Research Guides: Anti-Racist Resource List (Haverford College): Where Do I Start / Where Do I Stand?

Introduction to this Guide

This guide is intended to provide the Haverford College community (students, alumni, staff, and faculty) resources for learning about and responding to racism, especially anti-Black racism, in the world, in Philadelphia, and in the classroom. As part of a predominantly white institution, some resources will be aimed at white allies. However, the intention is also to highlight materials related to Black liberation and joy, not only trauma and oppression.

It is a work in progress--it will never be complete and its authors are open to suggestions, comments, and criticism. The last tab of the guide includes a link to a resource recommendation form and contact information.

Getting Started

To facilitate reflection, this section is intended to offer a self-check in of the stage which one is at in the scaffolding of anti-racist learning and action.The following parts describe the different stages one might find oneself and point to suggestions for what to do next. Of course, the stages and resources are not necessarily static or linear in this roughly-divided sequence, and you are encouraged to move back and forth between the resources that you find helpful if necessary.

Note: The resources in each part below are only for an introductory purpose, with a link to more resources in the next sections if interested.

Archive resources:

Here and Now: Resources for Supporting the Black Lives Matter Movement

Awareness and Understanding

If you find yourself:

not against the idea of a color-blind society
seeing racism as individual actions
endorsing the idea that "I'm not a racist if I don't intentionally act in racists ways" or that "I'm not a racist nor an anti-racist"

How to move forward:

being confronted with active racism or actions that highlight privilege
self-education on racism (and reject the desire to ask black folks, indigenous, or people of color to explain racism)

Resources:

I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown
ISBN: 9781524760854
Publication Date: 2018-05-15
Austin Channing Brown's first encounter with a racialized America came at age seven, when she discovered her parents named her Austin to deceive future employers into thinking she was a white man. Growing up in majority-white schools and churches, Austin writes, "I had to learn what it means to love blackness," a journey that led to a lifetime spent navigating America's racial divide as a writer, speaker, and expert helping organizations practice genuine inclusion. In a time when nearly every institution (schools, churches, universities, businesses) claims to value diversity in its mission statement, Austin writes in breathtaking detail about her journey to self-worth and the pitfalls that kill our attempts at racial justice. Her stories bear witness to the complexity of America's social fabric--from Black Cleveland neighborhoods to private schools in the middle-class suburbs, from prison walls to the boardrooms at majority-white organizations.
So You Want to Talk about Race by Ijeoma Oluo
ISBN: 9781580056779
Publication Date: 2018
Widespread reporting on aspects of white supremacy--from police brutality to the mass incarceration of Black Americans--has put a media spotlight on racism in our society. In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo guides readers of all races through subjects ranging from intersectionality and affirmative action to "model minorities" in an attempt to make the seemingly impossible possible: honest conversations about race and racism, and how they infect almost every aspect of American life.
White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo; Michael Eric Dyson (Foreword by)
ISBN: 9780807047415
Publication Date: 2018
The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality. 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.
EBOOK AVAILABLE
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum
ISBN: 9780465060689
Publication Date: 2003 (updated 2017)
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. EBOOK AVAILABLE

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Actions and Allies

If you find yourself:

feeling guilty on white superiority but meanwhile defending that "It's not my fault for being white" or
seeing racist actions intolerable and severely mistaken
finding it hard or awkward to talk about race with family and friends
beginning to think about how I can support anti-racist work

How to move forward:

start from small things in anti-racism and keep learning
you'll eventually become comfortable with the idea of anti-racist and reconcile your identity/privilege with the anti-racist work :D

Resources:

