Some resources for anti-racism and social justice work at the U.
Anti-racism is a priority for the U of M Libraries
Dean of the Libraries, Lisa German, said, "Antiracism is a journey, as Ibram X. Kendi tells us in How to Be an Antiracist, and we commit to identifying and addressing the ways white supremacy manifests itself throughout all aspects of librarianship. We must be accountable for this work. Our U Office for Equity and Diversity says: We all share responsibility for equity and diversity — it’s everybody’s everyday work. We are committed to making this a priority for the University of Minnesota Libraries."
Read more from Anti-Racism is a priority for the U of M Libraries
Racial Equity Fund - Sample of new items
Discover sample of purchases made with the Racial Equity Fund. Find recently purchased print and electronic books, videos, databases and more!
Learn more: https://youtu.be/hIuUkK6KRzY
Mapping Prejudice Project
"This research is showing what communities of color have known for decades. Structural barriers stopped many people who were not white from buying property and building wealth for most of the last century.
In Minneapolis, these restrictions served as powerful obstacles for people of color seeking safe and affordable housing. They also limited access to community resources like parks and schools. Racial covenants dovetailed with redlining and predatory lending practices to depress homeownership rates for African Americans. Contemporary white residents of Minneapolis like to think their city never had formal segregation. But racial covenants did the work of Jim Crow in northern cities like Minneapolis.
This history has been willfully forgotten. So we created Mapping Prejudice to shed new light on these historic practices. We cannot address the inequities of the present without an understanding of the past."
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Mapping PrejudiceVisualizing the hidden histories of race and privilege in Minneapolis. This map shows how racial restrictions were embedded in the physical landscape of our community. Using racial covenants in Hennepin County property deeds, this site illuminates how much land was reserved for the exclusive use of white people for most of the twentieth century.
Find U of M experts who work on topics related to racism and racial discrimination
Experts @ Minnesota contains public profiles of University faculty and staff and public pages for departments, colleges, campuses, and centers. You can search and connect with faculty and staff working on topics of interest.
Find U of M experts who work on topics related to racism and racial discrimination
Umbra Search African American History
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Umbra Search African American HistoryA freely available search tool and widget that brings together over 400,000 digitized materials documenting African American culture and history from over 1,000 libraries, archives, and cultural heritage institutions.
Streaming documentaries and videos
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Kanopy StreamingVideo streaming platform hosting a wide variety of award-winning films and documentaries.
Includes documentary titles such as:
- PUSHOUT: The Criminalization Of Black Girls In Schools - Takes a deep dive into the lives of Black girls and the practices, cultural beliefs and policies that disrupt one of the most important factors in their lives - education.
- Slaying the Dragon - Media Stereotypes of Asian & Asian American Women
- I Am Not Your Negro - An Oscar-nominated documentary narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, it explores the continued peril America faces from institutionalized racism.
- Exterminate All the Brutes - An eye-opening journey through time, offering an incisive look at the history of European colonialism in Africa and the Americas.
- The Mask You Live In - Follows boys and young men as they struggle to stay true to themselves while negotiating America's narrow definition of masculinity.
- Whose Streets? - Told by the activists and leaders who live and breathe this movement for justice, it is an unflinching look at the Ferguson uprising.
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PBS Video Collection This link opens in a new windowPBS Video Collection: Fourth Edition provides access to more than 1,200 streaming videos, including the most valuable video documentaries and series from PBS on many topics, including art, science, history, business, and more.
Selection of recommended readings
Below are a selection of online books and readings on the broad topic of anti-racism. We have more online books, journal articles, and sources in our Libraries Search and article databases.
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How to be an antiracist
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ISBN: 9780525509295Publication Date: 2019"The only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it -- and then dismantle it." Ibram X. Kendi's concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America -- but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it. In this book, Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science, bringing it all together with an engaging personal narrative of his own awakening to antiracism. How to Be an Antiracist is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond an awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a truly just and equitable society." -
How to Raise an Antiracist
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ISBN: 9780593242544Publication Date: 2022-06-14The book that every parent, caregiver, and teacher needs to raise the next generation of antiracist thinkers, from the author of How to Be an Antiracist and recipient of the MacArthur "Genius" Grant. "Kendi's latest . . . combines his personal experience as a parent with his scholarly expertise in showing how racism affects every step of a child's life. . . . Like all his books, this one is accessible to everyone regardless of race or class."--Los Angeles Times. The tragedies and reckonings around racism that are rocking the country have created a specific crisis for parents, educators, and other caregivers: How do we talk to our children about racism? How do we teach children to be antiracist? How are kids at different ages experiencing race? How are racist structures impacting children? How can we inspire our children to avoid our mistakes, to be better, to make the world better? -
White fragility : why it's so hard for White people to talk about racism
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ISBN: 9780807047422Publication Date: 2018"In this groundbreaking and timely book, antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility. Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo explores how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively." -
A good time for the truth: Race in Minnesota
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ISBN: 9781681340036Publication Date: 2016In this provocative book, sixteen of Minnesota’s best writers provide a range of perspectives on what it is like to live as a person of color in one of the whitest states in the nation. They give readers a splendid gift: the gift of touching another human being’s inner reality, behind masks and veils and politeness. They bring us generously into experiences that we must understand if we are to come together in real relationships. Minnesota communities struggle with some of the nation’s worst racial disparities. As its authors confront and consider the realities that lie beneath the numbers, this book provides an important tool to those who want to be part of closing those gaps. With contributions by: Taiyon J. Coleman Heid E. Erdrich Venessa Fuentes Shannon Gibney David Grant Carolyn Holbrook IBé Andrea Jenkins Robert Karimi JaeRan Kim Sherry Quan Lee David Mura Bao Phi Rodrigo Sanchez-Chavarria Diane Wilson Kao Kalia Yang -
So You Want to Talk about Race
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ISBN: 9781580056779Publication Date: 2018-01-16In this New York Times bestseller, Ijeoma Oluo offers a hard-hitting but user-friendly examination of race in America Widespread reporting on aspects of white supremacy--from police brutality to the mass incarceration of Black Americans--has put a media spotlight on racism in our society. Still, it is a difficult subject to talk about. How do you tell your roommate her jokes are racist? Why did your sister-in-law take umbrage when you asked to touch her hair--and how do you make it right? How do you explain white privilege to your white, privileged friend? In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo guides readers of all races through subjects ranging from intersectionality and affirmative action to "model minorities" in an attempt to make the seemingly impossible possible: honest conversations about race and racism, and how they infect almost every aspect of American life. "Oluo gives us--both white people and people of color--that language to engage in clear, constructive, and confident dialogue with each other about how to deal with racial prejudices and biases." --National Book Review "Generous and empathetic, yet usefully blunt . . . it's for anyone who wants to be smarter and more empathetic about matters of race and engage in more productive anti-racist action." --Salon (Required Reading) -
The Antiracism Handbook : practical tools to shift your mindset & uproot racism in your life & community
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ISBN: 9781684039111Publication Date: 2022-04-01An antiracist society starts with you. Gain the psychological skills you need to adopt an antiracist mindset and make meaningful and equitable changes in your community--and in the world. Racism has reached epidemic levels in our country, and every single day we see acts of racial injustice. From police brutality and the prison industrial complex, to crumbling infrastructure and toxic drinking water in predominantly Black neighborhoods--many people have finally opened their eyes to the harsh realities of inequality and systemic racism in America. But awareness isn't enough. We need to take action to create real change. Written by two psychologists and experts in race, identity, equity, and inclusion, The Antiracism Handbook will empower you to make your own personal contribution to creating an antiracist society. You'll find practical, evidence-based tools grounded in psychology to help you recognize and resist racial stereotypes in day-to-day interactions; and strategies to help you communicate with family, loved ones, and children about race and racism. -
Between the World and Me
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ISBN: 9780679645986Publication Date: 2015The library's license allows one user at a time. If it's unavailable, try again later. You may want to download the content you need and then close your browser so another student can use it.
