Skip to Main Content

Allyship and Anti-Oppression: A Resource Guide

Welcome!

Welcome to the Anti-Oppression and Allyship Resource Guide!  

This guide was developed in 2013 in response to requests from Swarthmore students, faculty, and staff to clarify terminology that came up in discussions around diversity and inclusion. (Learn more here.

As of 2019, this site is no longer actively updated, but the definitions, articles, and other resources are still available.

Racial Justice Reading List

Check out a student-created reading list that features texts from novels to speeches, all focused around the idea of racial justice and injustice. This list originated from the Anti-Racism Coalition of Swarthmore (ARCS), with initial contributions gathered on facebook.

If you're a student, you can access the doc directly and post your own suggestions -- while, of course, exercising good judgment about your positionality and the writer's positionality. Organizers are asking to focus the list on texts created by people who have directly experienced racism, and that posters with a primarily academic understanding of racism exercise restraint. (Not sure what "positionality" means? Check our definitions page, and think before posting.)

Regardless of your relationship to Swarthmore, you can also view the texts from the reading list in a box on our race and racism page. There are already many texts on the list, most of which are books, so treat it as a place where you can get suggestions for your next long read on race and racism.