Blog Details

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

Anti-Racism Resources

This blog post is a compliation of many different lists from many different contributing authors. This is why somethings may overlap. This lists continues to be added to.

The table Below contains a ‘short list’ with sources from a variety of channels. This list contains content from Black authors and content creators. The longer list of resources underneath the chart contains resources from authors and content creators of multiple races. This comes from Threshold Choir of the East Bay as a resource for its white members.

Further Learning: 

The list below is both long, and incomplete. If we missed one of your favorites, please let us know so we can add it! We also recommend trying to find ways to integrate content created by diverse voices into your regular content consumption for continuous and long-term exposure to diverse voices. — whether in news resources, movies and TV, books, etc.

Articles & educational tools: 

• Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, Peggy McIntosh (great primer on some of the ways privilege presents itself for white folks)
• 75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice
• Showing Up For Racial Justice’s educational toolkits
• What is Critical Race Theory (CRT)?

Non-fiction books: 

• My Grandmother’s Hands, Resmaa Menakem
• White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, Robin Diangelo: (here’s a podcast primer)
• Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
• Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
• The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
• The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander
• Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson
• Ibram X. Kendi’s Reading List
• Freedom is a Constant Struggle, Angela Davis

Podcasts

• Serial Season 3 – The Cleveland Justice System (storytelling about institutional racism in the Cleveland justice system.)
• The Diversity Gap – Specifically this one.
• Brené with Ibram X. Kendi on How to Be an Antiracist
• The Invention of Race
• 1619 (podcast from the New York Times)
• Scene on Radio (Seeing White Miniseries)
• Code Switch Podcast (three more recommendations Political Prisoners? and After the Cameras Leave, A Decade Of Watching Black People Die)

Cinema | Miniseries | TV

• Blindspotting (filmed and based in Oakland)
• When They See Us
• Clemency
• If Beale Street Could Talk
• Selma
• Fruitvale Station (filmed and based in Oakland)
• Just Mercy

Fiction

• Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
• Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward
• The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas
• Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
• Kindred, Octavia Butler

This following list comes from Nina Simons from Bioneers

Voices to Follow

As Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) share their lived experiences of oppression and discrimination — as well as their wisdom for moving forward to dismantle the systems that perpetuate it — the value of listening to these voices right now cannot be understated. Here are a few of so many inspiring  BIPOC organizers and leaders that you should be paying attention to.

• Patrisse Cullors, best known for being a co-founding partner of the Black Lives Matter movement, also wrote the New York Times best-selling book, “When They Call You a Terrorist.”
• Kimberlé Crenshaw is the executive director of the African American Policy forum and the host of their podcast, Intersectionality Matters!
• The Audre Lorde Project is a community organizing center for LGBT and gender non-conforming people of color.
• Code Switch is an NPR podcast hosted by a multi-racial, multi-generational team of journalists. Their episodes span overlapping themes of race, ethnicity and culture, how they play out in our lives and communities, and how all of this is shifting.
• PolicyLink is a national research and action institute advancing racial and economic equity by Lifting Up What Works®.
• Dr. Rupa Marya is a doctor, professor and leading activist whose work connects medicine with social justice.
• The Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, directed by professor john a. powell, advances research, policy, & communications in order to realize a world where all belong.
• Anti-Racist Research Policy Center convenes varied specialists to figure out novel and practical ways to understand, explain, and solve seemingly intractable problems of racial inequity and injustice.
• The Southern Poverty Law Center, founded in 1971, combats hate, intolerance, and discrimination through education and litigation.
• Repairers of the Breach is a nonprofit organization that seeks to build a moral agenda rooted in a framework that uplifts our deepest moral and constitutional values to redeem the heart and soul of our country.
• Color of Change is an online racial justice organization that designs campaigns powerful enough to end practices that unfairly hold Black people back, & champion solutions that move us all forward.
• Maya Wiley is a legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, as well as a University professor at the New School in NYC.
• Dream Corps closes prison doors and opens doors of opportunity. This nonprofit organization brings people together across racial, social, and partisan lines to create a future with freedom and dignity for all.
• White Awake is a network of people combatting white supremacy by focusing on educational resources and spiritual practices designed to engage people who’ve been socially categorized as “white” in the creation of a just and sustainable society.
• Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) is a national network of groups and individuals organizing white people for racial justice.

How to Support the Protesters Demanding Justice for George Floyd

This Teen Vogue article shares important resources — such as bail funds and organizations to know about — for helping protesters in need, along with further tools for getting involved and making your voice heard.

Read more here

What We’re Tracking:

• From Democracy Now!: “‘America’s Moment of Reckoning’: Cornel West Says Nationwide Uprising Is Sign of ‘Empire Imploding’” | As thousands from coast to coast took to the streets this weekend to protest the state-sanctioned killing of Black people, and the nation faces its largest public health crisis in generations and the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression, professor Cornel West calls the U.S. a “predatory capitalist civilization obsessed with money, money, money.”
• From MSNBC: “Nikole Hannah-Jones: Black Americans are ‘demanding their full citizenship’” | Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times Magazinereporter Nikole Hannah-Jones and New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb discuss policing’s roots in slave patrols and enforcement of white supremacy during Reconstruction.
• From LA Times: “Op-Ed: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Don’t understand the protests? What you’re seeing is people pushed to the edge” | Kareem Abdul-Jabbar notes that “black protesters in the age of Trump and coronavirus are people pushed to the edge, not because they want bars and nail salons open, but because they want to live. To breathe.”
• From the New Yorker archives: “Letter from a Region in My Mind” | This essay by James Baldwin opens with a thematic quote from 1962: “Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”
• From the Center for Whole Communities: “Cut the Check or Count Me Out: ‘Good Whites,’ Diversity Diversions & A New Look at an Old Idea” | This blog post calls out white liberal habits of tokenizing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which seek to replace the true work of liberating Black, Indigenous and/or people of color from systematic oppression.

Ways To Become Involved

Action 

• Black Lives Matter – www.blacklivesmatter.com
• Campaign Zero – www.joincampaignzero.org/#vision
• Color of Change – www.colorofchange.org
• TED: How You Can be an Ally in the Fight for Racial Justice – https://ideas.ted.com/how-you-can-be-an-ally-in-the-fight-for-racial-justice/
• Showing Up for Racial Justice – www.showingupforracialjustice.org
• Support Black-Owned Businesses – https://www.supportblackowned.com/
• Vote! – https://www.usa.gov/register-to-vote
• Week of Action In Defense of for Black Lives – www.m4bl.org/week-of-action/
• Write directly to your local legislators. To find who your legislators are, visit – https://openstates.org/find_your_legislator/
• “75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice” – www.medium.com/equality-includes-you/what-white-people-can-do-for-racial-justice-f2d18b0e0234

Donate

• Black Lives Matter – www.blacklivesmatter.com
• Color of Change – www.colorofchange.org
• Ella Baker Center for Human Rights – www.ellabakercenter.org
• NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.- www.naacpldf.org
• ACLU Black Lives Matter – https://www.aclu.org/issues/racial-justice/race-and-criminal-justice/blacklivesmatter

Educate 

• Anti-Racism Resources – http://bit.ly/ANTIRACISMRESOURCES
• My Grandmothers’s Hands:Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem. This book deals with the somatic path of untangling racism from the trauma inprints in black, white and police bodies and how to undo them. Highy recommended