A Beginner’s Guide to Racial Inequality

For Non-Black People Who Might Not Know Where to Start

Please use this document as a resource for constant education and proposed actions to create a more equal and just society. We will continually update this with new information — if you have comments, feedback, information to add, we welcome it!

This was created by a few well-intentioned people who wanted to curate the many resources we have at our disposal to help inform and educate others, specifically those that may not know where to begin and to support the Black Lives Matter movement.

For ease of sharing this doc, copy and paste: https://bit.ly/2XRt94A

What to expect in this doc:

  • READ: 
  • Articles
  • Fiction
  • Non-Fiction
  • WATCH & LISTEN:
  • Fiction
  • Based on Real Events
  • Single episodes
  • Mini-series
  • Shows
  • SUPPORT:
  • At the National Level
  • At the Local/Community Level
  • TAKE ACTON

READ: 

Articles to gain understanding

  • WNBA player, Natasha Cloud discusses her perspective on being a Black woman during this time and calls out other professional athletes for staying silent
  • Golding describes her experience as a Black woman experiencing the events of today while still maintaining focus on her full-time job — the best snippet from the article to sum it up is: I don’t know who decided that being professional was loosely defined as being divorced of total humanity, but whoever did they’ve aided, unintentionally maybe, in a unique form of suffocation
  • Author's Note: I'm writing this in hopes that it can be used to lighten the load of marginalized folks, keeping in mind that not all marginalized people want to engage in the ally conversation, and that is perfect as well. For those who do, my prayer is that when someone asks you the question, “how can I be a stronger ally?” you might choose to save your breath/energy and send this in its place
  • The essay is still hauntingly resonant today, as camera-phone videos of Black people being killed by police circulate the Internet. And it's a reminder that so much and so little has changed
  • “For our white friends and colleagues, police shootings are a tragedy in the abstract. For Black people, they’re agonizingly personal — and devastating”
  • For Black people, even things as seemingly simple as marriage carry a weight that is unique to the disadvantaged
  • Six officers said in their affidavits their superior officer pressured them to enforce low-level violations against Black and Hispanic people, while discouraging them from doing the same to white or Asian people
  • How education inequality even in liberal Brooklyn leads to racism that colors the perception of Black kids as dangerous to the growth of white students

Articles to understand the history:

  • The Root has created a timeline of some of the events that led up to Black people across the country collectively to attempt to contextualize the anger and frustration of protestors
  • NHJ’s personal account of growing up Black in America and how the country continually fails to accept Black people as Americans, no matter how much they believe in American ideals
  • Discusses how there's a link between how Black kids are perceived in schools, how Black women are perceived when pregnant, and how Black men are perceived by all of society
  • If you just say ‘prison abolition’ on CNN, you’re going to have a lot of people shaking their heads. But Ruth Wilson Gilmore has always been very clear that prison abolition is not just about closing prisons. It’s a theory of change
  • ‘Even in the fog of her grief, Michael Brown’s mother spoke to this struggle. With her son’s body laying on the concrete behind police tape, Lesley McSpadden cried, “Do you know how hard it was for me to get him to stay in school and graduate?’

 

Articles to understand how things can change:

  • It has been almost six years since the murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner, and little has changed in how poor communities of color are being policed. It’s time to rethink superficial and ineffective procedural police reforms
  • Former President Barack Obama’s first-hand account of this movement
  • State Senator Julia Salazar argues in a Q&A that policing reforms “have failed” and that funds should be reinvested into other services; she also lays out bills she is supporting to improve accountability. “These changes won’t be made unless we demand them loudly and relentlessly,” Salazar said
  • An interview with psychology professors who study race, gender, identity development, stereotyping, and social perceptions. They discuss racial and gender biases in children of different racial groups across five geographical regions to learn how culture influences bias.
  • A first-hand account of why a former police officer believes police officers are the way they are. He explains their training and the structures within that perpetuate toxic white impulses.

