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Tanya McKinnon

@tanyamckinnon

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Principal @ McKinnon Literary. Amplifying progressive voices. Feminist identified. (Twitter: McKinnonLit)

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A revolutionary new history that exposes the “whites-only” roots of the American immigration regime.

In Racist by Design, award-winning historian Kelly Lytle Hernández reveals how generations of lawmakers and law enforcers built the American immigration system to encourage white immigrants while targeting nonwhite migrants for exclusion, punishment, and removal. The goal, often explicitly stated by the system’s architects, was to create a permanent caste of undocumented and criminalized workers to provide cheap labor for the American economy.

Many Americans’ understanding of the immigration system begins with the Chinese Exclusion Act of the late nineteenth century. Lytle Hernández expands that history by a full century, showing how the Haitian Revolution of the 1790s inspired not only America’s first immigration bans (to prevent news of a free Black republic from reaching our shores) but also its first refugee resettlement program (to welcome and support Haiti’s evicted enslavers.) She explains how Chinese Exclusion led the Supreme Court to disconnect immigration laws from the constitution. She reveals how eugenicists and Jim Crow segregationists built much of our current immigration regime as expressly “whites-only,” and shows how during the Civil Rights Movement, Congress amended this system but never abolished it, leaving many of the regime’s racist rules and rituals intact today.

Lytle Hernández calls Racist by Design “an act of sabotage,” a book that will expose the blueprints of the system, so it can be dismantled. A nuanced, concise, and brilliant work that will outrage and inflame readers, Racist by Design is a major work by one of our most important historians. by @tanyamckinnon

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23 days ago

My book, Making a Killing: Capitalism, Cops, and the War on Black Life (Henry Holt/ Macmillan) is coming out in January but today the press is sharing the cover. The brilliant artist Cameron Rowland graciously allowed me to use their recent piece, "exigent circumstances” (2026) which is a hydraulic battering ram (hydra-ram) police use to forcibly open locked doors. The work is accompanied by the following caption:
“Law enforcement do not need a warrant to enter any premises.

Warrantless, no-knock raids are legally permitted under ‘exigent circumstances.’ Officers may determine any circumstances to be exigent at their discretion.

Hydraulic battering rams allow an individual officer to forcibly open any locked door.”

The image perfectly captures one of the book’s central arguments: that policing has always been an essential element of capitalism, esp. control over property—whether it is protecting propertied classes, facilitating gentrification, patrolling the borders of nations or segregated neighborhoods, managing the unhoused, overseeing evictions, and so forth. And for the families I write about who lost loved ones to state and extralegal violence, their stories amount to an intergenerational search for “home,” for safety, but are relegated to neighborhoods subject to organized abandonment under police occupation.

Most of the book is about Movements resisting police violence, which I show are class struggles, but I also argue that policing has become a lucrative source of private investment—tech companies, weapons manufacturers, and so forth, are literally making a killing. The hydra-ram is not just a tool but a commodity enriching private capital with public funds.
So I hope you'll check out my book by @tanyamckinnon

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25 days ago

In #MakingAKilling, historian Robin D. G. Kelley examines the deep history of law enforcement and racial justice in America—drawing a direct line from modern police fatalities to the economic and political structures that have shaped the nation.

Tracing the intersection of law enforcement, policy, and economic inequality—from housing segregation and predatory lending to border militarization—Kelley offers a comprehensive account of how state power and wealth accumulation have long been intertwined.

At the same time, Making a Killing chronicles the long tradition of Black civil rights resistance, highlighting the movements, leaders, and ideas that have pushed for systemic reform and broader social change throughout American history.

Out January 19, 2027.
Learn more via our #linkinbio. by @tanyamckinnon

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And he does it again!!! Congratulations @fadyjoudah !

« This is poetry of the highest order, and a stunning reminder of what words can do.”—Omar El Akkad

« Hold this book, read every word, study every picture, notice the prints you leave behind—a reminder that no one’s hands are clean. »—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

From National Book Award Finalist Fady Joudah, a collection of poems, essays, and photographs that offers a Palestinian representation of not only the staggering grief, but the unwavering resilience and prevailing life force of a people and place enduring genocide.

Fady Joudah writes from the split perspective of a Palestinian American physician caring for the sick while watching the destruction of Gaza from the United States, a nation complicit in that destruction. He locates the paradox of his position everywhere: in the seed a sparrow eats from his proffered hand; in his writing in English, the oppressor’s language; in the faces of Palestinian children receiving meals from aid kitchens—a glimpse into what his life could have been, and what is being lost in a war disproportionately impacting children and their families. Throughout the book, beauty insists on its survival not only through the Palestinian people, but also through the nonhuman world in which he takes occasional refuge from the devastation that humanity brings upon itself.

