General resources

Books

Non-Fiction

  • Bad Feminist - Roxane Gay

  • Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates

  • A Colony in a Nation - Chris Hayes

  • The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America - Richard Rothstein

  • Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower - Brittany Cooper

  • Heavy - Kiese Laymon

  • Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption - Bryan Stevenson

  • The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander

  • Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays - Eula Biss

  • A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to the Present - Howard Zinn

  • Thick - Tressie McMillan Cottom

  • The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration - Isabel Wilkerson

  • White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism - Robin DiAngelo

  • What Does It Mean to Be White - Robin DiAngelo

  • Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? - Beverly Daniel-Tatum

Fiction

  • An American Marriage - Tayari Jones

  • The Hate U Give - Angie Thomas

  • Sing, Unburied, Sing - Jesmyn Ward

  • The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead

Poetry

  • Citizen: An American Lyric  - Claudia Rankine

  • Electric Arches - Eve L. Ewing

  • Wade in the Water - Tracy K. Smith (U.S. Poet Laureate)

  • Brown - Kevin Young

Films

  • 13th

  • America to Me

  • Dear White People

  • Fruitvale Station

  • Get Out

  • I Am Not Your Negro

  • Sorry to Bother You

Audio and Video

“School Segregation in 2018 with Nikole Hannah-Jones” on Chris Hayes’s podcast, “Why Is This Happening?” 7/31/2018
Why are American schools resegregating? Over 60 years since the Brown v. Board of Education ruling forced schools to integrate, the nation is witnessing schools become increasingly segregated. So how did we get to this point? Nikole Hannah-Jones has firsthand knowledge of the system. Beginning in second grade, she was bussed to a wealthy, majority white school as part of a desegregation initiative in her home town. Now, she’s an award-winning investigative reporter writing for The New York Times magazine, doing extensive work on school segregation. In this episode Nikole Hannah-Jones explains why we continue to see segregation in the classroom and how, if at all, the education system can truly desegregate. [She also talks about resource hoarding and the inequities that exist in supposedly integrated schools.]

“The Personal Is Political with Brittany Cooper” on Chris Hayes’s podcast, “Why is This Happening?” 5/15/2018
Talking about the politics of identity, particularly in the age of Donald Trump, can feel like you’re walking through a minefield. Whether it’s the President’s immigration policy or two black men arrested in a Starbucks, Chris Hayes argues that all the political debates we’re having are wrapped up in personal politics. But when it comes to confronting those personal politics and examining the power struggles that they invoke, conversations tend to get tense and defensive. Author and Professor Brittney Cooper’s story is compelling and traumatic and illuminating and she uses these pieces to explore how the personal becomes political within her own life in her new book, “Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower”. If there’s anyone who can talk about the politics of identity, feminism, and how we can understand those ideas through the lens of Beyoncé, it is Brittney Cooper.

“Let’s Talk About Whiteness”
Writer Eula Biss interviewed by Krista Tippett on radio program “On Being”
“If you can’t talk about something, you can’t think about something. I've worked with students who could barely let themselves think, they were so scared of thinking the wrong thing.”
This conversation was inspired by Eula Biss’s stunning New York Times essay “White Debt,” which had this metaphor at its core: ”The state of white life is that we’re living in a house we believe we own but that we’ve never paid off.” She spoke with us in 2016 and we aired this last year, but we might just put this conversation out every year, as we’re all novices on this territory. Eula Biss had been thinking and writing about being white and raising white children in a multi-racial world for a long time. She helpfully opens up words and ideas like “complacence,” “guilt,” and something related to privilege called “opportunity hoarding.” To be in this uncomfortable conversation is to realize how these words alone, taken seriously, can shake us up in necessary ways — and how the limits of words make these conversations at once more messy and more urgent.

The Loving Generation - web documentary series
In 1967, the Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia overturned all laws outlawing interracial marriage. The Loving Generation tells the story of a generation of Americans born to one black parent and one white parent. Their narratives provide a fascinating and unique window into the borderland between “blackness” and “whiteness”, and, in some cases, explode fixed ideas about race and identity.

Black Experiences in White America

What Can White People Do?