No one is born racist or antiracist; these result from the choices we make. Being antiracist results from a conscious decision to make frequent, consistent, equitable choices daily. These choices require ongoing self-awareness and self-reflection as we move through life. In the absence of making antiracist choices, we (un)consciously uphold aspects of white supremacy, white-dominant culture, and unequal institutions and society. Being racist or antiracist is not about who you are; it is about what you do.
--Being Antiracist, National Museum of African American History and Culture
The National Museum of African American History and Culture has an extensive online toolkit on how to talk about race.
Activist Educators: Breaking Past Limits by 
Becoming Critical by
Presents the key experiences of a diverse group of teachers and students in their journeys of becoming social justice educator/scholars.
Blackballed by
From Lawrence Ross, author of The Divine Nine and the leading expert on sororities and fraternities, Blackballed exposes the white fraternity and sorority system, with traditions of racist parties, songs, and assaults on black students, and the universities themselves, who name campus buildings after racist men and women. It also takes a deep dive into anti-affirmative action policies and how they effectively segregate predominately white universities, providing ample room for white privilege. A bold mix of history and the current climate, Blackballed is a call to action for universities to make radical changes to their policies and standards to foster a better legacy for all students.
Blackballed by
"College" is a word that means many things to many people: a space for knowledge, a place to gain lifelong friends, and an opportunity to transcend one's socioeconomic station. Today, though, this word also recalls a slew of headlines that have revealed a dark and persistent world of racial politics on campus.From Lawrence Ross, author of The Divine Nine, Blackballed is an explosive and controversial book that rips the veil off America's hidden secret: America's colleges have fostered a racist environment that makes them a hostile space for African American students. Blackballed exposes the white fraternity and sorority system, with traditions of racist parties, songs, and assaults on black students; and the universities themselves, who name campus buildings after racist men and women. It also takes a deep dive into anti-affirmative action policies, and how they effectively segregate predominately white universities, providing ample room for white privilege. A bold mix of history and the current climate, Blackballed is a call to action for universities to make radical changes to their policies and standards to foster a better legacy for all students.
Black Women and Social Justice Education by
Focuses on Black women's experiences and expertise in order to advance educational philosophy and provide practical tools for social justice pedagogy.
Contesting the Myth of a 'Post Racial' Era by
Contesting the Myth of a 'Post Racial' Era brings together educational scholars across disciplines in higher education to reframe the discourse on race and racism in education in the Obama era and to explore structural, environmental, cultural, and political implications of race and racism in education. The volume gives explicit attention to contesting the myth of post-racialism in U.S. education by examining racial inequality across the K-16 spectrum, through examination of classroom practices, educational policies, educational research, and equity and access. Policy makers, educators, and academics with an interest in raising the achievement levels of students of color as well as access to greater opportunities will have interest in this book. It can be used for professional development at the K-12 and higher education level and for course adoption in college classrooms, particularly in programs and courses where race is an explicit area of study.
Deconstructing Privilege : teaching and learning as allies in the classroom by
Although scholarly examinations of privilege have increased in recent decades, an emphasis on privilege studies pedagogy remains lacking within institutions. This edited collection explores best practices for effective teaching and learning about various forms of systemic group privilege such as that based on race, gender, sexuality, religion, and class. Formatted in three easy-to-follow sections, Deconstructing Privilege charts the history of privilege studies and provides intersectional approaches to the topic. Drawing on a wealth of research and real-life accounts, this book gives educators both the theoretical foundations they need to address issues of privilege in the classroom and practical ways to forge new paths for critical dialogues in educational settings. Combining interdisciplinary contributions from leading experts in the field-- such as Tim Wise and Abby Ferber-- with pedagogical strategies and tips for teaching about privilege, Deconstructing Privilege is an essential book for any educator who wants to address what privilege really means in the classroom.
