LibGuides: Center for Cultural Resources: Racial Justice

Defining Racial Justice

Racial justice is the systematic fair treatment of people of all races, resulting in equitable opportunities and outcomes for all. Racial justice — or racial equity — goes beyond “anti-racism.” It is not just the absence of discrimination and inequities, but also the presence of deliberate systems and supports to achieve and sustain racial equity through proactive and preventative measures. NEA.org

Racial Justice Resources

A Cultural Conversation about Black Lives: A Call to Listen, To Learn, and To Act.

June 24, 2020

Hosted by the Center for Cultural Resources Board and School of Education

Resources from our IU Southeast Faculty Panelists for Learning More About their Presentations

Dr. Johnny Alse, Professor of Economics

Kim, M. (2020). 30+ Ways Asians Perpetuate Anti-Black Racism Everyday. Medium. https://medium.com/awaken-blog/30-ways-asians-perpetuate-anti-black-racism-everyday-32886c9b3075

· Indians’ Debt to Black America | Huffington Post

· 20+ Allyship Actions for Asians to Show Up for the Black Community Right Now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-BY9UEewHw "How Studying Privilege Systems Can Strengthen Compassion": Peggy McIntosh at TEDxTimberlaneSchools

Dr. James Hesselman, Professor of Theatre, Dean of Arts and Letters

https://sexedrescue.com/no-difference-between-us-by-jayneen-sanders/

Kendi, I. X. (2019). How to be an antiracist. First Edition. New York: One World. (See Books box.)

Dr. Eric Schansberg, Professor of Economics

Sowell, T. (1994). Race and culture : a world view. New York: Basic Books. (See Books below.)

Steele, S. (1991). The content of our character : a new vision of race in America. 1st HarperPerennial ed. New York, NY: HarperPerennial.

Coleman Hughes, “Stories and Data” (City Journal, 2020)

Voddie Baucham, “Ethnic Gnosticism” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip3nV6S_fYU)

John McWhorter; various books and essays

Dr. Faye Camahaln, Professor of Education

Let's talk about anti-blackness (https://blog.heinemann.com/)

Anti-Black Racism Classroom and Curriculum Strategies: a list of resources to address anti-black racism in the classroom (https://library.wwu.edu/files/wat-anti-black-racism-curriculum.pdf)

Black Lives Matter by Teaching Tolerance (https://www.tolerance.org/search?query=Black+Lives+Matter)

Dr. Melissa S, Fry, Director of the Applied Research and Education Center

Black Voices for listening:

The Root https://www.theroot.com

The Black Scholar—which has some brilliant pieces: https://www.theblackscholar.org/

The grio https://thegrio.com/

Podcasts:

Dear Culture https://thegrio.com/category/podcasts/

Code Switch https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/484785516/the-code-switch-podcast

Still Processing https://www.nytimes.com/column/still-processing-podcast

The Read (pop culture focus) https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/youve-got-kale/id619369512?i=1000475829201

The Daily is doing a good job with the current events.

"The Sunday Read" on June 7^th was amazing: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/podcasts/the-daily/george-floyd-protests.html

Intersectionality Highlights:

HoodxHolistic https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hoodxholistic-podcast/id1435091328

Talks to help get you informed:

https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/a32742892/ted-talks-videos-to-understand-racism/

These are TED, NYTimes, PBS News Hour and other sources and we could push them out—one each day. Choose one to highlight in an event.

Thinkers

READ BELL HOOKS—one of the most prolific writers of our time. She will push you to think. You need not agree with every argument she makes, but you will be a more thoughtful human if you engage her work.