Books for Adults (Please consider your local bookstores! Black bookstores listed below):

Fiction:

  • Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, this is a powerful and gripping YA novel about one girl's struggle for justice — also now a movie on Hulu
  • Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America
  • Homegoing follows the parallel paths of two sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi’s novel illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed—and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation

Non-Fiction:

  • This book explores the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality
  • This book offers what it is like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it. And how we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden
  • This book takes readers on a 28-day journey of how to dismantle the privilege within themselves so that they can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on people of color, and in turn, help other white people do better, too
  • Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it
  • Provides a look at how white, middle-class, Evangelicalism has participated in an era of rising racial hostility, inviting the reader to confront apathy and recognize God's ongoing work in the world
  • Oluo offers a contemporary, accessible take on the racial landscape in America, addressing head-on such issues as privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, microaggressions, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the "N" word
  • Touches on the history of the American people from the point of view of those whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories
  • Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life
  • A study of the women's movement in the U.S. from abolitionist days to the present that demonstrates how it has always been hampered by the racist and classist biases of its leaders
  • Alexander argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. By targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness
  • My Grandmother's Hands is a call to action for all of us to recognize that racism is not about the head, but about the body, and introduces an alternative view of what we can do to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide
  • A collection of fifteen essays written between 1976 and 1984 that explore Lorde's longstanding concerns about ways of increasing empowerment among minority women writers and the absolute necessity to explicate the concept of difference—difference according to sex, race, and economic status
  • In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti–Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history
  • Rankine recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media
  • Essays by James Baldwin touch on on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad
  • Just Mercy is an account of an idealistic, young lawyer’s coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice
  • Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole
  • Hooks examines the impact of sexism on black women during slavery, the historic devaluation of black womanhood, black male sexism, racism within the recent women's movement, and black women's involvement with feminism
  • This book explores issues from eradicated black history to the political purpose of white dominance, whitewashed feminism to the inextricable link between class and race
  • From one of the world's leading experts on unconscious racial bias, a personal examination of one of the central controversies and culturally powerful issues of our time, and its influence on contemporary race relations and criminal justice
  • Moving from an account of the evolution of race, Roberts delves deep into the current debates, interrogating the newest science and biotechnology, interviewing its researchers, and exposing the political consequences obscured by the focus on genetic difference
  • Rushdy shows how lynching in America has endured, evolved, and changed in meaning over the course of three centuries, from its origins in early Virginia to the present day
  • This is the story of the violation of Black Africa and the bondage of its peoples in another land. Harding resurrects forgotten heroes and traces the struggle of their descendants to keep the spirit and dreams of an uprooted people alive
  • the story of a southern black community's struggle to arm itself in self-defense against the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups. Frustrated and angered by violence condoned or abetted by the local authorities against blacks, the small community of Monroe, North Carolina, brought the issue of armed self-defense to the forefront of the civil rights movement
  • A moving cultural biography of abolitionist martyr John Brown, by one of the most important African-American intellectuals of the twentieth century
  • Today people are marching for George Floyd, but who marches for Breonna Taylor? This book is a course guide for developing a curriculum around black women’s studies. It is a good read and will teach you so much you don’t know about how we see (and don’t see) black women
  • This book examines a wide body of international research to argue for the abolition of policing and the implementation of alternatives like harm reduction and restorative justice
  • Add’l list on the topic of defunding police: 10 non-fiction books on why we need to defund the police
  • Explores what the weight of a lifetime of secrets, lies, and deception does to a black body, a black family, and a nation teetering on the brink of moral collapse
  • Touches readers of all colors as a vivid portrait of growing up, a haunting meditation on race and identity, and a lyrical valentine to a mother from her son.

Books for Children (Please consider your local bookstores! Black bookstores listed below):

Click to go back to Table of Contents

WATCH & LISTEN:

Free Media (YouTube videos)

  • Educator Jane Elliott asking a room full of White people a very, very simple question and explains the state of race in America all in a single minute
  • The day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, Jane Elliott, a teacher in a small, all-white Iowa town, divided her third-grade class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups and gave them a daring lesson in discrimination. This is the story of that lesson, its lasting impact on the children, and its enduring power years later. This film does a really good job of showing how much society dictates the discrimination people experience. Societal racism isn’t innate
  • As nationwide protests over the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor are met with police brutality, John Oliver discusses how the histories of policing and white supremacy are intertwined, the roadblocks to fixing things, and some potential paths forward
  • There is no such thing as being "not racist," says author and historian Ibram X. Kendi. In this vital conversation, he defines the transformative concept of antiracism to help us more clearly recognize, take responsibility for and reject prejudices in our public policies, workplaces and personal beliefs.
  • Emmanual Acho, a former NFL player, is having powerful conversations about racism, social injustice, and the hurt African Americans are feeling today. You can find these on Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and his Instagram channel as well.