In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race," a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men--bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates's attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son--and readers--the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children's lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward. -
Racism, not race : answers to frequently asked questions
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ISBN: 9780231553735Publication Date: 2022We talk a lot about race, yet we rarely focus on the underlying question of what race is and its connections to racism. Conversations about race can be uncomfortable and confusing, but this is resolvable if we ask the right questions and focus on clear answers. What, exactly, is race? Joseph L. Graves and Alan H. Goodman illuminate the idea of race so that people who want to confront the topic of racial injustice can do so with the necessary conceptual tools. Most people think race is real, they argue, and it is. But race is not real in the way that most of us have grown up to think of it. Race is not natural, fixed, or based on biology. Instead, they continue, racism created the idea of race, the idea of race has real effects, and while human genetic variation is biologically real, it is not race. The book is based on evidence from biological and social science. It is composed of twelve question-begging chapters, which engage topics such as the origins of race, race and genetics, the forms of racism, race and health, race and ability, institutional racism, DNA and ancestry testing, "race mixing," race and politics, and what it means to be an antiracist. -
Stamped from the Beginning
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ISBN: 9781568584645Publication Date: 2016-04-12In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. He uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to drive this history: Puritan minister Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and legendary activist Angela Davis. As Kendi shows, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. They were created to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation's racial inequities. -
Systemic racism in the United States : scaffolding as social construction
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ISBN: 9783319722337Publication Date: 2018This important volume provides a powerful overview of racism in the United States: what it is, how it works, and the social, cultural, and institutional structures that have evolved to keep it in place. It dissects the rise of legalized discrimination against four major racial groups (First Nations, Africans, Mexicans, and Chinese) and its perpetuation as it affects these groups and new immigrants today. The book's scaffolding framework--which takes in institutions from the government to our educational systems--explains why racism remains in place despite waves of social change. At the same time, contributors describe social justice responses being used to erode racism in its most familiar forms, and at its roots. -
Dying of Whiteness: how the politics of racial resentment is killing America's heartland
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ISBN: 9781541644960Publication Date: 2019-03-05A physician reveals how right-wing backlash policies have mortal consequences -- even for the white voters they promise to help Named one of the most anticipated books of 2019 by Esquire and the Boston Globe In the era of Donald Trump, many lower- and middle-class white Americans are drawn to politicians who pledge to make their lives great again. But as Dying of Whiteness shows, the policies that result actually place white Americans at ever-greater risk of sickness and death. Physician Jonathan M. Metzl's quest to understand the health implications of "backlash governance" leads him across America's heartland. Interviewing a range of everyday Americans, he examines how racial resentment has fueled progun laws in Missouri, resistance to the Affordable Care Act in Tennessee, and cuts to schools and social services in Kansas. And he shows these policies' costs: increasing deaths by gun suicide, falling life expectancies, and rising dropout rates. White Americans, Metzl argues, must reject the racial hierarchies that promise to aid them but in fact lead our nation to demise. -
Whiteness in America
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ISBN: 9780745672182Publication Date: 2020-08-17When Americans think about race, "white" is often the furthest thing from their minds. Yet whiteness colors so much of social life in the United States, from the organization and maintenance of social structures to an individual's sense of self. White has long been the invisible default category against which other racial and ethnic groups are silently compared and marked out as "different." At the same time, whiteness is itself an active marker that many bitterly fight to keep distinctive, and the shifting boundaries of whiteness reflect the nation's history of race relations, right back to the earliest period of European colonization. One thing that has remained consistent is that whiteness is a definitive mark of privilege. Yet, this privilege is differentially experienced across a broad and eclectic spectrum, as is white identity itself. In order to uncover the ways in which its rigid structures and complicated understandings permeate American life, this book examines some of the many varieties of what it means to be white - across geography, class, and social context - and the culture, social movements, and changing demographics of whiteness in America. -
Color struck : how race and complexion matter in the "color-blind" era
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ISBN: 9789463511100Publication Date: 2017Skin color and skin tone has historically played a significant role in determining the life chances of African Americans and other people of color. It has also been important to our understanding of race and the processes of racialization. But what does the relationship between skin tone and stratification outcomes mean? Is skin tone correlated with stratification outcomes because people with darker complexions experience more discrimination than those of the same race with lighter complexions? Is skin tone differentiation a process that operates external to communities of color and is then imposed on people of color? Or, is skin tone discrimination an internally driven process that is actively aided and abetted by members of communities of color themselves? Color Struck provides answers to these questions. In addition, it addresses issues such as the relationship between skin tone and wealth inequality, anti-black sentiment and whiteness, Twitter culture, marriage outcomes and attitudes, gender, racial identity, civic engagement and politics at predominately White Institutions. -
His name is George Floyd : one man's life and the struggle for racial justice
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ISBN: 9780593490624Publication Date: 2022"A landmark biography by two prizewinning Washington Post reporters that reveals how systemic racism shaped George Floyd's life and legacy-from his family's roots in the tobacco fields of North Carolina, to ongoing inequality in housing, education, health care, criminal justice, and policing-telling the singular story of how one man's tragic experience brought about a global movement for change. The events of that day are now tragically familiar: on May 25, 2020, George Floyd became the latest Black person to die at the hands of the police, murdered outside of a Minneapolis convenience store by white officer Derek Chauvin. The video recording of his death set off a series of protests in the United States and around the world, awakening millions to the dire need for reimagining this country's broken systems of policing. But behind a face that would be graffitied onto countless murals, and a name that has become synonymous with civil rights, there is the reality of one man's stolen life: a life beset by suffocating systemic pressures that ultimately proved inescapable. This biography of George Floyd shows the athletic young boy raised in the projects of Houston's Third Ward who would become a father, a partner, a friend, and a man constantly in search of a better life. -
Apocalypse of settler colonialism : the roots of slavery, white supremacy, and capitalism in 17th century North America and the Caribbean byISBN: 9781583676660Publication Date: 2017Virtually no part of the modern United States - the economy, education, constitutional law, religious institutions, sports, literature, economics, even protest movements - can be understood without first understanding the slavery and dispossession that laid its foundation. To that end, historian Gerald Horne digs deeply into Europe's colonization of Africa and the New World, when, from Columbus's arrival until the Civil War, some 13 million Africans and some 5 million Native Americans were forced to build and cultivate a society extolling liberty and justice for all.
