Anti-Racist Resource Guide

Racism describes a system of power and oppression/advantage and disadvantage based on race. Structural racism is a system, or series of systems, in which institutional practices, laws, policies, social- cultural standards, and socio-political decisions establish and reinforce norms that perpetuate racial group inequities. Within the context of the United State of America, and other nations, structural racism takes the form of white supremacy; the preferential treatment, privilege, power, access, networks, and access to opportunities available to white people, which often designate communities of color to chronic adverse outcomes.

Individual racism refers to a person’s racist assumptions, beliefs, or behaviors. Individual racism stems from conscious and unconscious bias and is reinforced by structural racism. Please visit the list of books, videos, movies, and TV shows within this guide to learn more about how racism functions and affects all of our day-to-day lives.

Implicit bias refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. These are mental shortcuts that help us more easily make sense of our incredibly complex world. These biases, which encompass both favorable and unfavorable assessments, are activated involuntarily and without an individual's awareness or intentional control. These associations develop over the course of a lifetime beginning at a very early age through exposure to direct and indirect messages.

We all have implicit biases, no matter our identities and regardless of how educated we are on the topic. These biases manifest themselves in ways that have impacts we may not desire.

Have you ever had a knee-jerk reaction or thought related to a person or situation, and then thought to yourself something like "That wasn't cool of me" or "No, that is not the right thing to think;" that is your implicit bias and then your active consciousness reconsidering that bias.

It is difficult for many of us to talk about implicit or explicit bias; we are often brought up to believe that we live in a "just world," that we treat people how they should be treated and as a result people get what they deserve. Bias directly contradicts that world view and our self or group concept.

Though we can learn and internalize these messages and biases very early in our lives, implicit biases are malleable and the associations we form can be unlearned. You engaging with this resource guide, in a meaningful way, lets me know that you are interested in learning how to shift your implicit biases toward an anti-racist lens. To learn more about how bias is learned, internalized, unlearned, and changed, please visit the list of books, articles, tv shows, and movies included in this guide.

Awareness

This is your initial awakening to the racial injustices around you. You are not only finally able to see that they exist, but that you play a crucial role in stopping the cycle by becoming anti-racist.

Being aware of racial injustices or understanding that you have privilege won’t make you antiracist, however. You have to keep going through the remaining stages.

Brace yourself though. This awakening is not a one time event. It will happen once, on a broad level regarding race and white supremacy, but will continue to happen on issue specific levels as you dive deeper into the work and create space for more and more varied lived experiences in your understanding of these systems.

Education

This is where you become an intentional student in this work. If you are engaging with this resource guide, it is likely the stage you are in right now. From webinars, lectures, and workshops, to blog posts, books, and documentaries, you study the complexities of racism and the many ways it manifests within our society.

The point of educating yourself on racism isn't for you to be able to articulate these complex topics in intellectual debates about inequality. Its about you being able to develop the eye for identifying racism in its many forms (in others and in yourself) without being hand-held to do so.

This stage of the process is crucial to the remaining stages of the work because you need a solid foundational understanding of racism and race in order to begin the work of dismantling your own thoughts, beliefs, and practices that perpetuate and uphold it.

Do this with intention. Don’t just accumulate resources to skip, without diving deep into them.

Self Interrogation

This is the stage where the real self work begins. This is where you disarm yourself of the racist tools of defence that you’ve used to bypass the work of anti-racism and harm people of color in your efforts. This is where you begin to replace them with tools of accountability to stop racist behaviors.

Self interrogation is a skill and a process. Being effective and efficient at this stage takes time and practice.

While it will start out as the part of this work that causes the most discomfort within you, you will eventually get to a place where you’re operating out of a growth mindset and embrace the many ways to identify how you can better be living up to the person you want to be in this fight for human equality. 

Community Action

Only after the appropriate effort in the self-interrogation stage of becoming anti-racist can you be trusted to do anti-racism work in a way that honors communities of color. Attempting to do this part of the work without accomplishing the first three stages is how you end up harming communities of color with actions such as white saviorism and/or performative allyship.

In stage four, you incorporate what you’ve learned during your ongoing process of becoming anti-racist into your everyday life. You leverage your positions of leadership and influence - no matter how big or small - to encourage others to do their own work in anti-racism. You elevate the intellectual contributions and scholarship of people of color educators and thought leaders in the process. 

