Mab Segrest is professor emeritus of gender and women’s studies at Connecticut College and the author of Administrations of Lunacy and Memoir of a Race Traitor. She is a longtime activist in social justice movements and a past fellow at the National Humanities Center.
Back in print after more than a decade and including a new introduction and afterword by the author, Memoir of a Race Traitor (The New Press ) chronicles de life of Mabelle (“Mab”) Massey Segrest at the forefront of antiracist activism. Against a backdrop of nine generations of her family’s history, Segrest explores 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, she describes her journey into the heart of her culture, finally veering from its trajectory of violence toward hope and renewal. Amid our current national crisis driven by a white supremacist movement, Segrest returns with an updated edition. Her new introduction and afterword explores what has transpired with the far right since the book’s publication in 1995 and to what can and must be done in the age of Trump. A starred review in Kirkus Reviews noted that, “In the shadow of increasing worldwide white nationalism and hyperpredatory capitalism, Segrest’s reflections are exceptionally chilling, fresh, and urgent. A passionate, lucid, and necessary memoir, then and now.”