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White Balance: How Hollywood Shaped Colorblind Ideology and Undermined Civil Rights
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ISBN: 9781469655796Publication Date: 2020-06-29The racial ideology of colorblindness has a long history. In 1963, Martin Luther King famously stated, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." However, in the decades after the civil rights movement, the ideology of colorblindness co-opted the language of the civil rights era in order to reinvent white supremacy, fuel the rise of neoliberalism, and dismantle the civil rights movement's legal victories without offending political decorum. Yet, the spread of colorblindness could not merely happen through political speeches, newspapers, or books. The key, Justin Gomer contends, was film--as race-conscious language was expelled from public discourse, Hollywood provided the visual medium necessary to dramatize an anti-civil rights agenda over the course of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. In blockbusters like Dirty Harry, Rocky, and Dangerous Minds, filmmakers capitalized upon the volatile racial, social, and economic struggles in the decades after the civil rights movement, shoring up a powerful, bipartisan ideology that would be wielded against race-conscious policy, the memory of black freedom struggles, and core aspects of the liberal state itself. -
We Are Meant to Rise : voices for justice from Minneapolis to the world
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ISBN: 9781452966472Publication Date: 2021-11-23A brilliant and rich gathering of voices on the American experience of this past year and beyond, from Indigenous writers and writers of color from Minnesota. In this significant collection, Indigenous writers and writers of color bear witness to one of the most unsettling years in the history of the United States. Essays and poems vividly reflect and comment on the traumas we endured in 2020, beginning with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, deepened by the blatant murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers and the uprisings that immersed our city into the epicenter of passionate, worldwide demands for justice. In inspired and incisive writing these contributors speak unvarnished truths not only to the original and pernicious racism threaded through the American experience but also to the deeply personal, in essays about family, loss, food culture, economic security, and mental health. Their call and response is united here to rise and be heard. We Are Meant to Rise lifts up the astonishing variety of BIPOC writers in Minnesota. From authors with international reputations to newly emerging voices, it features people from many cultures, including Indigenous Dakota and Anishinaabe, African American, Hmong, Somali, Afghani, Lebanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, Puerto Rican, Colombian, Mexican, transracial adoptees, mixed race, and LGBTQ+ perspectives. Most of the contributors have participated in More Than a Single Story, a popular and insightful conversation series in Minneapolis that features Indigenous and people of color speaking on what most concerns their communities. We Are Meant to Rise meets the events of the day, the year, the centuries before, again and again, with powerful testament to the intrinsic and unique value of the human voice. -
Speaking of Race : how to have antiracist conversations that bring us together
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ISBN: 9781615197330Publication Date: 2021-01-12It's easy to say that racism is wrong. But it's surprisingly hard to agree on what it is. Does a tired stereotype in your favorite movie make it racist? Does watching it anyway mean you're racist? Even among like-minded friends, such discussions can quickly escalate to hurt feelings all around--and when they do, we lose valuable opportunities to fight racism. Patricia Roberts-Miller is a scholar of rhetoric--the art of understanding misunderstandings. In Speaking of Race, she explains why the subject is a "third rail" and how we can do better: We can acknowledge that, in a racist society, racism is not the sole provenance of "bad people." We can focus on the harm it causes rather than the intent of offenders. And, when someone illuminates our own racist blind spots, we can take it not as a criticism, but as a kindness--and an opportunity to learn and to become less racist ourselves. -
Me and white supremacy : combat racism, change the world, and become a good ancestor byISBN: 9781728209821Publication Date: 2020Updated and expanded from the original workbook (downloaded by nearly 100,000 people), this critical text helps you take the work deeper by adding more historical and cultural contexts, sharing moving stories and anecdotes, and including expanded definitions, examples, and further resources, giving you the language to understand racism, and to dismantle your own biases, whether you are using the book on your own, with a book club, or looking to start family activism in your own home. This book will walk you step-by-step through the work of examining: Examining your own white privilege, What allyship really means, Anti-blackness, racial stereotypes, and cultural appropriation, Changing the way that you view and respond to race, and how to continue the work to create social change.
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How We Get Free: Black feminism and the Combahee River Collective
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ISBN: 9781608468683Publication Date: 2017-11-20The Combahee River Collective, a group of radical black feminists, was one of the most important organizations to develop out of the anti-racist and women's liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. In this collection, founding members of the organization and contemporary activists reflect on the legacy of its contributions to black feminism and its impact on today's struggles. -
Intersectionality As Critical Social Theory
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ISBN: 9781478007098Publication Date: 2019-08-23In Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory Patricia Hill Collins offers a set of analytical tools for those wishing to develop intersectionality's capability to theorize social inequality in ways that would facilitate social change. While intersectionality helps shed light on contemporary social issues, Collins notes that it has yet to reach its full potential as a critical social theory. She contends that for intersectionality to fully realize its power, its practitioners must critically reflect on its assumptions, epistemologies, and methods. She places intersectionality in dialog with several theoretical traditions--from the Frankfurt school to black feminist thought--to sharpen its definition and foreground its singular critical purchase, thereby providing a capacious interrogation into intersectionality's potential to reshape the world. -
Witnessing whiteness : the journey into racial awareness and antiracist action
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ISBN: 9781475863130Publication Date: 2022 (3rd edition)This new edition explains why developing an anti-racist white identity is an important part of cultivating an effective antiracist practice and is a necessary part of subverting the weaponizing of white identity cultivated by the far right -
Racial reconciliation and the healing of a nation : beyond law and rights byISBN: 9781479828210Publication Date: 2017The work at hand for bridging the racial divide in the United States From Baltimore and Ferguson to Flint and Charleston, the dream of a post-racial era in America has run up against the continuing reality of racial antagonism. Current debates about affirmative action, multiculturalism, and racial hate speech reveal persistent uncertainty and ambivalence about the place and meaning of race - and especially the black/white divide - in American culture. They also suggest that the work of racial reconciliation remains incomplete. Racial Reconciliation and the Healing of a Nation seeks to assess where we are in that work, examining sources of continuing racial antagonism among blacks and whites. It also highlights strategies that promise to promote racial reconciliation in the future. Rather than revisit arguments about the importance of integration, assimilation, and reparations, the contributors explore previously unconsidered perspectives on reconciliation between blacks and whites. Chapters connect identity politics, the rhetoric of race and difference, the work of institutions and actors in those institutions, and structural inequities in the lives of blacks and whites to our thinking about tolerance and respect. Going beyond an assessment of the capacity of law to facilitate racial reconciliation, Racial Reconciliation and the Healing of a Nation challenges readers to examine social, political, cultural, and psychological issues that fuel racial antagonism, as well as the factors that might facilitate racial reconciliation.
