In Open Contempt
Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space
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Narrated by:
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Irvin Weathersby Jr.
About this listen
“An awe-striking masterpiece of love.”—Jason Reynolds, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“The sentences alone in In Open Contempt make it one of the most memorable books of the decade. But it’s the unexpected lingering and genius crafting of consequential action that makes this one of the freshest explorations of space I’ve ever read. Irvin Weathersby Jr. has made something we’ve never before seen, felt, or witnessed.”—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir
A stirring journey into the soul of a fractured America that confronts the enduring specter of white supremacy in our art, monuments, and public spaces, from a captivating new literary voice.
Amid the ongoing reckoning over America’s history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly dot the country’s landscape, while schools and street signs continue to bear the names of segregationists. With poignant, lyrical prose, cultural commentator Irvin Weathersby confronts the inescapable specter of white supremacy in our open spaces and contemplates what it means to bear witness to sites of lasting racial trauma.
Weathersby takes us from the streets of his childhood in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward to the Whitney Plantation; from the graffitied pedestals of Confederate statues lining Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, to the location of a racist terror attack in Charlottesville; from the site of the Wounded Knee massacre in South Dakota to a Kara Walker art installation at a former sugar factory in Brooklyn, New York. Along the way, he challenges the creation myths embedded in America’s landmarks and meets artists, curators, and city planners doing the same. Urgent and unflinchingly intimate, In Open Contempt offers a hopeful reimagining of the spaces we share in order to honor our nation’s true history, encouraging us to make room for love as a way to heal and treat each other more humanely.
©2025 Irvin Weathersby, Jr. (P)2025 Penguin AudioCritic reviews
“In language gorgeous enough to be lyric, Irvin Weathersby Jr. helps us examine some of the stone grotesquerie erected and living among us—the remainders of before, the reminders of blood. And in doing so with such care, he’s granted us this work, a new monument to gaze at. One that should be raised and never razed. One that should be seen for what it is, an awe-striking masterpiece of love.”—Jason Reynolds, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“The sentences alone in In Open Contempt make it one of the most memorable books of the decade. But it’s the unexpected lingering and genius crafting of consequential action that makes this one of the freshest explorations of space I’ve ever read. Irvin Weathersby Jr. has made something we’ve never before seen, felt, or witnessed.”—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir
“When James Baldwin talked about being a witness, Irvin Weathersby’s In Open Contempt is what he meant. With accounts and observations equally enlightening, enraging, harrowing, and hopeful, Weathersby guides the reader through contemporary and historical spaces both public and private with an unflinching veracity. It is, in fact, when he illustrates how the borders between time and distance are artificial, and the ‘then’ and the ‘now’ are inexorably linked, that the narrative sings most sublimely. In Open Contempt is an intelligent implication and a courageous achievement.”—Robert Jones, Jr., New York Times bestselling author of The Prophets, a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction
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Story
In 1972, Martha "Marty" Goddard volunteered at a crisis hotline, counseling girls who had been molested by their fathers, their teachers, their uncles. Soon, Marty was on a mission to answer a question: Why were so many sexual predators getting away with these crimes? By the end of the decade, she had launched a campaign pushing hospitals and police departments to collect evidence of sexual assault and treat survivors with dignity. She designed a new kind of forensics tool—the rape kit—and new practices around evidence collection that spread across the country.
By: Pagan Kennedy
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How to Feed the World
- The History and Future of Food
- By: Vaclav Smil
- Narrated by: Joe Jameson
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
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We have never had to feed as many people as we do today. And yet, we misunderstand the essentials of where our food really comes from, how our dietary requirements shape us, and why this impacts our planet in drastic ways. As a result, in our economic, political, and everyday choices, we take for granted and fail to prioritize the thing that makes all our lives possible: food. In this ambitious, myth-busting book, Vaclav Smil investigates many of the burning questions facing the world today.
By: Vaclav Smil
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Dark Laboratory
- On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis
- By: Tao Leigh Goffe
- Narrated by: Tao Leigh Goffe
- Length: 12 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But behind the myth of paradise, the Caribbean and its people would come to pay the price of relentless Western exploitation and abuse. In Dark Laboratory, Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe embarks on a historical journey to chart the forces that have shaped these islands: the legacy of slavery, indentured labor, and the forced toil of Chinese and enslaved Black people who mined the islands’ bounty for the benefit of European powers.
By: Tao Leigh Goffe