by Nicholas Ensley Mitchell
Bloomsbury Academic
7/10/2025, hardcover
SKU: 9781538189764
We like to believe that bigotry is a product of ignorance and that if we educate people enough, they will become immune to bigotry. But what if bigotry isn't a lack of education, but rather a moral code that people live by? What if bigotry is a common code of hate to which no community is immune?
On Bigotry is a field guide for understanding how bigots think and teach others to think, how bigotry disguises itself, how bigotry teaches people to act politically, and, most importantly, what individuals and communities can do about it. This is an essential read for anyone interested in challenging the spread of bigotry in society, regardless of who engages in it and why.
Reviews:
"On Bigotry is a fascinating and provocative book that challenges us to understand bigotry and how it has operated in the past and still operates in the 21st Century. It is up to the reader whether they will take the lessons outlined in this powerful book to heart and drive bigotry to the "margins of society" or allow it to continue to have a significant foothold in society." -- Shawn Leigh Alexander, author of W. E. B. Du Bois: An American Intellectual and Activist
"Lively and learned, On Bigotry will fit excitingly into college courses, especially in education. As importantly, given that we are entering a period in which self-education becomes critical in combating hate, the book will find a home in coffee shops, Sunday schools, reading groups, unions, and wherever readers are trying to make a kinder and more just world. Broad in its conceptualization and deep in its research, Mitchell's work is acute on the moments when bigotry bellows, those when it hides, and those when it might be made to give way." -- David Roediger, author of The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
About the Author:
Nicholas Ensley Mitchell is an essayist and assistant professor of curriculum studies, courtesy assistant professor of African and African American Studies, and affiliate of the LGBTQ+ Research and Advocacy Center at the University of Kansas.