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                            A Developing Syllabus

(HISTORICAL/CULTURAL)

Ibram X. Kendi (2016) Chronicle of how anti-Black thinking has entrenched itself in the fabric of American society

  • Begin Again:  James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons For Our Time

Eddie Glaude Jr.  (2020)  The story of James Baldwin’s crucible

  • Caste:  The Origins of Our Discontents

Isabel Wilkerson (2020) How America has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings

Theodore Rosengarten  (1974)  The story of a black tenet farmer from east coastal Alabama; the autobiography of an illiterate man

James Baldwin  (1962)  A galvanizing and passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement

Austin Channing Brown (2018)  Exposes how White America’s love affair with diversity often falls short

Edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain (2021) A Community of Souls, in essay

Ibram X. Kendi (2019)  A life journey to show why becoming an antiracist is as essential as it is difficult

Edited by Dorothy Sterling (1994)  An examination, in their own words, of the lives of ordinary people who had few skills and fewer opportunities

  • White Fragility:  Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism

Robin Diangelo (2018)  “A bracing call to white folk everywhere to see their whiteness and to seize the opportunity to make things better now.” Michael Eric Dyson

Robin Diangelo   …illuminates the subtle and insidious racial patterns of progressive white people, revealing how a culture of niceness actually protects racism

  • The Sum of Us:  What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

Heather McGhee (2021) Racism has costs for White people too

Don Lemon (2021)  Today’s most urgent question:  How can we end racism in America in our lifetime?

W.E.B. DuBois (1903)  Founding work in the literature of Black protest

Damon Young  (2019)  Explores the ever shifting definitions of what it means to be black (and a man) in America

  • Fantasyland:  How America Went Haywire/A 500 Year History    

Kurt Andersen  (2017)   “We have passed through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole.  America has mutated into Fantasyland” 

Michael Eric Dyson (2017)  An ordained Baptist Minister and sociologist speaks to his with congregants “tender, intimate terms”

  • My Grandmother’s Hands:  Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies                                                                

Resmaa Menakem (2017)  …revolutionary work on how white supremacy is stored in the body…

  • How The Word Is Passed:  A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America                                                                                              

Clint Smith  “…frees history, frees humanity to reckon honestly with the legacy of slavery.  We need this book.”  Ibram X. Kendi

Isabel Wilkerson (2011)​ "This is narrative nonfiction, lyrical and tragic and fatalist.  The story exposes; the story moves; the story ends.  What Wilkerson urges, finally isn't argument at all; it's compassion.  Hush, and listen."   The New Yorker

  • White Rage:  The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.  

Carol Angerson.  "A sobering primer on the myriadways African American resilience and triumph over enslavement, Jim Crow and intolerance have been relentlessly defied by the very institutions entrusted to uphold our democracy."  The Washington Post

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Tim Madigan.  "The Burning is a bold and worthwhile beginning.  With its richness of horrifying detail, the book compels our attention, restoring the hateful episode's ghastly but necessary claim on the public conscience."  Fort Worth Star-Telegram

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Michel-Rolph Trouillot 1995) Silencing the Past is a thought-provoking analysis of historical narrative. Taking examples ranging from the Haitian Revolution to Columbus Day, Michel-Rolph Trouillot demonstrates how power operates, often invisibly, at all stages in the making of history to silence certain voices. 

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  • The Racial Contract by Charles W. Mills (1997) "Mills argues that most white people are still unknowingly influenced by a history of white supremacist philosophies and ideals that undergird our most basic assumptions about personhood and natural rights...."

               

  (REPARATIONS)

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  • The Debt:  What America Owes to Blacks

Randall Robinson (2000)  In no uncertain terms, tells what White America owes Blacks, and what Blacks owe themselves

William A. Darity and A. Kristen Mullen (2020)  Places Black American’s press for reparations within the context of a terse, honest account of our nation’s past

Nikole Hannah-Jones (2021)  "In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of somewhere between twenty and thiry enslaved people from Africa.  Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecendented systemof American Chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years.  This is sometimes referred to our country's original sin. but it is more than that:  It is the source of so much of what still defines the United States."  Book Jacket Front Cover.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2022) In approaching his theoretical work, he digs deeply into a rich combination of interdisciplinary resources including German transcendental philosophy, contemporary philosophy of language, contemporary social science, histories of activism and activist thinkers, and the Black radical tradition. 

Robin Kelly (2003) Kelley unearths freedom dreams in this exciting history of renegade intellectuals and artists of the African diaspora in the twentieth century. Focusing on the visions of activists from C. L. R. James to Aime Cesaire and Malcolm X, Kelley writes of the hope that Communism offered, the mindscapes of Surrealism, the transformative potential of radical feminism, and of the four-hundred-year-old dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. From'the preeminent historian of black popular culture' (Cornel West), an inspiring work on the power of imagination to transform society.

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(LEGAL/CRIMINAL JUSTICE)

 

Michelle Alexander (2010, 2012, 2020)  Searing indictment of our criminal justice system—“We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it.”

  • Charged:  The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration

Emily Bazelon (2019)  Examination of criminal justice in America that speaks directly to how to reduce mass incarceration

Paul Butler (2017) A renegade prosecutor’s radical thoughts on how to disrupt the system

  • The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

Richard Rothstein (2017)  History of deliberate residential segregation in America

Deray Mckeeson  (2018)  A meditation on resistance, justice, and freedom.  And an intimate portrait of a movement from the front lines.

Nancy MacLean (2017  Examines the Right’s relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, stop action on climate change and alter the Constitution

  • American Rule:  How a Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People

Jared Yates Sexton  (2020)  Tells the truth about what this nation has always been, and challenges us to forge a new path

  • Rich Thanks To Racism:  How the Ultra-Wealthy Profit From Racial Injustice (2021)                                                                                                

Jim Freeman Dissects the cruel and deeply hateful policies within the education, criminal, justice and immigration systems to discover their origins and why they persist

  • The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States by Ida B. Wells Barnett

  • Published in 1895

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