Cornel West

Aldon Morris

Melvin Oliver

Stephen L. Carter

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Patricia Hill Collins

Kimberle W. Crenshaw

Angela Y. Davis

Randall Kennedy---Excellent Book on Race, Crime, and the Law

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Annette Gordon-Reed

Toni Morrison

William Julius Wilson

Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker (Political Scientists who have done significant and important work on policy and inequality)

Tim Wise (Vocal and prolific white anti-racist)

Organizations to Support and Follow

Black Lives Matter

NAACP

Southern Poverty Law Center

United Negro College Fund

Louisville Urban League

Documentaries

1619 Project in the New York Times—articles and podcasts

13th

Race: The Power of an Illusion (Available through IUS Films on Demand)

Street Fight

Eyes on the Prize

I Am Not Your Negro

Slavery

White People

Freedom Riders

Crime + Punishment

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

Brother Outsider

The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

Slavery by Another Name

Soundtrack for a Revolution

Dark Girls

The Black List

Breaking the Huddle: The Integration of College Football

Banished: How Whites Drove Blacks Out of Town in America

When the Levees Broke: A requiem in Four Acts"

What's Race Got to Do With It?

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow

Black is, Black Ain't

Teaching Indians to be White

A Class Divided

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution

Movies

Fruitvale Station

Malcolm X

Selma

12 Years a Slave

Just Mercy

Crash

The Help [and the dialogue around it—critiques are an important part of what you can teach with this. But it is teachable. Many students have already watched it so it comes up in the race class even though I don't show it.]

Roots

Glory

The Tuskegee Airmen

Red Tails

Hidden Figures

Boys 'n the Hood

Stand and Deliver

Black Panther [and the dialogue around it]

Do the Right Thing

Shorter Topical Video Clips

Tulsa Massacre

The massacre of Tulsa's "Black Wall Street"

Books

The Angela Y. Davis Reader

Critical Race Feminism

An African American and Latinx History of the United States, Paul Ortiz

Say Her Name, Zetta Elliott

The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois—Truly one of the best books of all time.

Black Wealth, White Wealth, Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro

Living with Racism, Thomas Shapiro

White Privilege, Paula Rothenberg

An American Dilemma (Parts I and II), Gunnar Myrdal

Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson

Racial Formation in the United States, Michael Omi

This Little Light of Mine, Kay Mills (If you do not know Fannie Lou Hamer, I encourage you to get to know her. She was an amazing woman and learning her story will inspire you.)

Between Women, Judith Rollins (on relationships between Black domestics and the white women who employ them—really a brilliant piece of qualitative Sociology)