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My Grandmother's Hands
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ISBN: 9781942094487Publication Date: 2017-08-21The body is where our instincts reside and where we fight, flee, or freeze. My Grandmother’s Hands is a call to action for Americans to recognize that racism is not about the head, but about the body. Author Resmaa Menakem introduces an alternative view of what we can do to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide. -
The New Jim Crow: : mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness
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ISBN: 9781595588197Publication Date: 2012-01-16Once in a great while a book comes along that changes the way we see the world and helps to fuel a nationwide social movement. The New Jim Crow is such a book. Praised by Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier as "brave and bold," this book directly challenges the notion that the election of Barack Obama signals a new era of colorblindness. With dazzling candor, legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control—relegating millions to a permanent second-class status—even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness. In the words of Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, this book is a "call to action." Called "stunning" by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Levering Lewis, "invaluable" by the Daily Kos, "explosive" by Kirkus, and "profoundly necessary" by the Miami Herald, this updated and revised paperback edition of The New Jim Crow, now with a foreword by Cornel West, is a must-read for all people of conscience. -
White Rage: the unspoken truth of our racial divide
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ISBN: 9781632864147Publication Date: 2016-05-31From the Civil War to our combustible present, acclaimed historian Carol Anderson reframes our continuing conversation about race, chronicling the powerful forces opposed to black progress in America.As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as "black rage," historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable op-ed in The Washington Post suggesting that this was, instead, "white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames," she argued, "everyone had ignored the kindling." Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow; the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House, and then the election of America's first black President, led to the expression of white rage that has been as relentless as it has been brutal. Carefully linking these and other historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition, Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage. Compelling and dramatic in the unimpeachable history it relates, White Rage will add an important new dimension to the national conversation about race in America. -
The Mismeasure of Minds: Debating Race and Intelligence between Brown and The Bell Curve
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ISBN: 9781469643595Publication Date: 2018-11-19The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision required desegregation of America's schools, but it also set in motion an agonizing multidecade debate over race, class, and IQ. In this innovative book, Michael E. Staub investigates neuropsychological studies published between Brown and the controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve. In doing so, he illuminates how we came to view race and intelligence today. In tracing how research and experiments around such concepts as learned helplessness, deferred gratification, hyperactivity, and emotional intelligence migrated into popular culture and government policy, Staub reveals long-standing and widespread dissatisfaction--not least among middle-class whites--with the metric of IQ. He also documents the devastating consequences--above all for disadvantaged children of color--as efforts to undo discrimination and create enriched learning environments were recurrently repudiated and defunded. By connecting psychology, race, and public policy in a single narrative, Staub charts the paradoxes that have emerged and that continue to structure investigations of racism even into the era of contemporary neuroscientific research. -
The denial of antiblackness : multiracial redemption and Black suffering byISBN: 978151790092Publication Date: 2018"João H. Costa Vargas examines how antiblackness affects society as a whole through analyses of recent protests against police killings of black individuals in both the United States and Brazil, as well as the everyday dynamics of incarceration, residential segregation, and poverty. With multisite ethnography ranging from a juvenile prison in Austin, Texas, to grassroots organizing in Los Angeles to Black social movements in Brazil, Vargas finds the common factors that have perpetuated antiblackness, regardless of context. Ultimately, he asks why the denial of antiblackness persists, whom this narrative serves, and what political realities in makes possible."
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It Was Always a Choice : picking up the baton of athlete activism
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ISBN: 9781439921753Publication Date: 2022-07-08The recent flashpoint of Colin Kaepernick taking a knee renews a long tradition of athlete-activists speaking out against racism, injustice, and oppression. Like Kaepernick, Jackie Robinson, Paul Robeson, Muhammad Ali, Bill Russell, Tommie Smith, and John Carlos--among many others, of all races, male and female, pro and amateur--all made the choice to take a side to command public awareness and attention rather than "shut up and play," as O. J. Simpson, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods did. Using their celebrity to demand change, these activists inspired fans but faced great personal and professional risks in doing so. It Was Always a Choice traces the history and impact of these decisive moments throughout the history of U.S. sports. -
An African American and Latinx history of the United States
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ISBN: 9780807013908Publication Date: 2018An intersectional history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil rights Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history arguing that the "Global South" was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress, as exalted by widely taught formulations such as "manifest destiny" and "Jacksonian democracy," and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms American history into the story of the working class organizing against imperialism. In precise detail, Ortiz traces this untold history from the Jim Crow-esque racial segregation of the Southwest, the rise and violent fall of a powerful tradition of Mexican labor organizing in the twentieth century, to May 1, 2006, International Workers' Day, when migrant laborers-Chicana/os, Afro-Cubanos, and immigrants from nearly every continent on earth-united in resistance on the first "Day Without Immigrants." -
Black Marxism
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ISBN: 9780807876121Publication Date: 2005-10-12In this ambitious work, first published in 1983, Cedric Robinson demonstrates that efforts to understand black people's history of resistance solely through the prism of Marxist theory are incomplete and inaccurate. Marxist analyses tend to presuppose European models of history and experience that downplay the significance of black people and black communities as agents of change and resistance. Black radicalism must be linked to the traditions of Africa and the unique experiences of blacks on western continents, Robinson argues, and any analyses of African American history need to acknowledge this. To illustrate his argument, Robinson traces the emergence of Marxist ideology in Europe, the resistance by blacks in historically oppressive environments, and the influence of both of these traditions on such important twentieth-century black radical thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright. -
Arrested Justice : black women, violence, and America's prison nation
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ISBN: 9780814776223Publication Date: 2012-05-22Black women in marginalized communities are uniquely at risk of battering, rape, sexual harassment, stalking and incest. Through the compelling stories of Black women who have been most affected by racism, persistent poverty, class inequality, limited access to support resources or institutions, Beth E. Richie shows that the threat of violence to Black women has never been more serious, demonstrating how conservative legal, social, political and economic policies have impacted activism in the U.S.-based movement to end violence against women. Richie argues that Black women face particular peril because of the ways that race and culture have not figured centrally enough in the analysis of the causes and consequences of gender violence. As a result, the extent of physical, sexual and other forms of violence in the lives of Black women, the various forms it takes, and the contexts within which it occurs are minimized--at best--and frequently ignored. Arrested Justice brings issues of sexuality, class, age, and criminalization into focus right alongside of questions of public policy and gender violence, resulting in a compelling critique, a passionate re-framing of stories, and a call to action for change. Black women in marginalized communities are uniquely at risk of battering, rape, sexual harassment, stalking and incest. Through the compelling stories of Black women who have been most affected by racism, persistent poverty, class inequality, limited access to support resources or institutions, Beth E. Richie shows that the threat of violence to Black women has never been more serious, demonstrating how conservative legal, social, political and economic policies have impacted activism in the U.S.-based movement to end violence against women. Richie argues that Black women face particular peril because of the ways that race and culture have not figured centrally enough in the analysis of the causes and consequences of gender violence. As a result, the extent of physical, sexual and other forms of violence in the lives of Black women, the various forms it takes, and the contexts within which it occurs are minimized--at best--and frequently ignored. Arrested Justice brings issues of sexuality, class, age, and criminalization into focus right alongside of questions of public policy and gender violence, resulting in a compelling critique, a passionate re-framing of stories, and a call to action for change. -
Fatal Invention: : how science, politics, and big business re-create race in the twenty-first century
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ISBN: 9781595586919Publication Date: 2011-06-14An incisive, groundbreaking book that examines how a biological concept of race is a myth that promotes inequality in a supposedly "post-racial" era. Though the Human Genome Project proved that human beings are not naturally divided by race, the emerging fields of personalized medicine, reproductive technologies, genetic genealogy, and DNA databanks are attempting to resuscitate race as a biological category written in our genes. This groundbreaking book by legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts examines how the myth of race as a biological concept--revived by purportedly cutting-edge science, race-specific drugs, genetic testing, and DNA databases--continues to undermine a just society and promote inequality in a supposedly "post-racial" era. Named one of the ten best black nonfiction books 2011 by AFRO.com, Fatal Invention offers a timely and "provocative analysis" (Nature) of race, science, and politics that "is consistently lucid . . . alarming but not alarmist, controversial but evidential, impassioned but rational" (Publishers Weekly, starred review). "Everyone concerned about social justice in America should read this powerful book." --Anthony D. Romero, executive director, American Civil Liberties Union "A terribly important book on how the 'fatal invention' has terrifying effects in the post-genomic, 'post-racial' era." --Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, professor of sociology, Duke University, and author of Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States "Fatal Invention is a triumph! Race has always been an ill-defined amalgam of medical and cultural bias, thinly overlaid with the trappings of contemporary scientific thought. And no one has peeled back the layers of assumption and deception as lucidly as Dorothy Roberts." --Harriet A. Washington, author of and Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself -
Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity
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ISBN: 9780472111039Publication Date: 2000-06-12Statistics show that black males are disproportionately getting in trouble and being suspended from the nation's school systems. Based on three years of participant observation research at an elementary school, Bad Boys offers a richly textured account of daily interactions between teachers and students to understand this serious problem. Ann Arnett Ferguson demonstrates how a group of eleven- and twelve-year-old males are identified by school personnel as "bound for jail" and how the youth construct a sense of self under such adverse circumstances. The author focuses on the perspective and voices of pre-adolescent African American boys. How does it feel to be labeled "unsalvageable" by your teacher? How does one endure school when the educators predict one's future as "a jail cell with your name on it?" Through interviews and participation with these youth in classrooms, playgrounds, movie theaters, and video arcades, the author explores what "getting into trouble" means for the boys themselves. She argues that rather than simply internalizing these labels, the boys look critically at schooling as they dispute and evaluate the meaning and motivation behind the labels that have been attached to them. Supplementing the perspectives of the boys with interviews with teachers, principals, truant officers, and relatives of the students, the author constructs a disturbing picture of how educators' beliefs in a "natural difference" of black children and the "criminal inclination" of black males shapes decisions that disproportionately single out black males as being "at risk" for failure and punishment. Bad Boys is a powerful challenge to prevailing views on the problem of black males in our schools today. It will be of interest to educators, parents, and youth, and to all professionals and students in the fields of African-American studies, childhood studies, gender studies, juvenile studies, social work, and sociology, as well as anyone who is concerned about the way our schools are shaping the next generation of African American boys. Ann Arnett Ferguson is Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies and Women's Studies, Smith College. -
Chokehold : Policing Black Men
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ISBN: 9781620974988Publication Date: 2018With the eloquence of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the persuasive research of Michelle Alexander, a former federal prosecutor explains how the system really works, and how to disrupt it Cops, politicians, and ordinary people are afraid of black men. The result is the Chokehold: laws and practices that treat every African American man like a thug. In this explosive new book, an African American former federal prosecutor shows that the system is working exactly the way it's supposed to. Black men are always under watch, and police violence is widespread'all with the support of judges and politicians. In his no-holds-barred style, Butler, whose scholarship has been featured on 60 Minutes, uses new data to demonstrate that white men commit the majority of violent crime in the United States. For example, a white woman is ten times more likely to be raped by a white male acquaintance than be the victim of a violent crime perpetrated by a black man. Butler also frankly discusses the problem of black on black violence and how to keep communities safer'without relying as much on police. Chokehold powerfully demonstrates why current efforts to reform law enforcement will not create lasting change. Butler's controversial recommendations about how to crash the system, and when it's better for a black man to plead guilty'even if he's innocent'are sure to be game-changers in the national debate about policing, criminal justice, and race relations. -
The end of policing
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ISBN: 9781784782917Publication Date: 2017"How the police endanger us and why we need to find an alternative Recent years have seen an explosion of protest and concern about police brutality and repression--especially after long-held grievances in Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in months of violent protest following the police killing of Brown. Much of the conversation has focused on calls for enhancing police accountability, increasing police diversity, improving police training, and emphasizing community policing. Unfortunately, none of these is likely to produce results, because they fail to get at the core of the problem. The problem is policing itself--the dramatic expansion of the police role over the last forty years. This book attempts to jog public discussion of policing by revealing the tainted origins of modern policing as a tool of social control and demonstrating how the expanded role of the police is inconsistent with community empowerment, social justice--even public safety. Drawing on first-hand research from across the globe, Alex Vitale shows how the implementation of alternatives to policing, like drug legalization, regulation, and harm reduction instead of the policing of drugs, has led to reductions in crime, spending, and injustice." -
The Anti-Racist Organization : dismantling systemic racism in the workplace
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ISBN: 9781119880646Publication Date: 2022-05-10Tackle systemic racism in the workplace with practical strategies. In The Anti-Racist Organization: Dismantling Systemic Racism in the Workplace, HR strategist Shereen Daniels delivers an incisive and honest discussion of how business leaders can change workplace practices to create a more anti-racist and equitable environment. The author draws on her personal and client-facing experience, historical fact, legal proceedings, HR insights, and quantitative analysis to equip readers with the knowledge and tools they need to transform their companies. -
Golden Gulag: prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California byISBN: 0520938038Publication Date: 2007-01-08Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called "the biggest prison building project in the history of the world." Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces, ranging from global to local, conjoined to produce the prison boom.
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Oppositional Consciousness : the subjective roots of social protest
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ISBN: 9780226225784Publication Date: 2001-09-01How can human beings be induced to sacrifice their lives—even one minute of their lives-for the sake of their group? This question, central to understanding the dynamics of social movements, is at the heart of this collection of original essays. The book is the first to conceptualize and illustrate the complex patterns of negotiation, struggle, borrowing, and crafting that characterize what the editors term "oppositional consciousness"—an empowering mental state that prepares members of an oppressed group to undermine, reform, or overthrow a dominant system.
Each essay employs a recent historical case to demonstrate how oppositional consciousness actually worked in the experience of a subordinate group. Based on participant observation and interviews, chapters focus on the successful social movements of groups such as African Americans, people with disabilities, sexually harassed women, Chicano workers, and AIDS activists. Ultimately, Oppositional Consciousness sheds new light on the intricate mechanisms that drive the important social movements of our time. -
Redefining Realness : my path to womanhood, identity, love & so much more
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ISBN: 9781476709147Publication Date: 2014-02-04In her profound and courageous New York Times bestseller, Janet Mock establishes herself as a resounding and inspirational voice for the transgender community--and anyone fighting to define themselves on their own terms. With unflinching honesty and moving prose, Janet Mock relays her experiences of growing up young, multiracial, poor, and trans in America, offering readers accessible language while imparting vital insight about the unique challenges and vulnerabilities of a marginalized and misunderstood population. Though undoubtedly an account of one woman's quest for self at all costs, Redefining Realness is a powerful vision of possibility and self-realization, pushing us all toward greater acceptance of one another--and of ourselves--showing as never before how to be unapologetic and real. -
Sister Outsider: essays and speeches
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ISBN: 9780307809049Publication Date: 2007-08-01Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature. In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde-scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde's philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published. These landmark writings are, in Lorde's own words, a call to "never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is..." "[Lorde's] works will be important to those truly interested in growing up sensitive, intelligent, and aware.";--New York Times -
The Condemnation of Blackness: race, crime, and the making of modern urban America byISBN: 9780674240919Publication Date: 2019-07-22Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.