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
ISBN: 9780525509288
Publication Date: 2019-08-13
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 it's 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. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of antiracist ideas--from the most basic concepts to visionary possibilites--that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their posionous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves. Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science with his own personal story of awakening to antiracism. This is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond the awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a just and equitable society.
EBOOK AVAILABLE
Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor by Layla F. Saad; Robin DiAngelo (Foreword by)
ISBN: 9781728209807
Publication Date: 2020-01-28
Updated and expanded from the original workbook (downloaded by nearly 100,000 people), this critical text helps you take the work deeper by adding more historical and cultural contexts, sharing moving stories and anecdotes, and including expanded definitions, examples, and further resources, giving you the language to understand racism, and to dismantle your own biases, whether you are using the book on your own, with a book club, or looking to start family activism in your own home. This book will walk you step-by-step through the work of examining: Examining your own white privilege; What allyship really means Anti-blackness, racial stereotypes, and cultural appropriation; Changing the way that you view and respond to race; How to continue the work to create social change; Awareness leads to action, and action leads to change.
Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race by Derald Wing Sue
ISBN: 9781119241980
Publication Date: 2016-02-01
Most people avoid discussion of race-related topics because of the strong emotions and feelings of discomfort that inevitably accompany such conversations. Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race puts an end to that dynamic by sharing strategies for smoothing conversations about race in a productive manner. A guide for facilitating and participating in difficult dialogues about race, author Derald Wing Sue – an internationally recognized expert on multiculturalism, diversity, and microaggressions – explores the characteristics, dynamics, and meaning behind discussions about race as well as the hidden "ground rules" that inhibit honest and productive dialogue. Through emotional and visceral examples, this book explains why conversations revolving around racial issues are so difficult, and provides guidelines, techniques, and advice for navigating and leading honest and forthright discussions. Readers will develop a stronger ability to build rapport with people unlike themselves, and discover how not talking about race impacts society as a whole.
EBOOK AVAILABLE
Uprooting Racism - 4th Edition: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice by Paul Kivel
ISBN: 9780865718654
Publication Date: 2017-08-28
Powerful strategies and practical tools for white people committed to racial justice. Completely revised and updated, this fourth edition of Uprooting Racism offers a framework around neoliberalism and interpersonal, institutional, and cultural racism, along with stories of resistance and white solidarity. It provides practical tools and advice on how white people can work as allies for racial justice, engaging the reader through questions, exercises, and suggestions for action, and includes a wealth of information about specific cultural groups such as Muslims, people with mixed heritage, Native Americans, Jews, recent immigrants, Asian Americans, and Latino/as.

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Roots of Racism

By now, if you are intrigued to dig into the history and formation of racism from a more comprehensive and fundamental perspective on the pain of potentially unpleasant secrets:

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein
ISBN: 9781631494536
Publication Date: 2018-05-01
Widely heralded as a “masterful” (Washington Post) and “essential” (Slate) history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law offers “the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation” (William Julius Wilson). 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. A groundbreaking, “virtually indispensable” study that has already transformed our understanding of twentieth-century urban history.
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi
ISBN: 9781568585987
Publication Date: 2017
Americans like to insist that we are living in a postracial, color-blind society. In fact, racist thought is alive and well; it has simply become more sophisticated and more insidious. And as historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas in this country have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit. Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history.
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson
ISBN: 9781632864130
Publication Date: 2017-11-02
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, and then the election of America's first black President, led to the expression of white rage that has been as relentless as it has been brutal. Carefully linking these and other historical flashpoints 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.
Whitewashing Race: the Myth of a Color-Blind Society by Michael K. Brown; Martin Carnoy; Elliott Currie; Troy Duster; David B. Oppenheimer
ISBN: 1282358103
Publication Date: 2003-01-01
While not denying the economic advances of black Americans since the 1960s, "Whitewashing Race "draws on new and compelling research to demonstrate the persistence of racism and the effects of organized racial advantage across many institutions in American society including the labor market, the welfare state, the criminal justice system, and schools and universities. Looking beyond the stalled debate over current antidiscrimination policies, the authors also put forth a fresh vision for achieving genuine racial equality of opportunity in a post-affirmative action world.
EBOOK AVAILABLE

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