All is Never Said: The Story of Odette Harper Hines, Judith Rollins

Books from the IU Southeast Library

How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 9780525509295
Publication Date: 2019
"Antiracism is a transformative concept that reorients and reenergizes the conversation about racism—and, even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. At its core, racism is a powerful system that creates false hierarchies of human value; its warped logic extends beyond race, from the way we regard people of different ethnicities or skin colors to the way we treat people of different sexes, gender identities, and body types. Racism intersects with class and culture and geography and even changes the way we see and value ourselves." (From Amazon.com)
Race and Culture by Thomas Sowell
Call Number: GN495.4 .S69 1994
ISBN: 0465067964
Publication Date: 1994-07-13
Encompassing more than a decade of research around the globe, this book shows that cultural capital has far more impact than politics, prejudice, or genetics on the social and economic fates of minorities, nations, and civilization.
The Content of Our Character by Shelby Steele
Call Number: E185.615 .S723 1991
ISBN: 006097415X
Publication Date: 1998-09-23
"In this controversial essay collection, award-winning writer Shelby Stelle illuminates the origins of the current conflict in race relations--the increase in anger, mistrust, and even violence between black and whites. With candor and persuasive argument, he shows us how both black and white Americans have become trapped into seeing color before character, and how social policies designed to lessen racial inequities have instead increased them." (From Amazon.com)
The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace by Jeff Hobbs
Call Number: E185.97.P38 H63 2014
ISBN: 9781476731902
Publication Date: 2014-09-23
Examines "the short life of a talented young African-American man who escapes the slums of Newark for Yale University only to succumb to the dangers of the streets--and of one's own nature--when he returns home"--Amazon.com.
Peace was a talented young African-American man who escaped the slums of Newark for Yale University, only to succumb to the dangers of the streets -- and of one's own nature -- when he returned home. When Hobbs arrived at Yale University, he became fast friends with Peace, his college roommate for four years. Peace's life was rough from the beginning in the crime-ridden streets of Newark in the 1980s, and he carried with him the difficult dual nature of his existence, "fronting" in Yale and at home. Through an honest rendering of Peace's relationships, Hobbs examines the collision of two fiercely insular worlds.
Makes Me Wanna Holler by Nathan McCall
Call Number: E185.97.M12 A3 1994
ISBN: 0679412689
Publication Date: 1994-02-06
Coming of Age in Mississippi. by Moody, Anne, 1940-2015
Call Number: E185.97.M65 A3
Publication Date: 1968
Critical Race Theory by Richard Delgado; Jean Stefancic
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 0585434697
Publication Date: 2001-01-01
Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan M. Metzl
Call Number: E-book
ISBN: 9781541644960
Publication Date: 2019-03-05
A physician reveals how right-wing backlash policies have mortal consequences -- even for the white voters they promise to help - from Amazon
White Trash by Nancy Isenberg
Call Number: HN90.S6 I84 2016
ISBN: 9780670785971
Publication Date: 2016-06-21
The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement. They were alternately known as "waste people," "offals," "rubbish," "lazy lubbers," and "crackers." By the 1850s, the downtrodden included so-called "clay eaters" and "sandhillers," known for prematurely-aged children distinguished by their yellowish skin, ragged clothing, and listless minds. Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature and scientific theories over four hundred years, history professor Nancy Isenberg upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free society ; where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics –- a widely popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for sterilization. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ’s Great Society and they now haunt us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty. Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been at or near the center of major political debates over the character of the American identity.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
Call Number: E185.97.L5 A3 1999
ISBN: 0345379756
Publication Date: 1992-09-29
The autobiography of Malcolm X / with the assistance of Alex Haley ; foreword by Attallah Shabazz ; introduction by M.S. Handler ; epilogue by Alex Haley ; afterword by Ossie Davis.
Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins; Patricia Hill Collins
Call Number: HQ1426 .C633 2000
ISBN: 0415924839
Publication Date: 1999-12-09
