The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America - Paperback

by Barrett Holmes Pitner (Author)

In this incisive blend of personal narrative and philosophical inquiry, journalist and activist Barrett Holmes Pitner seeks a new way to talk about racism in America

An NPR Best Book of the Year
Can new language reshape our understanding of the past and expand the possibilities of the future? The Crime Without a Name follows Pitner's journey to identify and remedy the linguistic void in how we discuss race and culture in the United States. Ethnocide, first coined in 1944 by Jewish exile Raphael Lemkin (who also coined the term "genocide"), describes the systemic erasure of a people's ancestral culture. For Black Americans, who have endured this atrocity for generations, this erasure dates back to the transatlantic slave trade and reached new resonance in a post-Trump world.

Author Biography

Barrett Holmes Pitner is a columnist, journalist, and philosopher whose work has been published in The Daily Beast, BBC, The Guardian, and elsewhere. He is the founder of The Sustainable Culture Lab, a cultural think tank with the goals of influencing policy by working with legislators and decision makers, and impacting culture at a grassroots level through events, work, and cultural offerings. He lives in Washington, D.C.