The "everyday racism" confronted by black women across America is the subject explored in a recently published book written by UNLV professor Yanick St. Jean.
The book, "Double Burden: Black Women and Everyday Racism," was published earlier this year by M.E. Sharpe Inc. Joe R. Feagin, a graduate research professor in sociology at the University of Florida, is the book's coauthor.
St. Jean, an assistant professor of sociology who has been at UNLV since 1992, said the book is a natural extension of the research she has been conducting since her days in graduate school.
In preparation for writing the book, St. Jean and Feagin conducted more than 200 interviews in which they explored the complex family, social, and workplace lives of African-American women in several regions of the country.
"As they have for centuries, African-American women and men today face a complex array of racial barriers created by white Americans in all major institutional settings across society," according to the book's publisher. "Black women in particular face a variety of racial woes, often concurrently: workplace and other organizational barriers, attacks on their beauty, misrepresentations by the media, and conflicts and strained relationships with white women."
The book reveals "not only stories of encounters with obstacles, racist attitudes, and prejudicial actions and opinions, but also methods that many have adopted for overcoming barriers, through the development of an array of survival and countering strategies, which the authors refer to collectively as an oppositional culture, rooted in the family structure and sustained and transmitted via collective memory through the centuries," the publisher states on the book's jacket.
For additional information, call St. Jean at 895-0255.