Films and TV to watch

  • Fiction:
  • Students of color navigate the daily slights and slippery politics of life at an Ivy League college that's not nearly as "post-racial" as it thinks
  • A soulful drama about a young couple fighting for justice in the name of love and the promise of the American dream
  • An all-star high school athlete and accomplished debater, Luce is a poster boy for the new American Dream. When Luce’s teacher makes a shocking discovery his stellar reputation is called into question. It’s made more complicated by his relationship to his adopted white parents and their expectations of him and themselves
  • Based on the novel by Richard Wright, Native Son tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a young African-American living in Chicago who is hired as a chauffeur for an affluent businessman. As Thomas enters this seductive new world of money and power — including a precarious relationship with Dalton’s daughter, he faces unforeseen choices and perilous circumstances that will alter the course of his life forever
  • A teen witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood friend by a trigger-happy cop and must decide whether to testify or not
  • As two teen prodigies try to master the art of time travel, a tragic police shooting sends them on a series of dangerous trips to the past
  • Modern-day black women might be described as strong and confident; in other words, just the opposite of Issa and Molly. As the best friends deal with their own real-life flaws, their insecurities come to the fore as together they cope with an endless series of uncomfortable everyday experiences
  • On the hottest day of the year on a street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, everyone's hate and bigotry smolders and builds until it explodes into violence.

  • Based on Real Events:
  • In this documentary, scholars, activists and politicians analyze the criminalization of African Americans and the U.S. prison boom
  • Time passes and tension mounts in a Florida police station as an estranged interracial couple awaits news of their missing teenage son
  • A detective infiltrates and exposes the Ku Klux Klan. The detective soon recruits a more seasoned colleague into the undercover investigation of a lifetime. Together, they team up to take down the extremist hate group as the organization aims to sanitize its rhetoric to appeal to the mainstream
  • The film depicts the story of Oscar Grant III, a 22-year-old from Hayward, California, and his experiences on the last day of his life, before he was fatally shot by BART Police in the early morning hours of New Year's Day 2009
  • In 1979, James Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent describing his next project, "Remember This House." The book was to be a revolutionary, personal account of the lives and assassinations of three of his close friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. At the time of Baldwin's death in 1987, he left behind only 30 completed pages of this manuscript. Filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished
  • After graduating from Harvard, Bryan Stevenson heads to Alabama to defend those wrongly condemned or those not afforded proper representation. Stevenson encounters racism and legal and political maneuverings as he tirelessly fights for McMillian's life
  • A chronicle of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s campaign to secure equal voting rights via an epic march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965
  • Documentary that examines the evolution of the Black Power movement in American society from 1967 to 1975 as viewed through Swedish journalists and filmmakers
  • Five teens from Harlem become trapped in a nightmare when they're falsely accused of a brutal attack in Central Park
  • Previously unseen footage powers this documentary on the riots that erupted in LA after the acquittal of four police officers filmed beating Rodney King
  • Marc Silver’s 2015 documentary recounts the 2012 death of teenager Jordan Davis, who was shot multiple times in a parking lot while listening to music with friends. His attacker was found guilty of first-degree murder, but only after a mistrial and extensive media coverage
  • In 2015, Sandra Bland, a politically active 28-year-old black woman from Chicago was arrested for a traffic violation in a small Texas town. Three days later, she was found dead in her cell. Though ruled a suicide, her death sparked allegations of racially motivated murder and made Bland's case a rallying point for activists across the country
  • The Wire’s Sonja Sohn documents protests and unrest in Baltimore after Freddie Gray died due to injuries sustained after an arrest. While the six officers who arrested Gray await a verdict, the eyes of the nation fall on Baltimore, where lines of division become clearer than ever
  • Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis direct this 2017 documentary about the death of Michael Brown and subsequent uprising in Ferguson, Missouri. The officer who shot Brown was not indicted, and eventually cleared of all charges and ruled to have been acting in self defense
  • An intimate profile of pioneering lawyer/activist Bryan Stevenson, who has dedicated his life to fighting for equality in the criminal-justice system, while advocating for a movement to reconcile the past in order to claim a brighter American future
  • This series traces the tragic case of Kalief Browder, a Black Bronx teen who spent three horrific years in jail, despite not being convicted of a crime
  • Decades after the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, Sonia Lowman’s documentary covers how segregation, though illegal, persists in the American school system through demographic inequality, specifically in Little Rock, New York City, and Los Angeles
  • Strong Island is director Yance Ford's examination of his own family and the murder of his brother William. William Ford was unarmed when he was shot by a white employee at an auto shop and dead before even reaching a hospital. His shooter was not indicted, and Ford's film examines the family's ongoing pain over 20 years after justice failed William

Podcasts to listen to

Single episodes:

