Make Change: How to Fight Injustice, Dismantle Systemic Oppression, and Own Our Future - Hardcover

King, Shaun

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0358048001 ISBN 13: 9780358048008

Publisher: DeyStrBks, 2020

Synopsis

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“A captivating memoir of change. A hope-filled sermon for change. A tactical blueprint for how we can each make change. Make Change is all three and all the more towards an equitable and just world.”
—Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist

Activist and journalist Shaun King reflects on the events that made him one of the most prominent social justice leaders of our time and lays out a clear action plan for you to join the fight.
 
As a leader of the Black Lives Matter movement, Shaun King has become one of the most recognizable and powerful voices on the front lines of civil rights in our time. His commitment to reforming the justice system and making America a more equitable place has brought challenges and triumphs, soaring victories and crushing defeats. Throughout his wide-ranging activism, King’s commentary remains rooted in both exhaustive research and abundant passion.
    
In Make Change, King offers an inspiring look at the moments that have shaped his life and considers the ways social movements can grow and evolve in this hyper-connected era. He shares stories from his efforts leading the Raise the Age campaign and his work fighting police brutality, while providing a roadmap for how to stay sane, safe, and motivated even in the worst of political climates. By turns infuriating, inspiring, and educational, Make Change will resonate with those who believe that America can—and must—do better.

About this title

About the Author

SHAUN KING was recently named by Time magazine as one of the twenty-five most important people in the world online. He covers civil rights issues for the Intercept and is writer-in-residence at the Fair Punishment Project at Harvard Law School. Previously, King served as a pastor, teacher, and full-time motivational speaker in Atlanta’s juvenile justice system. In 2019, King launched the media platform The North Star, which has hundreds of thousands of members and subscribers. His podcast The Breakdown has remained one of the most popular news and politics category on Apple with over 100k subscribers. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

It was a beautiful, cloudless Friday morning in July of 2014. I could smell the ocean and hear the soothing sounds of its waves crashing as I took the first step out of my beat-up Hyundai and slammed the door shut. It was about 7 a.m., and Santa Monica was quiet. Rush-hour traffic in Los Angeles could be maddening, so I had left home super early that morning to beat the snarled highways and make my way to the offices of Global Green, an international environmental organization where I served as the director of communications. I was tempted, as I often was, to walk the extra block to the Pacific Coast Highway and stare out at the blue water that stretched as far as my eyes could see. Something about the ocean centers me. Seeing it never got old, but I was behind on several tasks at work, and the mounting pressure of deadlines overruled my inclination to be contemplative that morning, so I made my way inside.

The job was a major change of pace for me after years of spearheading my own philanthropic projects. I had become known in charity circles for my use of social media and email listservs to build awareness and raise funds for causes, but doing it for an organization like Global Green was a new challenge, bringing me into a more corporate setting. As I climbed the steps to our cushy second-floor office, I had no expectation that this would be the day that would change the entire course of my life. Everything about it felt just like the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that. Routine. But as I reflect back on that day, and over my forty years on earth, I now see my life as split in two, existing one particular way before that Friday and in an altogether different way after it.

For nearly a decade, Global Green had partnered with Vanity Fair to host its annual Oscars gala. The entire budget for the organization hinged on the success of the event. That morning, I organized our donor database, mundane but necessary work that consisted of cutting and pasting and entering data for hundreds of donors. As the hours crept along that morning and my colleagues filed in, I received a push notification on my phone from a former classmate of mine from Morehouse, where I had attended college fifteen years earlier. It was a Facebook message.

'shaun," my friend wrote. 'somebody posted something horrible on YouTube, man. The police are harassing this middle-aged brother on the street corner in New York and the dude is just begging them to leave him alone. He tells them over and over that he didn't do anything. The man wasn't armed. He wasn't violent. None of that. And all of a sudden, this plainclothes cop comes up behind him, and starts choking the shit out of him, like UFC rear naked choke-style. The cop chokes the man while the brother was still standing up'?''?then wrestles him to the ground and continues choking him. And Shaun'?''?you can hear the man yell out over and over and over again, 'I can't breathe'?''?I can't breathe.' He says it a dozen times. And the guy dies right there on the sidewalk, man."

When I read those words, my stomach dropped. My first thought was that I couldn't click on that link in the Global Green office. Don't get me wrong: the people there were nice. But nobody ever talked about civil rights or police brutality or racial justice. I just didn't know if I was ready to explain to them what my friend told me I would be seeing. And I'm ashamed to admit this, but a small part of me thought that he must've left out a key detail somewhere along the way. What he described for me was cold-blooded murder in broad daylight, with witnesses, caught on film. I wondered whether my friend had left out an essential chunk of the story. He hadn't. Such videos have spread across the world in the years since, but before that day in July, a viral video of someone being killed by police simply did not exist, and so the reality of it was confounding.

I waited until my lunch break to watch the video, turning the volume down on my computer before clicking the link. What I saw was shocking. It was just as my friend had described, but worse . . . much worse.

Edition details

• Publisher: DeyStrBks
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0358048001
• ISBN 13: 9780358048008
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272