Additional Resources for Anti-Racism

America for Americans:  A History of Xenophobia in the United States.  Erika Lee.  Basic Books, 2019.
Copies at Cary Library and throughout Minuteman Library Network (print, audio and E-book)

Between the World and Me.  Ta-Nehisi Coates.  One World, 2015.
Copies at Cary Library and throughout Minuteman Library Network (print, audio and E-book)An open letter from Coates to his son written in an effort to teach him about what it is to “grow up Black” in America, and the pain that involves.

Caste.  Isabel Wilkerson.  Random House, 2020.
Copies at Cary Library and throughout Minuteman Library Network (print, audio and E-book)Wilkerson asserts that it is more than race that defines the relationship between Black and White America, but, rather, an artificial, yet fully entrenched, hierarchical system very similar to the caste system of India and the treatment of the Jews by Nazi Germany.

Charleston Syllabus:  Readings on race, racism and racial violence.  Chad Williams, Kidada E. Williams, and Keisha N. Blain, Eds.  The University of Georgia Press, 2016.Available in print at Cary Library and throughout Minuteman Library Network

Contemporary essays and readings from scholarly works compiled in the wake of the 2015 Charleston, SC, massacre.  Excerpts include works by W.E.B. DuBois, Barak Obama, Marcus Garvey, Fannie Lou Hamer and so many others.

The Color of the Law:  A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.  Richard Rothstein.  Liveright, 2017.
Copies at Cary Library and throughout Minuteman Library Network (print, audio and E-book)Much lauded work on residential segregation and how it came to be.

My Grandmother’s Hands:  Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies.  Resmaa Menakem.  Central Recovery Press, 2017.
Copies at Cary Library and throughout Minuteman Library Network (print, audio and E-book)The author, a therapist, argues that physical trauma becomes psychological trauma that is carried in our bodies through generations.  It afflicts us all, regardless of skin color.

How to be an Antiracist.  Ibram Kendi.  One World, 2019.
Copies at Cary Library and throughout Minuteman Library Network (print, audio and E-book)Ground-breaking.  Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, and others. Full of definitions, but, much more to the point, it offers a whole new way of thinking — that there is no such thing as being “not racist” – there is only racist and anti-racist, and we all move back and forth between these categories depending upon the individual action.  It provides a vision for enabling us see the full humanity in each other.

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.  Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.  Beacon Press, 2014.
Copies at Cary Library and throughout Minuteman Library Network (print, audio and E-book)Now considered by many an essential 400-year history of Native American peoples and events that radically reframes the picture many of us learned growing up.

The Making of Asian America.  Erika Lee. Simon & Schuster | 2015.
Copies at Cary Library and throughout Minuteman Library Network (print, audio and E-book)Widely reviewed and praised for its comprehensive accounting of the history of Asian Americans here and the role they have played in the development of this country.

The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness.  Michelle Alexander.  The New Press, 2020.Copies at Cary Library and throughout Minuteman Library Network (print, audio and E-book)

This work makes the case that the overt racism of the Jim Crow Laws that targeted people of color and characterized the time after Reconstruction have been replaced by the tool of mass incarceration, particularly tied to the war on drugs.

The Second Founding:  How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution.  Eric Foner.  W.W. Norton, 2020.
Copies at Cary Library and throughout Minuteman Library Network (print, audio and E-book)Top scholar, historian, Eric Foner explains how the 13th   (abolishing slavery), 14th (establishing equal protection under the law) and 15th amendments (defending the right to vote, regardless of race, color or previous condition of servitude) came to be and the essential roles they each play in preserving true equality for American citizens.

Slavery by Another Name:  the Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.  Douglas A. Blackmon.  Anchor, 2009.
Copies at Cary Library and throughout Minuteman Library Network (print, audio and E-book)A disturbing book that shows through multiple individual stories that despite the fact that slavery was technically abolished by the Constitution, it continued de facto in a variety of forms to World War II.

So You Want to Talk about Race.  Ijeoma Oluo.  Seal Press, 2018.
Copies at Cary Library and throughout Minuteman Library Network (print, audio and E-book)This book helps provide the language and understanding to encourage honest, empathetic conversations about racial prejudice that affects each of our lives.

The Souls of Black Folks. W.E.B. DuBois, 1903. (Full-text at Project Gutenberg)
Available in many editions throughout the Minuteman Library Network, but also freely available at Project Gutenberg.Brutally honest, classic work of American literature, sociology and African-American history.

Stamped from the Beginning:  The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.  Ibram X. Kendi.  Bold Type Books, 2017.Copies at Cary Library and throughout Minuteman Library Network (print, audio and E-book)

National Book Award Winner.  Called “magisterial”, this is the title that provides the foundation and greater depth underpinning his young adult version, Stamped:  Racism, Antiracism, and You:  A Remix of the National Book Award-Winning Stamped from the Beginning (a Summer 2021 Reading Challenge title).

The Sum of Us:  What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.  Heather McGhee.  One World, 2021.Copies at Cary Library and throughout Minuteman Library Network (print, audio and E-book)

The author, an economist with a JD degree, shows how fiscal policy that disadvantages some, hurts all of us.  Ibram Kendi said in his review:  “This is the book I’ve been waiting for.”

Waking Up White, and Finding Myself in the Story of Race.  Debby Irving.  Elephant Room Press, 2014.
Copies at Cary Library and throughout Minuteman Library Network (print, audio and E-book)A middle-aged, white woman from Winchester talks about her awakening to white privilege.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.  Isabel Wilkerson.  Vintage, 2011.Copies at Cary Library and throughout Minuteman Library Network (print, audio and E-book)

Truly, an epic telling of the true stories of three individuals as they made their ways, separately, north or west from the Jim Crow South to settle and raise their families in places that offered, often, more opportunity, but with still much pain.

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.   Carol Anderson.  Bloomsbury, 2016.Copies at Cary Library and throughout Minuteman Library Network (print, audio and E-book)

Widely praised and honored, including this from The New York Times Book Review: “[White Rage] is an extraordinarily timely and urgent call to confront the legacy of structural racism bequeathed by white anger and resentment, and to show its continuing threat to the promise of American democracy”.