This stage of the work will not be void of mistakes, but the way those are handled and the number of times they are repeated thereafter (as least as possible), is what will make the difference here. Because leading by example in your failures is but one of the many ways for you to do this work authentically. 

Reading books and watching documentaries on anti-racism is one thing but how are you bringing that energy into your day-to-day lives and interpersonal relationships? If you're going to be on this journey toward being anti-racist, you must commit to combating racism and bias when you see it and hear it.

Common questions include things like "what do I say when someone is racist but doesn't mean it?" "Should I speak up when someone offends my identity at work?" "How can I talk to my parents about their racist language?" "How do I check my Uncle Bob when he's actin' a fool at the dinner table?" Like doing anything new, IT'S SCARY! But that's okay! I've put together some quick references for you to read and practice so you can start changing the minds and hearts of people in your life. Remember, "It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to your enemies, but a great deal more to stand up to your friends." - Albus Dumbledore.

Responding to Microaggressions and Bias, Dr. Diane J. Goodman

Responding to Implicit Racism, Victoria Alexander

Are Your Kids Too Young To Talk About Race? The Conscious Kid

Tool: Recognizing Microaggressions and the Messages They Send, UCSC, adapted from Sue, Derald Wing

Racial Microaggressions and African American and Hispanic Students in Urban Schools: A Call for Culturally Affirming Education, Allen, Ayana; Scott, Lakia M.; Lewis, Chance W.

The Cycle of Socialization, Adams, M., Bell, L. A., Griffin, P. (1997) Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice

Eight Lessons for Talking About Race, Racism, and Racial Justice, The Opportunity Agenda

The 1619 Project. Nikole Hannah Jones, The New York Times.

Anti-Racist Checklist for Whites. Robin DiAngelo, 2016.

A Critique of "Our Constitution Is Color-Blind.” Neil Gotanda, 1991.

The Case for Reparations. Ta-Nehisi Coates

Civil Rights Protests Have Never Been Popular, Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2017

Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. Kimberle Crenshaw, 1989.

Harvard’s Implicit Bias Test

Killing Us Softly: Navigating State and State-Sanctioned Violence Against Black Men’s Humanity. Charles H.F. Davis III, Keon A. McGuire

Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought. Patricia Hill Collins, 1986.

On Trans Dissemblance: Or, Why Trans Studies Needs Black Feminism. Varun Chaudhry, 2020

Racism, whiteness, and burnout in antiracism movements: How white racial justice activists elevate burnout in racial justice activists of color in the United States, Paul Gorski

Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory. Angela P. Harris, 1990.

Race without Racism: How Higher Education Researchers Minimize Racist Institutional Norms. Shaun Harper, 2012.

Racism Defined. Dismantling Racism.

Spirit-Murdering the Messenger: The Discourse of Fingerpointing as the Law's Response to Racism. Patricia Williams, 1987.

The Subtle Linguistics of White Supremacy. Yawo Brown, 2015.

Welcome To The Anti-Racism Movement — Here’s What You’ve Missed. Ijeoma Oluo, 2017.

White Fragility and the Rules of Engagement. Robin Diangelo, 2015.

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. Peggy McIntosh, 1989.

Whiteness as Property. Cheryl Harris, 1993.

Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory?, Derrick A. Bell, 1995.

Who Gets To Be Afraid in America? Ibram X. Kendi

The Year I Gave Up White Comfort: An Ode to my White “Friends” on Being Better to Black Womxn. Rachel Ricketts, 2019. 

**Before purchasing any books, please check out this list of Black owned bookstores! Many of them will ship your new literary treasures to you right now!

This reading list is quite long. We have broken the list out by type, below.