By placing before readers a series of carefully chosen images from Gaza, Joudah presses his reader to comprehend that the experience of both the individual and the whole are integral to an explicitly Palestinian understanding of genocide, even if that rendering is a nearly impossible endeavor. Exhibit G insists on the immensity of Palestinian interiority, and finds in this collective act of creation a hyper-present awareness. “By claiming what is being actively erased,” Joudah writes, “I become presence.”

At once an indictment of genocide, a rendering of catastrophic loss, and “an affirmation of life instead of a staging of death” (Katherine Larson), Exhibit G insists that love exists in all its variousness, and that it is the only defense against a totalizing,
@milkweed_books by @tanyamckinnon

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Yes, it’s a surfing book, but it’s also so much more. The first book of indigenous Hawaiian surf history, culture and knowledge is available today!
A visually stunning and culturally rich exploration of surfing, the oldest sport in North America and an integral part of Hawaiian society that dates back more than 1,000 years.
Modern surfing culture has existed for only about 100 years. Even the word “surfing” was a Western invention created in the 1800s by early visitors to Hawaiʻi, who had no idea how to describe the sight of Hawaiians riding waves. Little did those Westerners know that Hawaiians already had a name for it: heʻe nalu, or wave-sliding. by @tanyamckinnon

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2 months ago

Thrilled to see the publication of this beautiful and complex portrait of Black fatherhood.
@bookerbbbrown
@simonandschuster by @tanyamckinnon

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2 months ago

#SaveASeatForMe
#NotesOnAmericanFatherhood
#Fatherhood
#Parenting
#BlackMen
#BlackBoys
#BlackMasculinity
#GirlDads by @tanyamckinnon

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3 months ago

Hope to see you there!
@damonyoungvsb
@pantheonbooks by @tanyamckinnon

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3 months ago

by @tanyamckinnon

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4 months ago

Today marks the return of Greg Tate’s classic Flyboy in the Buttermilk, newly reissued by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

One of the most original and influential cultural critics of his generation, Tate brought unmatched intelligence, style, and range to writing about Black music, art, politics, and American culture. In these essays, he moves effortlessly from hip-hop to Basquiat, from Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix to questions of race, power, identity, and the future of America.

This new edition features a foreword by Questlove and an introduction by Hanif Abdurraqib.

You can also read an excerpt in @michaelharriot’s ContrabandCamp Substack.

Most importantly, it’s time for a new generation of readers to become acquainted with this modern classic. Tate’s insights remain as urgent, provocative, and illuminating today as when they first appeared.
@fsgbooks by @tanyamckinnon

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4 months ago

The brilliant public scholar @profblmkelley shows us why Emancipation Day matters so deeply— and why this year, more than ever, it deserves to be celebrated.

This is the first fully illustrated history of Juneteenth and other Emancipation Day celebrations— told through photographs, art, and the kind of engrossing narrative only an award-winning historian can deliver.

For more than 150 years, Black communities have gathered to honor freedom, resilience, and the ongoing struggle for true liberation. This volume is a testament to every generation that demanded their contributions to the making of America be fully recognized.

Pick up a copy to celebrate with family and friends. 🙌🏾 by @tanyamckinnon

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4 months ago

Available now from @37inkbooks and you can listen to a fantastic interview on Fresh Air.

Part memoir by the daughter of the iconic comedian Richard Pryor, part exploration of the historical and contemporary use of the N-word, this hybrid book peels back the curtain on the life of Pryor and interrogates the most perplexing word in the American lexicon, a word he helped popularize.

The N-word is one of the most perplexing, controversial and misunderstood words in the American lexicon. It’s a word that Elizabeth Pryor has not only contemplated, it’s one that she has taught and observed up close.

When a white student quoted her father and blurted out the N-word in the middle of a class she was teaching, Professor Pryor’s worlds collided. In that moment, she was forced to confront the history of the notorious slur in the United States, and her complicated relationship with her father Richard Pryor, who made the word a trademark of his comedy in the 1970s.

As she dives into her research, her own memories of the N-word come flooding back in unprocessed memories that she hadn’t thought about for decades. In reckoning with those memories, Elizabeth goes on a more public journey of discovery of the messy and sometimes surprising legacies of racism in the United States.

A braided narrative that seamlessly integrates the history of the N-word with Elizabeth’s own story of growing up the Black Jewish daughter of Richard Pryor, Something We Said follows Elizabeth as she becomes a leading scholar and teacher of the very word her father put on the pop culture map. by @tanyamckinnon

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