for people new to anti-racism:
“This anti-racist syllabus is for people realizing they were never taught how to be anti-racist. How to treat all the racial groups as equals. How to look at the racial inequity all around and look for the racist policies producing it, and the racist ideas veiling it. This list is for people beginning their anti-racist journey after a lifetime of defensively saying, “I’m not a racist” or “I can’t be a racist.” Beginning after a lifetime of assuring themselves only bad people can be racist.”
— IBRAM X. KENDI
non-beginners, start here:
First, we would like to acknowledge something that isn’t being championed enough: the original “Antiracism Booklists” were created by Black Librarians. In 1939, due to the appalling portrayals of black characters in children’s books, Augusta Baker (revolutionary American librarian and storyteller) amassed a collection of books that provided inspiring black role models while accurately portraying African-American life to young people of all races. She also catalyzed children’s book authors and supportive publishers to produce more inspiring works for young readers. From Clara Stanton Jones desegregating libraries to Dorothy B. Porter decolonizing the Dewey Decimal System, Black Librarians dedicated their lives to racial justice.
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research library in Harlem for 95 years and part of the New York Public Library, digitized many of Augusta Baker's bibliographies.The Schomburg also digitized a few titles from the various bibliographies (before 1963) that were out-of-copyright.
We also recommend Ibram X. Kendi’s Antiracist Reading List.
In addition to Kendi’s list and August Baker’s bibliographies, we’ve compiled our own list (including Kendi’s writing). It is a compilation of recommendations from Black leaders, Black authors, Black academics, Black activists, Black orgs, and a few recommendations that strongly impacted Dorrance Dance artists, personally - along with a list of essential Black authors and works below.
Antiracism is a commitment to changing practices in every area of your life.
When buying books, make sure to resist the mindless comfort of ordering from corporations and instead, buy from and support black-owned bookstores & businesses.
The Fire Next Time
by James Baldwin
"Basically the finest essay I’ve ever read. [...] Baldwin refused to hold anyone’s hand. He was both direct and beautiful all at once. He did not seem to write to convince you. He wrote beyond you." - Ta-Nehisi Coates
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
by Carol Anderson
As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as "black rage," historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable op-ed in the Washington Post showing that this was, instead, "white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames," she writes, "everyone had ignored the kindling." From the end of the Civil War to our combustible present, Anderson reframes the conversation about race, chronicling powerful forces opposed to black progress in America.
Me and White Supremacy
by Layla Saad
A 28-day challenge to combat racism, change the world, and become a good ancestor- leads readers through a journey of understanding their white privilege and participation in white supremacy, so that they can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on black, indigenous and people of color, and in turn, help other white people do better, too.
How to be an Anti-Racist
by Ibram X. Kendi
Reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America--but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. Instead of working with the policies and system we have in place, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it.
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas
by Ibram X. Kendi
Racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Instead, they were devised and honed by some of the most brilliant minds of each era to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation’s racial disparities in everything from wealth to health. ‘Stamped’ chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history.
Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?
by Mumia Abu-Jamal
This collection of short meditations, written from a prison cell, captures the past two decades of police violence that gave rise to Black Lives Matter while digging deeply into the history of the United States.
So You Want to Talk About Race
by Ijeoma Oluo
"A challenging, sympathetic and beautifully organized how-to manual for anyone who wants to address problems of race and racism in the U.S." - Shelf Awareness
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
by Michelle Alexander
A stunning account of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status—denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement and challenges the civil rights community—and all of us—to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America.
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?
by Beverly Daniel Tatum
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? 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.
The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race
Edited by Jesmyn Ward
Ward has turned to some of her generation’s most original thinkers and writers, gathered short essays, a memoir, and a few essential poems to engage the question of race in the United States.
Black Feminist Thought
by Patricia Hill Collins
Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African-American women outside academe. She provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. The result is a superbly crafted book that provides the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought.
Hood Feminism: Notes From The Woman That A Movement Forgot
by Mikki Kendall
A potent and electrifying critique of the legitimacy of the modern feminist movement. Arguing that it has chronically failed to address the needs of all but a few women Kendall draws on her own experiences with hunger, violence, and hypersexualization, along with incisive commentary on politics, pop culture, the stigma of mental health, and more.