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The First Civil Right: how liberals built prison America byISBN: 9780199892792Publication Date: 2014-01-01The explosive rise in the U.S. incarceration rate in the second half of the twentieth century, and the racial transformation of the prison population from mostly white at mid-century to sixty-five percent black and Latino in the present day, is a trend that cannot easily be ignored. Many believe that this shift began with the "tough on crime" policies advocated by Republicans and southern Democrats beginning in the late 1960s, which sought longer prison sentences, more frequent use of the death penalty, and the explicit or implicit targeting of politically marginalized people. In The First Civil Right, Naomi Murakawa inverts the conventional wisdom by arguing that the expansion of the federal carceral state-a system that disproportionately imprisons blacks and Latinos-was, in fact, rooted in the civil-rights liberalism of the 1940s and early 1960s, not in the period after.Murakawa traces the development of the modern American prison system through several presidencies, both Republican and Democrat. Responding to calls to end the lawlessness and violence against blacks at the state and local levels, the Truman administration expanded the scope of what was previously a weak federal system. Later administrations from Johnson to Clinton expanded the federal presence even more. Ironically, these steps laid the groundwork for the creation of the vast penal archipelago that now exists in the United States. What began as a liberal initiative to curb the mob violence and police brutality that had deprived racial minorities of their 'first civil right-physical safety-eventually evolved into the federal correctional system that now deprives them, in unjustly large numbers, of another important right: freedom. The First Civil Right is a groundbreaking analysis of root of the conflicts that lie at the intersection of race and the legal system in America.
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The torture letters : reckoning with police violence byISBN: 022672980XPublication Date: 2020Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens - and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander John Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square "black site" show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds--perhaps thousands--of Chicago residents. Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public's complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protesters, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge's Area Two and follows the city's networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay -Ralph's story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism.
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America, Goddam : violence, black women, and the struggle for justice
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ISBN: 9780520384507Publication Date: 2022-04-05A powerful account of violence against Black women and girls in the United States and their fight for liberation. Echoing the energy of Nina Simone's searing protest song that inspired the title, this book, is a call to action in our collective journey toward just futures. America, Goddam explores the combined force of anti-Blackness, misogyny, patriarchy, and capitalism in the lives of Black women and girls in the United States today. -
Well-read black girl : finding our stories, discovering ourselves : an anthology
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ISBN: 9780525619789Publication Date: 2018An inspiring collection of essays by black women writers, curated by the founder of the popular book club Well-Read Black Girl, on the importance of recognizing ourselves in literature. Remember that moment when you first encountered a character who seemed to be written just for you? That feeling of belonging remains with readers the rest of their lives--but not everyone regularly sees themselves on the pages of a book. In this timely anthology, Glory Edim brings together original essays by some of our best black women writers to shine a light on how important it is that we all--regardless of gender, race, religion, or ability--have the opportunity to find ourselves in literature. Contributors include Jesmyn Ward (Sing, Unburied, Sing), Lynn Nottage (Sweat), Jacqueline Woodson (Another Brooklyn), Gabourey Sidibe (This Is Just My Face), Morgan Jerkins (This Will Be My Undoing), Tayari Jones (An American Marriage), Rebecca Walker (Black, White and Jewish), and Barbara Smith (Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology). Whether it's learning about the complexities of femalehood from Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, finding a new type of love in The Color Purple, or using mythology to craft an alternative black future, the subjects of each essay remind us why we turn to books in times of both struggle and relaxation. As she has done with her book club-turned-online community Well-Read Black Girl, in this anthology Glory Edim has created a space in which black women's writing and knowledge and life experiences are lifted up, to be shared with all readers who value the power of a story to help us understand the world and ourselves. -
West Indian Immigrants: a black success story?
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ISBN: 9781610444002Publication Date: 2008-06-12West Indian immigrants to the United States fare better than native-born African Americans on a wide array of economic measures, including labor force participation, earnings, and occupational prestige. Some researchers argue that the root of this difference lies in differing cultural attitudes toward work, while others maintain that white Americans favor West Indian blacks over African Americans, giving them an edge in the workforce. Still others hold that West Indians who emigrate to this country are more ambitious and talented than those they left behind. In West Indian Immigrants, sociologist Suzanne Model subjects these theories to close historical and empirical scrutiny to unravel the mystery of West Indian success. West Indian Immigrants draws on four decades of national census data, surveys of Caribbean emigrants around the world, and historical records dating back to the emergence of the slave trade. Model debunks the notion that growing up in an all-black society is an advantage by showing that immigrants from racially homogeneous and racially heterogeneous areas have identical economic outcomes. Weighing the evidence for white American favoritism, Model compares West Indian immigrants in New York, Toronto, London, and Amsterdam, and finds that, despite variation in the labor markets and ethnic composition of these cities, Caribbean immigrants in these four cities attain similar levels of economic success. Model also looks at "movers" and "stayers" from Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Guyana, and finds that emigrants leaving all four countries have more education and hold higher status jobs than those who remain. In this sense, West Indians immigrants are not so different from successful native-born African Americans who have moved within the U.S. to further their careers. Both West Indian immigrants and native-born African-American movers are the "best and the brightest"--they are more literate and hold better jobs than those who stay put. While political debates about the nature of black disadvantage in America have long fixated on West Indians' relatively favorable economic position, this crucial finding reveals a fundamental flaw in the argument that West Indian success is proof of native-born blacks' behavioral shortcomings. Proponents of this viewpoint have overlooked the critical role of immigrant self-selection. West Indian Immigrants is a sweeping historical narrative and definitive empirical analysis that promises to change the way we think about what it means to be a black American. Ultimately, Model shows that West Indians aren't a black success story at all--rather, they are an immigrant success story. -
Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? : police violence and resistance in the United States
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ISBN: 9781608466849Publication Date: 2016-05-30What is the reality of policing in the United States? Do the police keep anyone safe and secure other than the very wealthy? How do recent police killings of young black people in the United States fit into the historical and global context of anti-blackness? This collection of reports and essays (the first collaboration between Truthout and Haymarket Books) explores police violence against black, brown, indigenous and other marginalized communities, miscarriages of justice, and failures of token accountability and reform measures. It also makes a compelling and provocative argument against calling the police. Contributions cover a broad range of issues including the killing by police of black men and women, police violence against Latino and indigenous communities, law enforcement's treatment of pregnant people and those with mental illness, and the impact of racist police violence on parenting, as well as specific stories such as a Detroit police conspiracy to slap murder convictions on young black men using police informant and the failure of Chicago's much-touted Independent Police Review Authority, the body supposedly responsible for investigating police misconduct. The title Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? is no mere provocation: the book also explores alternatives for keeping communities safe. Contributors include William C. Anderson, Candice Bernd, Aaron Cant#65533;, Thandi Chimurenga, Ejeris Dixon, Adam Hudson, Victoria Law, Mike Ludwig, Sarah Macaraeg, and Roberto Rodriguez. -
Just mercy : a story of justice and redemption
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ISBN: 9780812994537Publication Date: 2014Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn't commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship--and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever. Just Mercy is at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer's coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice. -
I'm still here: Black dignity in a world made for whiteness
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ISBN: 1524760862Publication Date: 2018The author's first encounter with a racialized America came at age seven, when her parents told her they named her Austin to deceive future employers into thinking she was a white man. She grew up in majority-white schools, organizations, and churches, and has spent her life navigating America's racial divide as a writer, a speaker, and an expert helping organizations practice genuine inclusion. -
On the Other Side of Freedom
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ISBN: 0525560327Publication Date: 2018-09-04In August 2014, twenty-nine-year-old activist DeRay Mckesson stood with hundreds of others on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to push a message of justice and accountability. These protests, and others like them in cities across the country, resulted in the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. Now, in his first book, Mckesson lays down the intellectual, pragmatic, and political framework for a new liberation movement. -
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?