Despite the Best Intentions by
On the surface, Riverview High School looks like the post-racial ideal. Serving an enviably affluent, diverse, and liberal district, the school is well-funded, its teachers are well-trained, and many of its students are high achieving. Yet Riverview has not escaped the same unrelenting question that plagues schools throughout America: why is it that even when all of the circumstances seem right, black and Latino students continue to lag behind their peers? Through five years' worth of interviews and data-gathering at Riverview, John Diamond and Amanda Lewis have created a rich and disturbing portrait of the achievement gap that persists more than fifty years after the formal dismantling of segregation. As students progress from elementary school to middle school to high school, their level of academic achievement increasingly tracks along racial lines, with white and Asian students maintaining higher GPAs and standardized testing scores, taking more advanced classes, and attaining better college admission results than their black and Latino counterparts. Most research to date has focused on the role of poverty, family stability, and other external influences in explaining poor performance at school, especially in urban contexts. Diamond and Lewis instead situate their research in a suburban school, and look at what factors within the school itself could be causing the disparity. Most crucially, they challenge many common explanations of the 'racial achievement gap,' exploring what race actually means in this situation, and why it matters. An in-depth study with far-reaching consequences, Despite the Best Intentions revolutionizes our understanding of both the knotty problem of academic disparities and the larger question of the color line in American society.
DisCrit: disability studies and critical race theory in education by
This groundbreaking volume brings together major figures in Disability Studies in Education (DSE) and Critical Race Theory (CRT) to explore some of today's most important issues in education. Scholars examine the achievement/opportunity gaps from both historical and contemporary perspectives, as well as the overrepresentation of minority students in special education and the school-to-prison pipeline. Chapters also address school reform and the impact on students based on race, class, and dis/ability and the capacity of law and policy to include (and exclude). Readers will discover how some students are included (and excluded) within schools and society, why some citizens are afforded expanded (or limited) opportunities in life, and who moves up in the world and who is trapped at the "bottom of the well." Book Features: A unique exploration of the intersections of race, class, and dis/ability. New insights into longstanding problems of inequity in American education. An examination of the ways in which certain students come to fit into certain categories of dis/ability. Creative ways to achieve changes in theory, research, practice, and policy that will promote more socially just education systems.
Feeling white : whiteness, emotionality, and education by 
Handbook of Social Justice in Education by
'The Handbook of Social Justice Education' is a comprehensive, review of the field, addressing from multiple perspectives, education theory, research, and practice in historical and ideological context, with an emphasis on social movements for justice.
Is Everyone Really Equal? by
This is the new edition of the award-winning guide to social justice education. Based on the authors' extensive experience in a range of settings in the United States and Canada, the book addresses the most common stumbling blocks to understanding social justice. This comprehensive resource includes new features such as a chapter on intersectionality and classism; discussion of contemporary activism (Black Lives Matter, Occupy, and Idle No More); material on White Settler societies and colonialism; pedagogical supports related to "common social patterns" and "vocabulary to practice using"; and extensive updates throughout. Accessible to students from high school through graduate school, Is Everyone Really Equal? is a detailed and engaging textbook and professional development resource presenting the key concepts in social justice education. The text includes many user-friendly features, examples, and vignettes to not just define but illustrate the concepts. Book Features: Definition Boxes that define key terms. Stop Boxes to remind readers of previously explained ideas. Perspective Check Boxes to draw attention to alternative standpoints. Discussion Questions and Extension Activities for using the book in a class, workshop, or study group. A Glossary of terms and guide to language use.
lack males and racism : improving the schooling and life chances of African Americans / by 
New framings on anti-racism and resistance. Volume 1 Anti-racism and transgressive pedagogies by 
New Framings on Anti-Racism and Resistance Volume 2 Resistance and the new futurity by
Using a critical anti-racism approach, contributors to this volume demonstrate and document the resistance and futurity possible when students, educators, administrators, policymakers, and community members engage in critical anti-racism education. Relying on contemporary educational issues and personal/political reflections, this collection of essays brings together a variety of new insights on anti-racism praxis. This volume speaks to readers who are working with or seeking new conceptual framings of race, white supremacy, and Indigeneity in order to work towards a politics of decolonization. New Framings on Anti-Racism and Resistance: Volume 2 - Resistance and the New Futurity provides new theoretical directions and practical applications for people engaged in the field of anti-racism.
