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Overview
What J. D. Vance did for Appalachia with Hillbilly Elegy, CNN analyst and one of the youngest state representatives in South Carolina history Bakari Sellers does for the rural South, in this important book that illuminates the lives of America’s forgotten black working-class men and women.
Part memoir, part historical and cultural analysis, My Vanishing Country is an eye-opening journey through the South's past, present, and future.
Anchored in in Bakari Seller’s hometown of Denmark, South Carolina, Country illuminates the pride and pain that continues to fertilize the soil of one of the poorest states in the nation. He traces his father’s rise to become, friend of Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King, a civil rights hero, and member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) , to explore the plight of the South's dwindling rural, black working classmany of whom can trace their ancestry back for seven generations.
In his poetic personal history, we are awakened to the crisis affecting the other “Forgotten Men & Women,” who the media seldom acknowledges. For Sellers, these are his family members, neighbors, and friends. He humanizes the struggles that shape their lives: to gain access to healthcare as rural hospitals disappear; to make ends meet as the factories they have relied on shut down and move overseas; to hold on to precious traditions as their towns erode; to forge a path forward without succumbing to despair.
My Vanishing Country is also a love letter to fatherhoodto Sellers' father, his lodestar, whose life lessons have shaped him, and to his newborn twins, who he hopes will embrace the Sellers family name and honor its legacy.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781094157795 |
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Publisher: | HarperCollins Publishers |
Publication date: | 05/19/2020 |
Product dimensions: | 5.80(w) x 5.60(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Introduction: Black, Country, and Proud 1
I The Wounds Have Not Healed: "Don't Be a Dead Hero" 19
II Black and Forgotten 41
III School Daze: The Making of a Morehouse Man 65
IV The Making of a Politician, Part 1 81
V The Making of a Politician, Part 2 95
VI Dreaming with My Eyes Open: Becoming a Leader 109
VII Risk Taking 127
VIII Anxiety: A Black Man's Superpower 151
IX A Voice for the Voiceless 169
X Why Are the Strongest Women in the World Dying? 189
XI Why 2016 Happened and the Power of Rhetoric 205
Afterword 219
Dear Donor Family 223
Acknowledgments 225