Unlearn Your Racism, Part 2: What to Read and Where to Find It

So, you say that you'd like to learn more about unlearning your racism, but you're not sure where to start. I'm not pretending to post any kind of exhaustive list of resources here, but I will offer some that I have found helpful. It would be great if any of you want to comment on this post with additional resources. I find that every time I share resources with folks on this I learn about several more. At the moment, I'm not desegregating this list by the race/ethnicity of the author, or by subject.

IMPORTANT NOTE: I want to note that it is an unfortunate trend that white scholars such as myself have tended to legitimize the work of other white scholars rather than properly cite the origin of many ideas about race and racism, which were first advanced by scholars of color. This is particularly egregious among scholars who explore white privilege, many of whom are white and cite predominantly other white scholars...when in fact, scholars of color advanced nearly identical (and even more innovative) ideas for many generations, but called it something else or published the works in non-white journals and with non-white publishing houses. Also, race and racism is not only a black/white phenomenon and unfortunately it isn't restricted to the United States, so, as I do in my scholarly work I urge you all to consider race as a glocal phenomenon, one that is most obviously local and community-specific, but also inextricably influenced by and influencing regional, national, international and global dynamics.

BOOKS
Sorry I'm not enabling all these as hyperlinks, but these books are all fairly easy to find.

John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me
Thomas Kochman, Black and White Styles in Conflict
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
Martin Luther King, Jr, Stride Toward Freedom and A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches
Joe Feagin, Racist America and Systemic Racism
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought
Richard Delgado, Critical Race Theory
Race and Racism: An Introduction, Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban
Cornel West, Race Matters
Richard Wright, The Library Card
bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism
Andrew Hacker, Two Nations
Beverly Tatum, Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?": A Psychologist Explains the Development of Racial Identity
Lisa Delpit, Other People's Children and The Skin that We Speak
Tim Wise, White Like Me
Dalton Conley, Honky
Sonya Douglass Horsford, Learning in a Burning House
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Roots
Ntzoke Shange, For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf
Mica Pollock, Everyday Anti-Racism
Studs Terkel, Race: The American Obsession
Gary Orfield, Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown V. Board of Education
Henry Louis Gates, Colored People: A Memoir
Michael Eric Dyson, Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line
Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well

BIBLIOGRAPHIES
Those of you interested in comprehensive resources can look through the Working Against Racism Bibliography, the Anti-Racism Reference List at Radical Reference, Paul Kivel's Bibliography on Racism, Joe Feagin's Basic Bibliography, APA has a fine Annotated Bibliography of Psychology and Racism, and there are many other fine resources of this kind out there. This is, of course, the kind of activity that scholars love, as it makes life a little easier to have a central location from which to find resources. My only caution is that these are not usually interdisciplinary and many are not international/global, so I would urge you to draw from these, but also explore others that warehouse a variety of sources.


WEB SITES
I love the American Anthropological Association's Understanding Race Project web site. It is multi-media, interactive, and includes everything from teaching resources to scholarly position papers. Race: The Power of an Illusion is also a great resource, and its main points are summarized here. This section of the Global Issues web site is a little thin, but decent site to raise your awareness of racism as a global phenomenon.


BLOGS
Stuff White People Like
Racism Review
Resist Racism
Context of White Supremacy


FILMS
Hollywood Shuffle (satire)
I'm Gonna Get You Sucka (satire)
Eye of the Storm & A Class Divided (Documentary)
Eyes on the Prize (Documetary Series)
List of Racism-Related Films
List of Documentary Films about Racism

This is a start! Please add comments and resources, and I will update this post.