MEMOIR OF A RACE TRAITOR:
Fighting Racism in the American South

“Mab Segrest’s book is extraordinary. It is a ‘political memoir’ but its language is poetic and its tone passionate. I started it with caution and finished it with awe and pleasure,” Howard Zinn wrote of Memoir of a Race Traitor, the 1994 book in which Segrest documented and pondered her work with others in the 1980s taking on Klan and neo-Nazi movements in North Carolina. Back in print after more than two decades, Race Traitor provides a singular chronicle of life at the forefront of antiracist activism, with a new introduction and afterword by the author.

In 1994, Mab Segrest first explained how she “had become a woman haunted by the dead.” Against a backdrop of nine generations of her family’s history, Segrest explored her experiences in the 1980s as a white lesbian organizing against a virulent far-right movement in North Carolina. Juxtaposing childhood memories with contemporary events, Segrest described her journey into the heart of her culture, finally veering from its trajectory of violence toward hope and renewal. The book also contains a pivotal essay, “On Being White and Other Lies: A Short History of Racism in the United States.” She uses her family’s genealogy (a record with which she could belong to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the Colonial Dames) to trace the evolution of racist and anti-racist movements from 1611 to the end of the 20^th century.

Memoir of a Race Traitor became a classic text of white antiracist practice. bell hooks called it a “courageous and daring [example of] the reality that political solidarity, forged in struggle, can exist across differences.” It was the Editor’s Choice for the Lambda Literary Awards, was named Outstanding Book on Human Rights in North America by the Gustavus Myers Center on Human Rights, and was nominee for Non-Fiction Book of the Year by the Southern Regional Council.

Praised as a “true delight” and a “must-read” by the Minnesota Review when it was first published, a quarter of a century later Memoir of a Race Traitor is still an inspiring and politically potent book. Kirkus Reviews called the new edition exceptionally chilling, fresh and urgent” and “a passionate, lucid and necessary memoir.” With brand-new power and relevance in 2020, this is still a book that far transcends its genre, especially now amid our current national crisis driven by an increasingly apocalyptic white supremacist movement. With a new introduction and afterword that explores what has transpired with the far right since its publication, the book brings us into the age of Trump—and to what we can and must do about it.