Poison in the Ivy by
The world of elite campuses is one of rarified social circles, as well as prestigious educational opportunities. W. Carson Byrd studied twenty-eight of the most selective colleges and universities in the United States to see whether elite students' social interactions with each other might influence their racial beliefs in a positive way, since many of these graduates will eventually hold leadership positions in society. He found that students at these universities believed in the success of the 'best and the brightest,' leading them to situate differences in race and status around issues of merit and individual effort. Poison in the Ivy challenges popular beliefs about the importance of cross-racial interactions as an antidote to racism in the increasingly diverse United States. He shows that it is the context and framing of such interactions on college campuses that plays an important role in shaping students' beliefs about race and inequality in everyday life for the future political and professional leaders of the nation. Poison in the Ivy is an eye-opening look at race on elite college campuses, and offers lessons for anyone involved in modern American higher education.
Promoting Social Justice Through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning by
How can education become a transformative experience for all learners and teachers? The contributors to this volume contend that the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) can provide a strong foundation for the role of education in promoting social justice. The collection features contributions by an array of educators and scholars, highlighting the various ways that learners and teachers can prepare for and engage with social justice concerns. The essays offer reflections on the value of SoTL in relation to educational ethics, marginalized groups, community service and activism, counter narratives, and a range of classroom practices. Although the contributors work in a variety of disciplines and employ different theoretical frameworks, they are united by the conviction that education should improve our lives by promoting equity and social justice.
Race and Gender in the Classroom by
Race and Gender in the Classroom explores the paradoxes of education, race, and gender, as Laurie Cooper Stoll follows eighteen teachers carrying out their roles as educators in an era of "post-racial" and "post-gendered" politics. Because there are a number of contentious issues converging simultaneously in these teachers' everyday lives, this is a book comprised of several interrelated stories. On the one hand, this is a story about teachers who care deeply about their students but are generally oblivious to the ways in which their words and behaviors reinforce dominant narratives about race and gender, constructing for their students a worldview in which race and gender do not matter despite their students' lived experiences demonstrating otherwise. This is a story about dedicated, overworked teachers who are trying to keep their heads above water while meeting the myriad demands placed upon them in a climate of high-stakes testing. This is a story about the disconnect between those who mandate educational policy like superintendents and school boards and the teachers who are expected to implement those policies often with little or no input and few resources. This is ultimately a story, however, about how the institution of education itself operates in a "post-racial" and "post-gendered" society.
Radical Writing Center Praxis by
In Radical Writing Center Praxis Laura Greenfield calls for a paradigm change in writing centers, imagining a field whose very reason for being is to facilitate justice and peace. The book calls on readers to more critically examine power and agency in writing centers and to imagine new possibilities for the field's theories and practices. Large, intersecting systems of oppression manifest in the everyday practices of institutions, classrooms, and writing centers. Local practices in turn influence the surrounding world. Radical Writing Center Praxis therefore challenges the writing center field to resist assumptions of political neutrality and instead to redefine itself in terms of more explicit ethical commitments. In this paradigm it is clear that to engage in anti-oppression work is not merely a special interest but rather a vital interest to all. Introducing the concepts and vocabulary of radical politics, Radical Writing Center Praxis examines the tensions between the field's professed beliefs and everyday practices and offers a process by which the writing center discipline as a whole might rebuild itself anew. It will be invaluable to writing center directors, tutors, scholars, and students as well as to administrators and compositionists.
Rhetorics of Whiteness by
Winner, CCCC Outstanding Book Award in the Edited Collection Category, 2018 With the election of our first black president, many Americans began to argue that we had finally ended racism, claiming that we now live in a postracial era. Yet near-daily news reports regularly invoke white as a demographic category and recount instances of racialized violence as well as an increased sensitivity to expressions of racial unrest. Clearly, American society isn't as color-blind as people would like to believe. In Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in Popular Culture, Social Media, and Education, contributors reveal how identifications with racialized whiteness continue to manifest themselves in American culture. The sixteen essays that comprise this collection not only render visible how racialized whiteness infiltrates new twenty-first-century discourses and material spaces but also offer critical tactics for disrupting this normative whiteness. Specifically, contributors examine popular culture (novels, films, TV), social media (YouTube, eHarmony, Facebook), education (state law, the textbook industry, dual credit programs), pedagogy (tactics for teaching via narratives, emotional literacy, and mindfulness) as well as cultural theories (concepts of racialized space, anti-dialogicism, and color blindness). Offering new approaches to understanding racialized whiteness, this volume emphasizes the importance of a rhetorical lens for employing whiteness studies' theories and methods to identify, analyze, interpret, and interrupt representations of whiteness. Although whiteness studies has been waning as an active research field for the past decade, the contributors to Rhetorics of Whiteness assert that it hasn't lost its relevancy because racialized whiteness and issues of systemic racism persist in American society and culture today. Few whiteness studies texts have been published in rhetoric and composition in the past decade, so this collection should quickly become mandatory reading. By focusing on common, yet often overlooked, contemporary examples of how racialized whiteness haunts U.S. society, Rhetorics of Whiteness serves as a valuable text for scholars in the field as well as anyone else interested in the topic.