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ISBN: 9780465060689Publication Date: 2017-09-05The classic, bestselling book on the psychology of racism -- now fully revised and updated Walk into any racially mixed high school and you will see Black, White, and Latino youth clustered in their own groups. Is this self-segregation a problem to address or a coping strategy? Beverly Daniel Tatum, a renowned authority on the psychology of racism, argues that straight talk about our racial identities is essential if we are serious about enabling communication across racial and ethnic divides. -
Reclaiming Our Space
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ISBN: 9780807055373Publication Date: 2019-01-29In Reclaiming Our Space, social worker, activist, and cultural commentator Feminista Jones explores how Black women are changing culture, society, and the landscape of feminism by building digital communities and using social media as powerful platforms. Online platforms have given those outside the traditional university setting an opportunity to engage with and advance these conversations--and in doing so have created new energy for intersectional movements around the world. -
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: an American Slave
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ISBN: 9781536146172Publication Date: 2018-12-28Frederick Douglass, a former slave, became the leader of the abolitionist movement. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave is a first-hand account of his life from indentured slave to a free man. -
Overground Railroad
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ISBN: 9781683356578Publication Date: 2020-01-07The first book to explore the historical role and residual impact of the Green Book, a travel guide for black motorists Published from 1936 to 1966, the Green Book was hailed as the "black travel guide to America." At that time, it was very dangerous and difficult for African-Americans to travel because black travelers couldn't eat, sleep, or buy gas at most white-owned businesses. -
The beautiful struggle: a father, two sons and an unlikely road to manhood
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ISBN: 0385526849Publication Date: 2009A memoir of growing up in the tough world of Baltimore in the 1980s chronicles the relationship between the author and his father, a Vietnam vet and Black Panther affiliate, and his campaign to keep his sons from falling victim to the temptations of the streets. -
Heavy
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ISBN: 9781501125690Publication Date: 2018-10-16In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to time in New York as a college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. -
Algorithms of Oppression
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ISBN: 9781479849949Publication Date: 2018-02-20In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color. -
Healing Racial Trauma
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ISBN: 9780830843879Publication Date: 2020-01-07"People of color have endured traumatic histories and almost daily assaults on our dignity. We have prayed about racism, been in denial, or acted out in anger, but we have not known how to individually or collectively pursue healing from the racial trauma." -
Hostile Heartland
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ISBN: 9780252042492Publication Date: 2019-06-30We forget that racist violence permeated the lower Midwest from the pre-Civil War period until the 1930s. From Kansas to Ohio, whites orchestrated extraordinary events like lynchings and riots while engaged in a spectrum of brutal acts made all the more horrific by being routine. Also forgotten is the fact African Americans forcefully responded to these assertions of white supremacy through armed resistance, the creation of press outlets and civil rights organizations, and courageous individual activism. Drawing on cutting-edge methodology and a wealth of documentary evidence, Brent M. S. Campney analyzes the institutionalized white efforts to assert and maintain dominance over African Americans. Though rooted in the past, white violence evolved into a fundamentally modern phenomenon, driven by technologies such as newspapers, photographs, automobiles, and telephones. Other surprising insights challenge our assumptions about sundown towns, who was targeted by whites, law enforcement's role in facilitating and perpetrating violence, and the details of African American resistance. -
Structural Racism in America : sociological theory, education inequality, and social change
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ISBN: 9781003225324Publication Date: 2022-03-30Racist policies are identified as "opportunity killers," and the disparities created by them often have racism sustained through race-neutral policies. Systemic Racism in America: Sociological Theory, Education Inequality, and Social Change situates our contemporary moment within a historical framework and works to identify forms, occurrences, and consequences of racism as well as argue for concrete solutions to address it. This volume assembles renowned and thought-provoking social scientists to address the destructive impacts of structural racism and the recent, incendiary incidents that have driven racial injustice and racial inequality to the fore of public discussion and debate. The book is organized into three parts to explore and explain the ways in which racism persists, permeates, and operates within our society. The first part presents theoretical perspectives to analyze the roots and manifestation of contemporary racism; the second concentrates on educational inequality and structural issues within our institutions of learning that have led to stark racial disparities; and the third and final section focuses on solutions to our current state and how people, regardless of their race, can advocate for racial equity. -
Reparations and Anti-Black Racism: A Criminological Exploration of the Harms of Slavery and Racialized Injustice.
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ISBN: 9781529216851Publication Date: 2021-12-13The Black Lives Matter movement has exposed the state violence and social devaluation that Black populations continue to suffer. Police shootings and incarceration inequalities in the US and UK are just two examples of the legacy of slavery today. This book offers a criminological exploration of the case for slavery and anti-Black racism reparations in the context of the enduring harms and differential treatment of Black citizens. Through critical analysis of legal arguments and reviewing recent court actions, it refutes the policy perspectives that argue against reparations. Highlighting the human rights abuses inherent to and arising from slavery and ongoing racism, this book calls for governments to take responsibility for the impact of ongoing racialized injustice. -
Practicing Cooperation : Mutual Aid Beyond Capitalism
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ISBN: 9781452964164Publication Date: 2021-11-02A powerful new understanding of cooperation as an antidote to alienation and inequality. From the crises of racial inequity and capitalism that inspired the Black Lives Matter movement and the Green New Deal to the coronavirus pandemic, stories of mutual aid have shown that, though cooperation is variegated and ever changing, it is also a form of economic solidarity that can help weather contemporary social and economic crises. Addressing this theme, Practicing Cooperation delivers a trenchant and timely argument that the way to a more just and equitable society lies in the widespread adoption of cooperative practices. -
New World Coming: frontline voices on pandemics, uprisings, & climate crisis
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ISBN: 9781948814546Publication Date: 2021-11-02"Different voices in New World Coming tell powerful stories of loss and difficulty plus messages of hope and promise for all as we seek a healing future for the earth and each other." New World Coming documents the distinct moment through personal narratives and intergenerational imaginings of a just, healthy, and equitable future. Writers reflect on what movements for justice and liberation can learn from the response to COVID-19, uprisings for Black lives, and climate crisis, through essays and poems that inspire and generate the change we need to survive and thrive. -
Hometown Inequality : race, class, and representation in American local politics byISBN: 9781108662550Publication Date: 2020-06-20Local governments play a central role in American democracy, providing essential services such as policing, water, and sanitation. Moreover, Americans express great confidence in their municipal governments. But is this confidence warranted? Using big data and a representative sample of American communities, this book provides the first systematic examination of racial and class inequalities in local politics. We find that non-whites and less-affluent residents are consistent losers in local democracy. Residents of color and those with lower incomes receive less representation from local elected officials than do whites and the affluent. Additionally, they are much less likely than privileged community members to have their preferences reflected in local government policy. Contrary to the popular assumption that governments that are "closest" govern best, we find that inequalities in representation are most severe in suburbs and small towns. Typical reforms do not seem to improve the situation, and we recommend new approaches.
