Resources on Race in the United States
Inspired by our baptismal covenant to respect dignity of every human being, we offer the following list of resources on issues of race.
Books
Non-Fiction
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (2020). HSP offered a book study on this extremely important and influential book whose argument is that we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it. Instead of making African-Americans slaves, the United States now makes them criminals and incarcerates them to exploit their labor, vent racist hatred, and make money for owners of for-profit prisons.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. editor, Bearing Witness (1998). Also an HSP book-study book, this collection of excerpts from various African-American autobiographies describes what it has been like to be black in America, from slavery to the present day.
James Forman, Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (2018). Forman shows us that the first substantial cohort of black mayors, judges, and police chiefs took office amid a surge in crime and drug addiction. Many feared that the gains of the civil rights movement were being undermined by lawlessness―and thus embraced tough-on-crime measures, including longer sentences and aggressive police tactics. In the face of skyrocketing murder rates and the proliferation of open-air drug markets, they believed they had no choice. But the policies they adopted would have devastating consequences for residents of poor black neighborhoods.
David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2019). Blight presents Douglass as a complex and flawed human being, but also a brilliant and tireless orator, activist and advocate for blacks' freedom and equality. Through his struggles in the years leading up to the Civil War and during the profound failures of Reconstruction, we better understand how deep-seated today's racism truly is.
Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns (2010) She tells the story of the Great Migration--six million Black citizens who fled the South for the North and West in search of a better life, from World War I to 1970. This is done through the lives of three black protagonists.
Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origin of our Discontents (2020). Wilkerson distinguishes 7 beliefs or practices that characterize caste in societies in India, Nazi Germany, and the United States: divine will put the system in place, it gets inherited from parent to child, it forbids marriage between castes, it posits that lower castes pollute upper ones, it denies lower caste people entry into the best occupations, it stigmatizes and dehumanizes lower caste people, it uses terror and cruelty to enforce the system, and it teaches the inherent superiority of one caste's members to those below it. With this cross-cultural analysis, Wilkerson clarifies and underlines the heinousness of America's treatment of Negroes.
John Lewis and Andrew Aydin, March: Book One (2013). This is the first in a trilogy of three graphic novels about the civil rights movement by Congressman John Lewis, one of its key figures. His commitment to justice and nonviolence has taken him from an Alabama sharecropper's farm to the halls of Congress, from a segregated schoolroom to the 1963 March on Washington, and from receiving beatings from state troopers to receiving the Medal of Freedom from the first African-American president. Book One spans John Lewis' youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., the birth of the Nashville Student Movement, and its battle to tear down segregation through nonviolent lunch counter sit-ins, building to a stunning climax on the steps of City Hall.
As an addendum to this, there is the following essay that Rep. John Lewis penned shortly before his death. He asked that it be published the day of his funeral. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/opinion/john-lewis-civil-rights-america.html
Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy (2013). Bryan Stevenson was a young Harvard-trained defense 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. In Alabama, Stevenson battled racist attitudes among police, prosecutors and judges, malicious prosecution, made-up evidence, all-white juries, harsh penal systems and a well-oiled death machine, all to rescue black men wrongly sitting on death row, awaiting execution. He didn’t win every case, but enough to create some lasting changes and save innocent lives in the process. An inspiring book about the possibility of reform and redemption, even as it indicts the racism of America's criminal justice system.
Jim Wallis and Bryan Stevenson, America's Original Sin (2017) Fifty years ago, Wallis was driven away from his faith by a white church that considered dealing with racism taboo. His participation in the civil rights movement brought him back when he discovered a faith that commands racial justice. Yet, as recent tragedies confirm, we continue to suffer from the legacy of racism. The old patterns of white privilege are colliding with the changing demographics of a diverse nation. But faith communities can help lead the way to grassroots change. Probing yet positive, biblically rooted yet highly practical, this book shows people of faith how they can work together to overcome the embedded racism in America.
Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law (2017) Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods.
Van Jones, Beyond the Messy Truth (2017) A longtime progressive activist with deep roots in the conservative South, Jones has made it his mission to challenge voters and viewers to stand in one another’s shoes and disagree constructively. He wants to tackle rural and inner-city poverty, unemployment, addiction, unfair incarceration, and the devastating effects of the pollution-based economy on both coal country and our urban centers. He shares memories from his decades of activism on behalf of working people, inspiring stories of ordinary citizens who became champions of their communities, and little-known examples of cooperation in the midst of partisan conflict.
Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (1949) This acclaimed theologian and religious leader demonstrates how the gospel may be read as a manual of resistance for the poor and disenfranchised in a book that inspired Martin Luther King and shaped the civil rights movement.
Debby Irving, Waking Up White (2014) Irving tells her own story of growing up with white privileges--material advantages, but also “a whole host of intangible benefits” like optimism, confidence, and trust in American institutions. “My life had been built on more than a diploma, a paycheck, fresh fruit, or medicine when I needed it; it had been cemented with a sense of access, belonging, and optimism”—feelings that she took for granted but that many blacks didn’t share.
Shelly Tochluk, Witnessing Whiteness: The Journey into Racial Awareness and Antiracist Action (2022) The author combines authentic storytelling, nuanced analysis, and compelling voices from a collection of cross-race guides to lead readers through a self-reflective process that creates clarity about today’s challenging and often contradicting messages about how to be antiracist.
Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (2018) 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.
Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Graham Hill, Healing Our Broken Humanity (2018) Based on their work with diverse churches, colleges, and other organizations, Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Graham Hill offer Christian practices that can bring healing and hope to a broken world. They provide ten ways to transform society, from lament and repentance to relinquishing power, reinforcing agency, and more.
Fiction
Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give (2017) This novel is a powerful portrayal of Starr Carter, a teenage black girl who is the passenger in a car pulled over by a white police officer. She lives in a poor, predominantly black neighborhood but attends an elite predominantly white high school. She narrates her awakening to issues of racism, social injustice, and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Susan Devan Harness, Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption (2019). White social workers took Harness away from her Salish birth family because her addict mother neglected her, and a white couple from Billings adopted her when she was just over a year old. Her adoptive parents raised her without telling her anything about her Native culture and family. Though Susan was raised white in a white culture, whites did not accept her as white, though that was the only culture and way of being that she knew. As an adult, Harness reconnected with her Salish family. But she could not fit in there either because unconsciously she acted white. Bitterroot describes the author's struggles to be part of the Native world and to reclaim her heritage.
Min Jin Lee, Pachinko (2017) This is a multi-generational novel about a Korean family in Japan from the 1930s to the 1990s. Their struggles for acceptance and success in the face of deep-rooted bigotry and persistent Japanese stereotypes prove fatal for some and corrosive for others; by the end, no one is left untouched. Themes that weave through our society these days—immigration, racism, sexual inequality, poverty—are all reflected in this intimate, touching and yes, heartbreaking, tale of the day-to-day lives of the family.
Articles, Videos, and On-Line Resources
https://projects.seattletimes.com/2016/under-our-skin/#institutional_racism--This is a series of short video clips helpful in understanding how we talk about race. It tackles terms like institutional racism, microaggression, colorblindness, and white fragility. It is insightful to hear a variety of people from all kinds of backgrounds describe how they understand these terms and topics.
United Shades of America is a CNN program at 8 p.m. Sunday nights. Stand-up comic and host W. Kamua Bell engages people from diverse communities in one-on-one conversations about racism, poverty, crime, education, and other important social concerns. Previous episodes can be viewed on HBOMAX.
Dismantlingracism.org From 2005 until May of 2017, dR Works (short for Dismantling Racism Works) conducted workshops nationwide to help organizations learn about and break down systemic racism. Since the end of its workshops, dRWorks has offered its web-based workbooks for free online to individuals and groups wanting to learn more about the subject.
Lori Lakin Hutcherson, “My White Friend Asked Me on Facebook to Explain White Privilege. I Decided to Be Honest,” an article that appeared in 2017 in Yes! magazine. Hutcherson describes incidents that happened throughout her life and that of friends to make the concept of white privilege understandable through events in our everyday lives. You can read it here: https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2017/09/08/my-white-friend-asked-me-on-facebook-to-explain-white-privilege-i-decided-to-be-honest/
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G-dUyz50GH7xD7D6WI4RGoCGTq7doEFh/view?usp=sharing Mark Charles, a Native American activist, author, and public speaker, discusses Race, Trauma, and the Doctrine of Discovery.
https://youtu.be/AGUwcs9qJXY The video is a rapid-fire “worst hits” presentation by Phil Vischer of federal and state policies that have created and perpetuated systemic racism in our country. Vischer narrates with the aid of simple graphics that aptly make the case that we did not get where we are in this country without a lot of help from government policies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Tek9h3a5wQ James Baldwin and William Buckley debate the proposition that “The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro” at Cambridge University in 1965.