Olympic Industry Resistance: Challenging Olympic Power And Propaganda

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

The year 1968 was ablaze with passion and mayhem as protests erupted in Paris and Prague, throughout the United States, and in cities on all continents. The Summer Olympic Games in Mexico were to be a moment of respite from chaos. But the image of peace – a white dove – adopted by organizers was an illusion, as was obvious to a record six hundred million people watching worldwide on satellite television. Ten days before the opening ceremony, soldiers slaughtered hundreds of student protesters in the capital.

The second edition of this Palgrave Pivot offers a history of and proof against claims of "buying power" and the impact this myth has had on understanding media, race, class and economics in the United States. For generations Black people have been told they have what is now said to be more than one trillion dollars of "buying power," and this book argues that commentators have misused this claim largely to blame Black communities for their own poverty based on squandered economic opportunity. This book exposes the claim as both a marketing strategy and myth, while also showing how that myth functions simultaneously as a case study for propaganda and commercial media coverage of economics. In sum, while “buying power” is indeed an economic and marketing phrase applied to any number of racial, ethnic, religious, gender, age or group of consumers, it has a specific application to Black America. A new foreword by Dr. Darrick Hamilton, Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy at the New School (in New York, USA), and a new chapter on cryptocurrencies are included in this new edition.

In time for the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth, a specially curated collection of Mahatma Gandhi's writings on nonviolent resistance and activism.