  • The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.. Michelle Alexander.
  • Being White, Being Good: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility, and Social Justice Pedagogy. Barbara Applebaum. 
  • I Know Why The Caged Birds Sing. Maya Angelou
  • The Fire Next Time. James Baldwin.
  • Giovanni’s Room. James Baldwin.
  • Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
  • Unapologetic: A Black, Queen, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements. Charlene A. Carruthers.
  • Queenie. Candace Carty-Williams.
  • Other Side of Paradise. Staceyann Chin.
  • Between the World and Me. Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • The Water Dancer. Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower. Brittney Cooper.
  • Women, Race, & Class. Angela Y. Davis
  • Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Matthew Desmond
  • White Fragility: Why Its So Hard for White People to Talk About Race. Robin DiAngelo
  • The Souls of Black Folk. W.E.B. Du Bois
  • An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
  • For White Folks Who Teach In The Hood… And the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education. Christopher Emdin
  • Bad Feminist. Roxane Gay
  • Homegoing. Yaa Gyasi.
  • Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. Melissa Harris-Perry.
  • Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Patricia Hill Collins.
  • Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Bell Hooks.
  • Killing Rage: Ending Racism. Bell Hooks.
  • Subtle Acts of Exclusion: How to Understand, Identify, and Stop Microaggressions. Tiffany Jana, Michael Baran.
  • No Tea, No Shade. New Writings in Black Queer Studies. E. Patrick Johnson.
  •  When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in 20th Century America. Ira Katznelson
  • Stamped from the Beginning. Ibram X Kendi.
  • How to be an Anti-Racist. Ibram X Kendi.
  • Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, From Furgeson to Flint and Beyond. Marc Lamont Hill
  • March. (Graphic Novel) John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, Nate Powell
  • Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Teacher Got Wrong. James Loewen.
  • Sister Outsider. Audre Lorde.
  • Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, A Biomythography. Audre Lorde.
  • The Autobiography of Malcolm X
  • The Summer We Got Free. Mia Mckenzie.
  • Dying of Whiteness: How The Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland. Jonathan Metzel.
  • Coming of Age in Mississippi. Anne Moody
  • No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black & Free in America. Darnell L. Moore. 
  • Student Activism, Politics, and Campus Climate in Higher Education. Demetri L. Morgan, Charles H.F. Davis III
  • Beloved. Toni Morrison.
  • The Bluest Eye. Toni Morrison
  • The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Khalil Gilbran Muhammad
  • Their Eyes Were Watching God. Zora Neale Hurston.
  • Half of a Yellow Sun. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
  • Born a Crime: Stories From A South African Childhood. Trevor Noah.
  • Becoming. Michelle Obama.
  • So You Want To Talk About Race. Ijeoma Oluo
  • Since I Laid my Burden Down. Brontez Purnell.
  • Blackballed: The Black and White Politics of Race on America's Campuses. Lawrence Ross.
  • The Color of Law. Richard Rothstein. 
  • Me and White Supremacy. Layla F. Saad
  • Assata, an Autobiography. Assata Shakur.
  • Just Mercy. Bryan Stevenson
  • A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Ronald Takaki.
  • Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together In the Cafeteria? Beverly Daniel Tatum.
  • How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
  • Real Life. Brandon Taylor.
  • The Hate You Give. Angie Thomas.
  • In Search of Our Mothers Gardens. Alice Walker.
  • The Burning House: Jim Crow and the Making of Modern America. Anders Walker.
  • Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. Harriet A. Washington
  • The Warmth of Other Suns. Isabel Wilkerson
  • Native Son. Richard Wright.
  • A People’s History of the United States. Howard Zinn.    

Anti-Racist Reading List by Type:

Book to read on anti-racistBook to read to learn about anti-racism

The 13th (Documentary) - Netflix

American Son (Movie) - Netflix

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (Documentary) - Rent

Dear White People (TV Show & Movie) - Netflix & Rent

The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (Documentary) - Netflix

Do The Right Thing (Movie) -  Rent

Fruitvale Station (Movie) - Rent

The Hate U Give (Movie) - Hulu 

I Am Not Your Negro (Documentary) - Rent

If Beale Street Could Talk (Movie) - Hulu

Just Mercy (Movie) -  Rent (free for the month of June!)

The Kalief Browder Story (Documentary) - Netflix

Loving (Movie) -  Hulu

Moonlight - Netflix

Mudbound (Movie) - Netflix

The Murder of Fred Hampton (Documentary) - Rent

Reconstruction: America After the Civil War (TV Series) - PBS

Rest In Power: The Trayvon Martin Story - Rent

Selma (Movie) - Rent

Teach Us All (Documentary) - Netflix

When They See Us (Television Series) - Netflix

Whose Streets? (Documentary on Ferguson Uprising) - Rent