A Wider Type of Freedom How Struggles for Racial Justice Liberate Everyone

"Vividly distills the long struggle to abolish racial subordination through stories of organizers, artists, and writers who carried wide-ranging visions of freedom and liberation. A timely book for those yearning to think beyond our current crises."––Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Cofounder and Director of the African American Policy Forum

" A Wider Type of Freedom is a big book built on the instructive and inspiring visionary efforts of real people, as beautifully crafted as the campaigns it describes. It sheds light on the difference between racial equity and full racial justice, reflecting thus the limits of liberal democracy while urging us to consider new ways of organizing our societies. A must read for all of us determined to make collective liberation real."––Rinku Sen, Co-President of the Women's March and author of Stir It Up: Lessons in Community Organizing and Advocacy

"This collection of stories is woven together into a call to action. Every chapter points to why we must listen to the past and prepare for our descendants a guide to the arduous task of transforming democracy now, every day, in all kinds of ways. A great contribution to our collective journey!"––Judith LeBlanc, a citizen of the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma and Director of the Native Organizers Alliance

"This is the only book that brings together myriad movements that emerged in different time periods, geographic regions, and within different communities. Daniel HoSang elucidates in new and surprising ways the manner in which these movements advanced bold freedom dreams that far exceeded the liberal invitations to assimilation, integration, and incorporation. There is something for every reader here."––Claire Jean Kim, author of Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age

"This thoughtful, accessible analysis of pressing issues speaks directly to COVID and the recent past, but it will be read with great profit decades from now. It compactly tells the stirring stories of a variety of social movements that are often intensely local and sometimes fully transnational but point to something bigger, no matter the scale."––David Roediger, author of How Race Survived U.S. History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Eclipse of Post-racialism


A sweeping history of transformative, radical, and abolitionist movements in the United States that places the struggle for racial justice at the center of universal liberation.

In Where Do We Go From Here? (1967), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., described racism as "a philosophy based on a contempt for life," a totalizing social theory that could only be confronted with an equally massive response, by "restructuring the whole of American society." A Wider Type of Freedom provides a survey of the truly transformative visions of racial justice in the United States, an often-hidden history that has produced conceptions of freedom and interdependence never envisioned in the nation's dominant political framework.

A Wider Type of Freedom brings together stories of the social movements, intellectuals, artists, and cultural formations that have centered racial justice and the abolition of white supremacy as the foundation for a universal liberation. Daniel Martinez HoSang taps into moments across time and place to reveal the longstanding drive toward a vision of universal emancipation. From the nineteenth century's abolition democracy and the struggle to end forced sterilizations, to the twentieth century's domestic worker organizing campaigns, to the twenty-first century's environmental justice movement, he reveals a bold, shared desire to realize the antithesis of "a philosophy based on a contempt for life," as articulated by Martin Luther King Jr. Rather than seeking "equal rights" within failed systems, these efforts generated new visions that embraced human difference, vulnerability, and interdependence as core productive facets of our collective experience.