In spite of the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual tradition that is not widely known. In Black Feminist Thought, originally published in 1990, Patricia Hill Collins set out to explore the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals and writers, both within the academy and without. Here Collins provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. Drawing from fiction, poetry, music and oral history, the result is a superbly crafted and revolutionary book that provided the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought and its canon. from Amazon
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Call Number: E185.615 .C6335 2015
ISBN: 9780812993547
Publication Date: 2015-07-14
"For Ta-Nehisi Coates, history has always been personal. At every stage of his life, he's sought in his explorations of history answers to the mysteries that surrounded him -- most urgently, why he, and other black people he knew, seemed to live in fear. What were they afraid of? In Tremble for My Country, Coates takes readers along on his journey through America's history of race and its contemporary resonances through a series of awakenings -- moments when he discovered some new truth about our long, tangled history of race, whether through his myth-busting professors at Howard University, a trip to a Civil War battlefield with a rogue historian, a journey to Chicago's South Side to visit aging survivors of 20th century America's 'long war on black people,' or a visit with the mother of a beloved friend who was shot down by the police. In his trademark style -- a mix of lyrical personal narrative, reimagined history, essayistic argument, and reportage -- Coates provides readers a thrillingly illuminating new framework for understanding race: its history, our contemporary dilemma, and where we go from here"-- Provided by publisher.
We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Call Number: E907 .C63 2017
ISBN: 9780399590566
Publication Date: 2017-10-03
A portrait of the historic Barack Obama era features essays originally published in "The Atlantic," including "Fear of a Black President" and "The Case for Reparations," as well as new essays revisiting each year of the Obama administration.
""We were eight years in power" was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America's "first white president." But the story of these present-day eight years is not just about presidential politics. This book also examines the new voices, ideas, and movements for justice that emerged over this period--and the effects of the persistent shadow of our nation's old and unreconciled history. Coates powerfully examines the events of the Obama era from his intimate and revealing perspective--the point of view of a young writer who begins the journey in an unemployment office in Harlem and ends it in the Oval Office, interviewing a president. We Were Eight Years in Power features Coates's iconic essays first published in The Atlantic, including "Fear of a Black President," "The Case for Reparations," and "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration," along with eight fresh essays that revisit each year of the Obama administration through Coates's own experiences, observations, and intellectual development, capped by a bracingly original assessment of the election that fully illuminated the tragedy of the Obama era."--Dust jacket.
Standing at Armageddon by Nell Irvin Painter
Call Number: E661 .P33 1987
ISBN: 9780393331929
Publication Date: 2008-04-17
Standing at Armageddon is a comprehensive and lively historical account of America's shift from a rural and agrarian society to an urban and industrial society. Nell Irvin Painter will be featured in the PBS multipart series The Progressive Era with Bill Moyers, which coincides with the release of the updated edition of this acclaimed work. from Amazon
The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter
Call Number: E184.A1 P29 2010
ISBN: 9780393049343
Publication Date: 2010-03-15
Historian Painter centers her momentous study of racial classification on the slave trade and the nation-building efforts which dominated the United States in the 18th century, when thinkers led by Ralph Waldo Emerson strove to explain the rapid progress of America within the context of white superiority. Her research is filled with frequent, startling realizations about how tenuous and temporary our racial classifications really are.