Scenes of Subjection
by Saidiya Hartman
A provocative and original exploration of racial subjugation during slavery and its aftermath illumining the forms of terror and resistance that shaped black identity while examining the forms of domination that usually go undetected; in particular, the encroachments of power that take place through notions of humanity, enjoyment, protection, rights, and consent.
How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir
by Saeed Jones
A stunning coming-of-age story of a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape - each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another—and to one another—as we fight to become ourselves.
Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome - America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing
by Dr. Joy DeGruy
P.T.S.S. is a theory that explains the etiology of many of the adaptive survival behaviors in African American communities throughout the United States and the Diaspora. It is a condition that exists as a consequence of multigenerational oppression of Africans and their descendants resulting from centuries of chattel slavery. A form of slavery which was predicated on the belief that African Americans were inherently/genetically inferior to whites. This was then followed by institutionalized racism which continues to perpetuate injury. This book addresses the residual impacts of generations of slavery and opens up the discussion of how the black community can use the strengths we have gained in the past to heal in the present.
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
by Roxane Gay
Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and bodies, using her own emotions; and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, and appearance, and health. “Utterly readable, intimate and impossible to read without being moved and vicariously enraged.” - Cathy O’Neil
The Warmth of Other Suns
by Isabel Wilkerson
Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson interviewed more than 1,200 people, unearthed archival works, gathered the voices of the famous and the unknown, and devoted 15 years to the research and writing of The Warmth of Other Suns - to tell the epic story of the Great Migration, one of the biggest underreported stories of the 20th Century and one of the largest migrations in American history.
Men We Reaped
by Jesmyn Ward
In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life-to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write about the experience of living through all the dying, she realized the truth-and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships. Jesmyn says the answer was so obvious she felt stupid for not seeing it. But it nagged at her until she knew she had to write about her community, to write their stories and her own.
White Fragility
by Robin DiAngelo (white author)
White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress. This book explicates the dynamics of White Fragility and how we might build our capacity in the on-going work towards racial justice.
Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race
by Reni Eddo Lodge
“I’m no longer engaging with white people on the topic of race. Not all white people, just the vast majority who refuse to accept the existence of structural racism and its symptoms. I can no longer engage with the gulf of an emotional disconnect that white people display when a person of colour articulates their experience… It’s like they can no longer hear us. This emotional disconnect is the conclusion of living a life oblivious to the fact that their skin colour is the norm and all others deviate from it."
Pleasure Activism
by Adrienne Maree Brown
The writer, social justice facilitator, pleasure activist, healer and doula living in Detroit draws from Black feminist luminaries to teach us how embracing what brings us joy is central in organizing against oppression.
Black Prophetic Fire
by Christa Buschendorf and Cornel West
In an accessible, conversational format, Cornel West, with scholar Christa Buschendorf, provides a fresh perspective on six revolutionary African American leaders: Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Malcolm X, and Ida B. Wells. In dialogue with Buschendorf, West examines the impact of these leaders on their own eras and across the decades. He not only rediscovers the integrity and commitment within these passionate advocates but also their fault lines.
Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority
by Tim Wise (white author)
Points a finger at whites' race-based self-delusion, explaining how such an agenda will only do harm to the nation's people, including most whites. In no uncertain terms, he argues that the hope for survival of American democracy lies in the embrace of our multicultural past, present and future.
Blood Done Sign My Name
by Timothy Tyson (white author)
Explores the 1970 murder of Henry D. Marrow, a black man in Tyson's then home town of Oxford, North Carolina. The murder is described as the result of the complicated collision of the Black Power movement and the white backlash against public school integration and other changes brought by the civil rights movement.
The Making of Asian America: A History
by Erika Lee
In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But as award-winning historian Erika Lee reminds us, Asian Americans also have deep roots in the country. The Making of Asian America tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present-day.
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
by Cathy Park Hong
Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.
“…But all our phrasing — race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy — serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”
― TA-NEHISI COATES, BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME