly to life, the protests against police killings are also about the black community's long history on the receiving end of perceived and actual acts of injustice and discrimination. They Can't Kill Us All grapples with a persistent if also largely unexamined aspect of the otherwise transformative presidency of Barack Obama: the failure to deliver tangible security and opportunity to those Americans most in need of both.
From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by
The eruption of mass protests in the wake of the police murders of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York City have challenged the impunity with which officers of the law carry out violence against Black people and punctured the illusion of a postracial America. The Black Lives Matter movement has awakened a new generation of activists. In this stirring and insightful analysis, activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and Black unemployment. In this context, she argues that this new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for Black liberation.
Medical Apartheid by
From the era of slavery to the present day, the first full history of black America’s shocking mistreatment as unwilling and unwitting experimental subjects at the hands of the medical establishment. Medical Apartheidis the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge—a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It reveals how blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the twentieth century, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of blacks, and the view that they were biologically inferior, oversexed, and unfit for adult responsibilities. Shocking new details about the government’s notorious Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less-well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, prisons, and private institutions. The product of years of prodigious research into medical journals and experimental reports long undisturbed,Medical Apartheidreveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and makes possible, for the first time, an understanding of the roots of the African American health deficit. At last, it provides the fullest possible context for comprehending the behavioral fallout that has caused black Americans to view researchers—and indeed the whole medical establishment—with such deep distrust. No one concerned with issues of public health and racial justice can afford not to readMedical Apartheid, a masterful book that will stir up both controversy and long-needed debate.
Evicted by
New York Times Bestseller From Harvard sociologist and MacArthur "Genius" Matthew Desmond, a landmark work of scholarship and reportage that will forever change the way we look at poverty in America In this brilliant, heartbreaking book, Matthew Desmond takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge. Arleen is a single mother trying to raise her two sons on the $20 a month she has left after paying for their rundown apartment. Scott is a gentle nurse consumed by a heroin addiction. Lamar, a man with no legs and a neighborhood full of boys to look after, tries to work his way out of debt. Vanetta participates in a botched stickup after her hours are cut. All are spending almost everything they have on rent, and all have fallen behind. The fates of these families are in the hands of two landlords: Sherrena Tarver, a former schoolteacher turned inner-city entrepreneur, and Tobin Charney, who runs one of the worst trailer parks in Milwaukee. They loathe some of their tenants and are fond of others, but as Sherrena puts it, "Love don't pay the bills." She moves to evict Arleen and her boys a few days before Christmas. Even in the most desolate areas of American cities, evictions used to be rare. But today, most poor renting families are spending more than half of their income on housing, and eviction has become ordinary, especially for single mothers. In vivid, intimate prose, Desmond provides a ground-level view of one of the most urgent issues facing America today. As we see families forced into shelters, squalid apartments, or more dangerous neighborhoods, we bear witness to the human cost of America's vast inequality--and to people's determination and intelligence in the face of hardship. Based on years of embedded fieldwork and painstakingly gathered data, this masterful book transforms our understanding of extreme poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving a devastating, uniquely American problem. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.