Seeing Race Again : countering colorblindness across the disciplines by
Every academic discipline has an origin story complicit with white supremacy. Racial hierarchy and colonialism structured the very foundations of most disciplines' research and teaching paradigms. In the early twentieth century, the academy faced rising opposition and correction, evident in the intervention of scholars including W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Carter G. Woodson, and others. By the mid-twentieth century, education itself became a center in the struggle for social justice. Scholars mounted insurgent efforts to discredit some of the most odious intellectual defenses of white supremacy in academia, but the disciplines and their keepers remained unwilling to interrogate many of the racist foundations of their fields, instead embracing a framework of racial colorblindness as their default position. This book challenges scholars and students to see race again. Examining the racial histories and colorblindness in fields as diverse as social psychology, the law, musicology, literary studies, sociology, and gender studies, Seeing Race Again documents the profoundly contradictory role of the academy in constructing, naturalizing, and reproducing racial hierarchy. It shows how colorblindness compromises the capacity of disciplines to effectively respond to the wide set of contemporary political, economic, and social crises marking public life today.
Slavery and the University by
Slavery and the University is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post-Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery's influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.
Social Justice Education by 
Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies by
Since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the discourse of human rights has expanded to include not just civil and political rights but also economic, social, cultural, and, most recently, collective rights. Given their broad scope, human rights issues are useful touchstones in the humanities classroom and benefit from an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural pedagogy in which objects of study are situated in historical, legal, philosophical, literary, and rhetorical contexts. Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies is a sourcebook of inventive approaches and best practices for teachers looking to make human rights the focus of their undergraduate and graduate courses. Contributors first explore what it means to be human and conceptual issues such as law and the state. Next, they approach human rights and related social-justice issues from the perspectives of particular geographic regions and historical eras, through the lens of genre, and in relation to specific rights violations-for example, storytelling and testimonio in Latin America or poetry created in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide. Essays then describe efforts to cultivate students' capacity for ethical reading practices and to deepen their understanding of the stakes and artistic dimensions of human rights representations, drawing on active learning and experimental class contexts. The final section, on resources, directs readers to further readings in history, criticism, theory, and literary and visual studies and provides a chronology of human rights legal documents.
White Guys on Campus : racism, white immunity, and the myth of "post-racial" higher education by
Winner of the 2019 AERA Division J Outstanding Publication Award and the 2019 ASHE Outstanding Book Award On April 22, 2015, Boston University professor Saida Grundy set off a Twitter storm with her provocative question: "Why is white America so reluctant to identify white college males as a problem population?" White Guys on Campus is a critical examination of race in higher education, centering Whiteness, in an effort to unveil the frequently unconscious habits of racism among White male undergraduates. Nolan L. Cabrera moves beyond the "few bad apples" frame of contemporary racism, and explores the structures, policies, ideologies, and experiences that allow racism to flourish. This book details many of the contours of contemporary, systemic racism, while engaging the possibility of White students to participate in anti-racism. Ultimately, White Guys on Campus calls upon institutions of higher education to be sites of social transformation instead of reinforcing systemic racism, while creating a platform to engage and challenge the public discourse of "post- racialism."
Selected books (paper, ebook, audiobooks) on race and racism in higher education, social justice education, privilege in education.
Many other folks, and also many other libraries, have compiled resources on whiteness and anti-Black racism. Check them out, and send us more suggestions using the form on the left.