"Ever since the Enlightenment, race theory and its inevitable partner, racism, have followed a crooked road, constructed by dominant peoples to justify their domination of others. Filling a huge gap in historical literature that long focused on the non-white, eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter guides us through more than two thousand years of Western civilization, tracing not only the invention of the idea of race but also the frequent worship of 'whiteness' for economic, social, scientific, and political ends. Our story begins in Greek and Roman antiquity, where the concept of race did not exist, only geography and the opportunity to conquer and enslave others. Not until the eighteenth century did an obsession with whiteness flourish, with the German invention of the notion of Caucasian beauty. This theory made northern Europeans into 'Saxons,' 'Anglo-Saxons,' and 'Teutons,' envisioned as uniquely handsome natural rulers. Here was a worldview congenial to northern Europeans bent on empire. There followed an explosion of theories of race, now focusing on racial temperament as well as skin color. Spread by such intellectuals as Madame de Stael and Thomas Carlyle, white race theory soon reached North America with a vengeance. Its chief spokesman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, did the most to label Anglo-Saxons -- icons of beauty and virtue -- as the only true Americans. It was an ideal that excluded not only blacks but also all ethnic groups not of Protestant, northern European background. The Irish and Native Americans were out and, later, so were the Chinese, Jews, Italians, Slavs, and Greeks -- all deemed racially alien. Did immigrations threaten the very existence of America? Americans were assumed to be white, but who among poor immigrants could become truly American? A tortured and convoluted series of scientific explorations developed -- theories intended to keep Anglo-Saxons at the top: the ever-popular measurement of skulls, the powerful eugenics movement, and highly biased intelligence tests -- all designed to keep working people out and down." -- publisher description.
White Women, Race Matters by Ruth Frankenberg
Call Number: HQ1154 .F683 1993
ISBN: 0816622574
Publication Date: 1993-09-01
Traditional debates concerning racially hierarchical societies have tended to focus on the experience of being black. White Women, Race Matters breaks with this tradition by focusing on the particular experiences of white women in a racially hierarchical society. By considering the ways in which their experience not only contributes to but challenges the reproduction of racism, the work offers a rigorous examination of existing methodologies, practices and assumptions concerning racism and gender relations. Supported by extracts from in-depth life history interviews, White Women, Race Matters provides valuable course material. from Amazon
Teaching to Transgress by Bell Hooks
Call Number: LC196 .H66 1994
ISBN: 9780415908078
Publication Date: 1994-09-14
In this book, the author shares her philosophy of the classroom, offering ideas about teaching that fundamentally rethink democratic participation. She writes about a new kind of education, education as the practice of freedom. She advocates the process of teaching students to think critically and raises many concerns central to the field of critical pedagogy, linking them to feminist thought. In the process, these essays face squarely the problems of teachers who do not want to teach, of students who do not want to learn, of racism and sexism in the classroom. Teaching students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for the author, the teacher's most important goal. -- From back cover.
White Racism by Joel Kovel
Call Number: E185.61 .K63
ISBN: 0231057970
Publication Date: 1984-03-12
In an unusual, novel approach to critical race theory, Joel Kovel manages to tackle a subject that stumped so many theorists in the 1960s and 1970s: unconscious bias. White Racism: A Psychohistory presents a psychohistorical matrix of racism in an analysis of unconscious bias.
Kovel’s psychoanalytic approach to race is haunting in its approach to Western culture. With psychoanalytic calculation, White Racism probes the deep psychological and historical embedding of racism in Western civilization and provides a pessimistic view of future reform. from Amazon
White Rage by Carol Anderson
Call Number: E185.61 .A5438 2017
ISBN: 9781632864130
Publication Date: 2017-09-05
"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 an op-ed in the Washington Post showing that this was, instead, 'white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames, ' she writes, '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. Carefully linking these and other historical flash points 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."--Publisher's description.
White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo; Michael Eric Dyson (Foreword by)
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 0807047414
Publication Date: 2018-06-26
In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’ (Claudia Rankine). 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 examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively. from Amazon
Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch
Call Number: E185.61 .B7914 1988
ISBN: 9780671460976
Publication Date: 1988-11-15
In volume one of his America in the King Years, Pulitzer Prize winner Taylor Branch gives a masterly account of the American civil rights movement.