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Islamophobia and acts of violence : the targeting and victimization of American Muslims byISBN: 9780190922344Publication Date: 2022Islamophobia and Acts of Violence' is a collection of perspectives by authors from a variety of academic disciplines such as legal studies, communication studies, political science, and criminology on the subject of Anti-Muslim hate crimes.
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The souls of white jokes : how racist humor fuels white supremacy
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ISBN: 9781503632349Publication Date: 2022The racial power of humor -- Amused racial contempt, or a theory of white racist humor -- Hiding in plain sight : the racist humor of the far right -- Blue humor : the racist insults and injuries of the police -- President chimp : the politics of amused racial contempt -- Epilogue : racist humor and the cult(ure) of whiteness. -
Racial baggage : Mexican immigrants and race across the border
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ISBN: 9781503632257Publication Date: 2022Immigration and racial transformation in America -- Race in Mexico : mestizo privilege -- Racial border crossings -- First encounters with race in el norte -- Settling in : illegality and the U.S. color line -- Conclusion : from mestizo to minority. -
Ancestor trouble : a reckoning and a reconciliation
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ISBN: 9780812997934Publication Date: 2022Maud Newton's ancestors have vexed and fascinated her since she was a girl. Her mother's father, who came of age during the Great Depression in Texas, was supposedly married thirteen times, and survived being shot in the stomach by one of his wives. His father purportedly killed a man in the street with a hay hook, and later died in a mental institution. This book seeks to understand why the practice of genealogy has become a multi-billion-dollar industry in contemporary America, while also mining the secrets and contradictions of one singularly memorable family history" -
Bandits, Misfits, and Superheroes : whiteness and its borderlands in American comics and graphic novels
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ISBN: 9781496838377Publication Date: 2022-03-08American comics from the start have reflected the white supremacist culture out of which they arose. Superheroes and comic books in general are products of whiteness, and both signal and hide its presence. Even when comics creators and publishers sought to advance an antiracist agenda, their attempts were often undermined by a lack of awareness of their own whiteness and the ideological baggage that goes along with it. -
Racist, not racist, antiracist : language and the dynamic disaster of American racism
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ISBN: 9781793640437Publication Date: 2022This book unearths and outlines the semantic foundations of white fragility and their consequences for racial justice in the United States. It argues that by expanding our racial vocabulary in certain ways, we can make progress toward justice equally enjoyed by all. -
Developing anti-racist practices in the helping professions : inclusive theory, pedagogy, and application
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ISBN: 9783030954512Publication Date: 2022This book provides an interdisciplinary structure to critique existing approaches that have failed to eradicate systemic inequalities across helping professions. This timely contribution offers helping professionals sought after resources that many are clamoring for to improve their practice, their pedagogical stance, and their knowledge as it relates to antiracism and antiracist approaches. This collection of chapters that cover antiracist research, theory and practice approaches is in direct response to Kendis (2019) call to action to examine and revise institutional policies and practices to become antiracist. -
For antifascist futures : against the violence of imperial crisis
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ISBN: 9781942173649Publication Date: 2022We must, as For Antifascist Futures urges, take antifascism as a major imperative of movements for social change. But we must not limit our analysis or historical understanding of the rise of the right-wing authoritarianism in our times by rooting it in mid-twentieth century Europe. Instead we turn to a collection of powerful BIPOC voices who offer a range of anticolonial, Indigenous, and Black Radical traditions to think with. For Antifascist Futures: Against the Violence of Imperial Crisis takes seriously what is new in this moment of politics, exploring what the analytic of fascism offers for understanding the twenty-first century authoritarian convergence by centering the material and speculative labor of antifascist and antiracist social movement coalitions. -
Impacts of Racism on White Americans in the Age of Trump
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ISBN: 9783030752316Publication Date: 2021-11-26In this third iteration of the classic work The Impacts of Racism on White Americans (1981, 1996), a new generation of scholars make the case that racism often negatively affects Whites themselves, especially during the Trump era. In 1981, Impacts introduced an alternative understanding of racism, arguing that it went beyond white-black and/or inter-race relations. Instead, the book proposed that the problem of race in the U.S. is fundamentally one of white identity and culture and that racism has substantial negative effects on White Americans. This volume advances these propositions through three key areas: (1) Trump-era cultural and institutional racism, bolstered by the use of historical notions of racial hierarchy; (2) institutional and interpersonal racism, which in turn drive individual racist behaviors; and finally, (3) racism's interactional sequences and how they impact anti-racism efforts. As each chapter author explores an iteration of these racisms, they also explore how racist attitudes produce disadvantage among White Americans. -
Above the Well : an antiracist literacy argument from a boy of color
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ISBN: 9781646422241Publication Date: 2021-09-01Above the Well explores race, language and literacy education through a combination of scholarship, personal history, and even a bit of fiction. Inoue comes to terms with his own languaging practices in his upbring and schooling, while also arguing that there are racist aspects to English language standards promoted in schools and civic life. His discussion includes the ways students and everyone in society are judged by and through tacit racialized languaging, which he labels White language supremacy and contributes to racialized violence in the world today. Inoue's exploration ranges a wide array of topics: His experiences as a child playing Dungeons and Dragons with his twin brother; considerations of Taoist and Western dialectic logics; the economics of race and place; tacit language race wars waged in classrooms with style guides like Strunk and White's The Elements of Style; and the damaging Horatio Alger narratives for people of color.
Reading for racial justice from University of Minnesota Press
"The University of Minnesota Press is committed to challenging white supremacy, police violence, and unequal access to criminal justice, education, and resources in Minnesota, the United States, and throughout the world." To promote understanding and action for change, here is a selection of over 100 books on racial justics.
Reading for Racial Justice from the University of Minnesota Press
Anti-racist readings for white people from student journalist
From Annie Hoffman, Libraries Student Journalist, reflects on student life during COVID-19,
"As we mourn George Floyd’s death and try to honor his life through opposing violent policing and systemic racism, it is essential that white people like me make meaningful commitments to antiracist work. If you are white and unsure of where to begin, these books are all a good place to start. Reading work by Black writers and untangling your own racism is an important first step."
Last Updated: Jan 7, 2025 3:18 PM
URL: https://libguides.umn.edu/antiracismreadinglists