White supremacy & empire

This section has readings about the impacts of racism, marginalization, and white supremacy. This section is divided by topic: racism, colonialism, and whiteness, as well as theoretical framework and further resources. If you are interested in resources about specific communities check out our Race & Identity section.

RACISM

Readings

• Something more is required of us now. What? by Michelle Alexander

• Teaching Hard History, Southern Poverty Law Center report on how slavery is taught

• Rosa Parks poem, Atlanta Team of the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival

• Teaching Resistance: The Racial Politics of Mass Media (from “Killing Rage, Ending Racism”) by bell hooks (read our summary here)

• Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States by Edward Bonilla-Silva (full book) (read our summary here)

• Defining Racism: Can we talk? by Beverley Daniel Tatum

• The Complexity of Identity: "Who Am I?" by Beverley Daniel Tatum

• Black Skins, White Masks by Franz Fanon (full book)

• Coincidence or conspiracy? Whiteness, policy, and the persistence of the Black/White achievement gap by David Gillborn

• Teaching to Transgress: Education as a Practice of Freedom by bell hooks (full book)

• Let America be American Again by Langston Hughes

• Are you a racist? 'No' isn't a good enough answer, video commentary by Marlon James

• 5 Signs That I'm Struggling With Internalized Racism by Maisha Z. Johnson

• How the Supreme Court Has Made it Impossible to Challenge Systemic Racism by Jennifer Louribel

• The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House by Audre Lorde

• Unresolved Identities: Discourse, Ambivalence, and Urban Immigrant Students by Bic Ngo (full book)

• Chapter 4, "Racial Formation" from Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s by Michael Omi and Howard Winant

• Hybridity: Limits, Transformations, Prospects by Anjali Prabhu (full book)

• Emmet poem, Philadelphia Team, Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival

• What's so critical about critical race theory? by A. Javier Trevino, Michelle A. Harris and Devon Wallace

• Bring in Brown to Keep Black Down, poem by Alok Vaid-Menon (video)

• Color film was built for white people. Here's what it did for dark skin. Vox video

• Racism’s psychological toll by Jenna Wortham

• Myth of the Welfare Queen: A Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist's Portrait of Women on the Line. David Zucchino. Simon & Schuster; 1st edition (February 25, 1999)

• Social media conversations about race An analysis by the Pew Research Center

• Lynching in America interactive database

• Transatlantic Slave Trade Database

Syllabi

• #BlackIslamSyllabus by Kayla Renee Wheeler

• Black Lives Matter Syllabus: James Baldwin and Malcom X 

• Black Lives Matter Syllabus: Race, Resistance, and Populist Protest

• Immigration Syllabus, Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota (in response to 2016 presidential election)

• 1619 Project by the New York Times Magazine

• Islamophobia Is Racism Syllabus

• Police Violence Against Natives Syllabus

• Syllabus for White People to Educate Themselves (in response to 2016 presidential election)

• Urban Design Syllabus on Race and Justice, created by students at Harvard

• Welfare Reform Syllabus, African American Intellectual History Society

COLONIALISM

• Timeline of U.S. Empire, website by students in Macalester College class “The Empire Strikes Back”

• Posts and Pasts: A Theory on Postcolonialism by Alfred J. Lopez (full book)

• Zionists should be excluded from left-oriented protests by Steven Salaita

• The Forgotten Slaves by Margaret Ellen Newell

• Orientalism, Edward Said. Vintage Books, 1979. PDF of introduction here.

• Unsettling settler colonialism: The discourse and politics of settlers, and solidarity with Indigenous nations by Corey Snelgrove, Rita Dhamoon, Jeff Corntassel

• Decolonization is Not a Metaphor by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (read our summary here)

• Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples by Linda Tuhiwai Smith. Zed Books; 2 edition (May 10, 2012)

• “Decolonizing together: Moving Beyond a Politics of Solidarity Toward a Practice of Decolonization” by Harsha Walia

• Whose Land is it Anyway? A Manual for Decolonization, edited by Peter MacFarlane and Nicole Schabus

WHITENESS

• Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person by Gina Crosley-Corcoran

• The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege by Robert Jensen

• Invisible Privilege: What White Men Don't See by Mark Maier

• White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh

• All About Eve: White Studies and Getting Over Whiteness by David R. Roediger

• White Spaces by Tobin Miller Shearer

• White Benefits Checklist

• The Trouble with White Women: An Interview with Kyla Schuller by Nawal Arjini

• White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo (this is an article, not her full book, also called White Fragility)

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

• Critical Theory Glossary

• Introduction to Critical Race Theory syllabus by Professor Adrienne Keene, Brown University

• Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (full book)

• The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon (preface by Jean-Paul Sartre)

• Nietzche, Genealogy, History by Michel Foucault (From "Truth and Method")

• Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire or here