Hailed as the most masterful story ever told of the American civil rights movement, Parting the Waters is destined to endure for generations.

Moving from the fiery political baptism of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the corridors of Camelot where the Kennedy brothers weighed demands for justice against the deceptions of J. Edgar Hoover, here is a vivid tapestry of America, torn and finally transformed by a revolutionary struggle unequaled since the Civil War.

Taylor Branch provides an unsurpassed portrait of King's rise to greatness and illuminates the stunning courage and private conflict, the deals, maneuvers, betrayals, and rivalries that determined history behind closed doors, at boycotts and sit-ins, on bloody freedom rides, and through siege and murder.

Epic in scope and impact, Branch's chronicle definitively captures one of the nation's most crucial passages. from Amazon
Nigger by Randall Kennedy
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 0375713719
Publication Date: 2003-01-14
It’s “the nuclear bomb of racial epithets,” a word that whites have employed to wound and degrade African Americans for three centuries. Paradoxically, among many black people it has become a term of affection and even empowerment. The word, of course, is nigger, and in this candid, lucidly argued book the distinguished legal scholar Randall Kennedy traces its origins, maps its multifarious connotations, and explores the controversies that rage around it.

Should blacks be able to use nigger in ways forbidden to others? Should the law treat it as a provocation that reduces the culpability of those who respond to it violently? Should it cost a person his job, or a book like Huckleberry Finn its place on library shelves? With a range of reference that extends from the Jim Crow south to Chris Rock routines and the O. J. Simpson trial, Kennedy takes on not just a word, but our laws, attitudes, and culture with bracing courage and intelligence from Amazon
Race, Crime, and the Law by Randall Kennedy
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 0375701842
Publication Date: 1998-03-31
In this groundbreaking, powerfully reasoned, lucid work that is certain to provoke controversy, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy takes on a highly complex issue in a way that no one has before. Kennedy uncovers the long-standing failure of the justice system to protect blacks from criminals, probing allegations that blacks are victimized on a widespread basis by racially discriminatory prosecutions and punishments, but he also engages the debate over the wisdom and legality of using racial criteria in jury selection. He analyzes the responses of the legal system to accusations that appeals to racial prejudice have rendered trials unfair, and examines the idea that, under certain circumstances, members of one race are statistically more likely to be involved in crime than members of another.
Evicted by Matthew Desmond
Call Number: HD7287.96.U6 D47 2016
ISBN: 9780553447439
Publication Date: 2016-03-01
In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they each struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Hailed as “wrenching and revelatory” (The Nation), “vivid and unsettling” (New York Review of Books), Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of twenty-first-century America’s most devastating problems. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible. from Amazon
Faces at the Bottom of the Well by Derrick Bell; Michelle Alexander (Foreword by)
Call Number: E185.615 .B395 1992
ISBN: 1541645537
Publication Date: 2018-10-30
In Faces at the Bottom of the Well, civil rights activist and legal scholar Derrick Bell uses allegory and historical example to argue that racism is an integral and permanent part of American society. African American struggles for equality are doomed to fail so long as the majority of whites do not see their own well-being threatened by the status quo. Bell calls on African Americans to face up to this unhappy truth and abandon a misplaced faith in inevitable progress. Only then will blacks, and those whites who join with them, be in a position to create viable strategies to alleviate the burdens of racism. "Freed of the stifling rigidity of relying unthinkingly on the slogan 'we shall overcome,'" he writes, "we are impelled both to live each day more fully and to examine critically the actual effectiveness of traditional civil rights remedies." from Amazon
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Call Number: RC265.6.L24 S55 2010 and e-book
ISBN: 9781400052172
Publication Date: 2010-02-02
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer and viruses; helped lead to in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks is buried in an unmarked grave. Her family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. The story of the Lacks family is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of--From publisher description.
Medical Apartheid by Harriet A. Washington
Call Number: R853.H8 W37 2008
ISBN: 9780767915472
Publication Date: 2008-01-08
The first comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between Africans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the way both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without a hint of informed consent--a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of blacks, and a view that they were biologically inferior, oversexed, and unfit for adult responsibilities. New details about the government's Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, and private institutions. This book reveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and makes possible, for the first time, an understanding of the roots of the African American health deficit.--From publisher description.
So You Want to Talk about Race by Ijeoma Oluo
Call Number: E184.A1 O454 2018
ISBN: 9781580056779
Publication Date: 2018-01-16
"A current, constructive, and actionable exploration of today's racial landscape, offering straightforward clarity that readers of all races need to contribute to the dismantling of the racial divide. In So You Want to Talk About Race, Editor at Large of The Establishment, Ijeoma Oluo offers a contemporary, accessible take on the racial landscape in America, addressing head-on such issues as privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the "N" word. Perfectly positioned to bridge the gap between people of color and white Americans struggling with race complexities, Oluo answers the questions readers don't dare ask, and explains the concepts that continue to elude everyday Americans. Oluo is an exceptional writer with a rare ability to be straightforward, funny, and effective in her coverage of sensitive, hyper-charged issues in America. Her messages are passionate but finely tuned, and crystalize ideas that would otherwise be vague by empowering them with aha-moment clarity. Her writing brings to mind voices like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay, and Jessica Valenti in Full Frontal Feminism, and a young Gloria Naylor, particularly in Naylor's seminal essay "The Meaning of a Word.""-- Provided by publisher.
The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
Call Number: E185.61 .R8185 2017
ISBN: 9781631492853
Publication Date: 2017-05-02
"Richard Rothstein explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation -- that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes it clear that it was de jure segregation -- the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments -- that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day."--Jacket.
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
Call Number: HV9950 .A437 2012
ISBN: 9781595581037
Publication Date: 2010-01-05
This work argues that the War on Drugs and policies that deny convicted felons equal access to employment, housing, education, and public benefits create a permanent under caste based largely on race.As the United States celebrates the nation's "triumph over race" with the election of Barack Obama, the majority of young black men in major American cities are locked behind bars or have been labeled felons for life. Although Jim Crow laws have been wiped off the books, an astounding percentage of the African American community remains trapped in a subordinate status - much like their grandparents before them. In this incisive critique, former litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander provocatively argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. Alexander shows that, by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness. The New Jim Crow challenges the civil rights community - and all of us - to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America.
Becoming by Michelle Obama
Call Number: E909.O24 A3 2018
ISBN: 9781524763138
Publication Date: 2018-11-13
"An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States. When she was a little girl, Michelle Robinson's world was the South Side of Chicago, where she and her brother, Craig, shared a bedroom in their family's upstairs apartment and played catch in the park, and where her parents, Fraser and Marian Robinson, raised her to be outspoken and unafraid. But life soon look her much further afield, from the halls of Princeton, where she learned for the first time what if felt like to be the only black woman in a room, to the glassy office tower where she worked as a high-powered corporate lawyer--and where, one summer morning, a law student named Barack Obama appeared in her office and upended all her carefully made plans. Here, for the first time, Michelle Obama describes the early years of her marriage as she struggles to balance her work and family with her husband's fast-moving political career. She takes us inside their private debate over whether he should make a run for the presidency and her subsequent role as a popular but oft-criticized figure during his campaign. Narrating with grace, good humor, and uncommon candor, she provides a vivid, behind-the-scenes account of her family's history-making launch into the global limelight as well as their life inside the White House over eight momentous years--as she comes to know her country and her country comes to know her. [This book] takes us through modest Iowa kitchens and ballrooms at Buckingham Palace, through moments of heart-stopping grief and profound resilience, bringing us deep into the soul of a singular, groundbreaking figure in history as she strives to live authentically, marshaling her personal strength and voice in service of a set of higher ideals. In telling her story with honesty and boldness, she issues a challenge to the rest of us: Who are we and who do we want to become?"--Dust jacket.
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum
Call Number: E185.625 .T38 2003
ISBN: 0465083617
Publication Date: 2003-01-17
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. These topics have only become more urgent as the national conversation about race is increasingly acrimonious. This fully revised edition is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the dynamics of race in America. from Amazon
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 9781504034654
Publication Date: 2016-03-15
The true story of an individual's struggle for self-identity, self-preservation, and freedom, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl remains among the few extant slave narratives written by a woman. This autobiographical account chronicles the remarkable odyssey of Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897) whose dauntless spirit and faith carried her from a life of servitude and degradation in North Carolina to liberty and reunion with her children in the North.
Written and published in 1861 after Jacobs' harrowing escape from a vile and predatory master, the memoir delivers a powerful and unflinching portrayal of the abuses and hypocrisy of the master-slave relationship. Jacobs writes frankly of the horrors she suffered as a slave, her eventual escape after several unsuccessful attempts, and her seven years in self-imposed exile, hiding in a coffin-like "garret" attached to her grandmother's porch.
A rare firsthand account of a courageous woman's determination and endurance, this inspirational story also represents a valuable historical record of the continuing battle for freedom and the preservation of family. from Amazon
Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement by Sonia Song-Ha Lee
Call Number: e=book
ISBN: 9781469614144
Publication Date: 2014-05-26
In the first book-length history of Puerto Rican civil rights in New York City, Sonia Lee traces the rise and fall of an uneasy coalition between Puerto Rican and African American activists from the 1950s through the 1970s. Previous work has tended to see blacks and Latinos as either naturally unified as "people of color" or irreconcilably at odds as two competing minorities. Lee demonstrates instead that Puerto Ricans and African Americans in New York City shaped the complex and shifting meanings of "Puerto Rican-ness" and "blackness" through political activism. African American and Puerto Rican New Yorkers came to see themselves as minorities joined in the civil rights struggle, the War on Poverty, and the Black Power movement--until white backlash and internal class divisions helped break the coalition, remaking "Hispanicity" as an ethnic identity that was mutually exclusive from "blackness."

Drawing on extensive archival research and oral history interviews, Lee vividly portrays this crucial chapter in postwar New York, revealing the permeability of boundaries between African American and Puerto Rican communities. from Amazon
The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter Godwin Woodson
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 1680920685
Publication Date: 2017-06-05
The Mis-Education of the Negro is a book originally published in 1933 by Dr. Carter G. Woodson. The thesis of Dr. Woodson's book is that blacks of his day were being culturally indoctrinated, rather than taught, in American schools. This conditioning, he claims, causes blacks to become dependent and to seek out inferior places in the greater society of which they are a part. He challenges his readers to become autodidacts and to "do for themselves", regardless of what they were taught:

History shows that it does not matter who is in power... those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they did in the beginning.

Here is a quote from the book:

"When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his 'proper place' and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary."

Source: Wikipedi
A Different Mirror by Ronald T. Takaki
Call Number: E184.A1 T335 1993
ISBN: 0316831123
Publication Date: 1993-06-01
Upon its first publication, A Different Mirror was hailed by critics and academics everywhere as a dramatic new retelling of our nation's past. Beginning with the colonization of the New World, it recounted the history of America in the voice of the non-Anglo peoples of the United States--Native Americans, African Americans, Jews, Irish Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and others--groups who helped create this country's rich mosaic culture.

Now, Ronald Takaki has revised his landmark work and made it even more relevant and important. Among the new additions to the book are:

--The role of black soldiers in preserving the Union
--The history of Chinese Americans from 1900-1941
--An investigation into the hot-button issue of "illegal" immigrants from Mexico
--A look at the sudden visibility of Muslim refugees from Afghanistan.

This new edition of A Different Mirror is a remarkable achievement that grapples with the raw truth of American history and examines the ultimate question of what it means to be an American. from Amazon
Speaking Treason Fluently by Tim Wise
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 9781593762070
Publication Date: 2008-09-01
In this highly anticipated follow-up to White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, activist Tim Wise examines the way in which institutional racism continues to shape the contours of daily life in the United States, and the ways in which white Americans reap enormous privileges from it. The essays included in this collection span the last ten years of Wise’s writing and cover all the hottest racial topics of the past decade: affirmative action, Hurricane Katrina, racial tension in the wake of the Duke lacrosse scandal, white school shootings, racial profiling, phony racial unity in the wake of 9/11, and the political rise of Barack Obama. Wise’s commentaries make forceful yet accessible arguments that serve to counter both white denial and complacency—two of the main obstacles to creating a more racially equitable and just society. Speaking Treason Fluently is a superbly crafted collection of Wise’s best work, which reveals the ongoing salience of race in America today and demonstrates that racial privilege is not only a real and persistent problem, but one that ultimately threatens the health and well-being of the entire society. from Amazon
The Nature of Prejudice by Gordon W. Allport
Call Number: BF575.P9 A38
ISBN: 0201001799
Publication Date: 1979-01-22
First published in 1954, The Nature of Prejudice remains the standard work on discrimination. With profound insight into the complexities of the human experience, Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport organized a mass of research to produce a landmark study on the roots and nature of prejudice. Allport's comprehensive and penetrating work examines all aspects of this age-old problem: its roots in individual and social psychology, its varieties of expression, its impact on the individuals and communities. He explores all kinds of prejudice -- racial, religious, ethnic, economic and sexual -- and offers suggestions for reducing the devastating effects of discrimination.

In this unabridged edition, a new introduction by Kenneth B. Clark of Columbia University and a new preface by Thomas Pettigrew of Harvard University update the social-psychological research in prejudice and attest to the enduring values of Allport's original theories and insights. from Amazon
Biased : uncovering the hidden prejudice that shapes what we see, think, and do by Eberhardt, Jennifer L.
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 9780735224940
Publication Date: 2019
How do we talk about bias? How do we address racial disparities and inequities? What role do our institutions play in creating, maintaining, and magnifying those inequities? What role do we play? With a perspective that is at once scientific, investigative, and informed by personal experience, Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt offers us the language and courage we need to face one of the biggest and most troubling issues of our time. She exposes racial bias at all levels of society—in our neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and criminal justice system. Yet she also offers us tools to address it. Eberhardt shows us how we can be vulnerable to bias but not doomed to live under its grip. Racial bias is a problem that we all have a role to play in solving. from Amazon