  • Activists are demanding a radical reshaping of police departments across the country. Years before this movement, one city scrapped its police department and started from scratch. Camden, N.J.'s former police chief Scott Thomson explains how they rebuilt, and what happened
  • In this discussion, Gilmore offers a sweeping and detailed analysis of the relentless expansion and funding of police and prisons, and how locking people in cages has become central to the American project. Gilmore offers a comprehensive road map for understanding how we have arrived at the present political moment of brutality and rebellion, and she lays out the need for prison abolition and defunding police forces
  • Research shows the media disproportionately depict African-Americans as criminals, and whites as victims. Brooke speaks with Nazgol Ghandnoosh, research analyst at The Sentencing Project, about her study, "Race and Punishment: Racial Perceptions of Crime and Support for Punitive Policies," which details how media distortions feed our own implicit biases
  • You can’t think about something if you can’t talk about it, says Eula Biss. The writer helpfully opens up lived words and ideas like complacence, guilt, and opportunity hoarding for an urgent reckoning with whiteness

Mini-series:

  • “1619” is a New York Times audio series, hosted by Nikole Hannah-Jones, that examines the long shadow of American slavery
  • Features movement voices, stories, and strategies for racial injustice
  • This American Life spent five months at Harper High School in Chicago, where last year alone 29 current and recent students were shot. 29. This 2-part series gives a real sense of what it means to live in the midst of all this gun violence, how teens and adults navigate a world of funerals and Homecoming dances
  • Right now, all sorts of people are trying to rethink and reinvent education, to get poor minority kids performing as well as white kids. But there's one thing nobody tries anymore, despite lots of evidence that it works: desegregation
  • Where did the notion of “whiteness” come from? What does it mean? What is whiteness for? John Biewen took a deep dive into these questions, along with an array of leading scholars, in this 14-part series
  • Dan Taberski and the team behind Missing Richard Simmons investigate COPS — the longest running reality show in TV history — and its cultural impact on policing in America

Show:

  • A race and culture outlet and a weekly podcast from American public radio network NPR. Topics range from politics, pop culture, sports and more
  • Learn from thought leaders, authors, and creatives about the diversity gaps in society & culture. Their goal is to discover promising practices for closing diversity gaps in everyday lives and work
  • Organizers and activists dive deep with experts, influencers, diverse local & national leaders to better understand the issues
  • 4 hosts gather in multiracial, interracial conversation about the ways we can’t talk, don’t talk, would rather not talk, but intermittently, fitfully, embarrassingly do talk about culture, identity, politics, power, and privilege in our pre-post-yet-still-very-racial America
  • Trevor Noah and David Kibuuka explore unfamiliar angles and embrace differing viewpoints—with humor
  • Kid Fury and Crissle hilariously cover hip hop & pop culture each week from a black and LGBTQ perspective

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SUPPORT:

Organizations to support

National (Some may have local affiliates/branches):

  • BLM was founded in 2013 in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer. It is a global organization whose mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes
  • IP works to exonerate the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and reforms the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice
  • Legal organization fighting for racial justice. Through litigation, advocacy, and public education, LDF seeks structural changes to expand democracy, eliminate disparities, and achieve racial justice
  • Offers civil, criminal defense, juvenile rights, and pro bono practices to defend clients and dismantle the systemic barriers in New York City
  • Funds donated to Campaign Zero support the analysis of policing practices across the country, research to identify effective solutions to end police violence nationwide
  • The Know Your Rights Camp's mission is to advance the liberation and well-being of Black and Brown communities through education, self-empowerment, mass-mobilization and the creation of new systems that elevate the next generation of change leaders
  • A national hub for developing, sharing, and experimenting with tactical interventions, strategic organizing practices, and innovative organizing tools to end mass incarceration
  • Prevents incarceration and combat racial and economic disparities in the bail system
  • American Civil Liberties Union works in our courts and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights & liberties guaranteed to all people in this country. You can donate, educate yourself on the issues and contact your local affiliates
  •  National org with local chapters that conducts various legal services related to protesting, including legal observation during protests and legal representation of individuals who have been detained
  • Founded by Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy), legal aid organization focused on individual representation, criminal justice reform, racial justice, and public education.  Really good resources and needs financial support.
  • Loveland Foundation is committed to showing up for communities of color in unique and powerful ways, with a particular focus on Black women and girls. Their resources and initiatives are collaborative and they prioritize opportunity, access, validation, and healing
  • My Block, My Hood, My City provides underprivileged youth with an awareness of the world and opportunities beyond their neighborhood. They take students on explorations focused on STEM, Arts & Culture, Citizenry & Volunteerism, Health, Community Development, Culinary Arts, and Entrepreneurism

Local/Community Focused:

  • Legal and public education organization focused on hate, bigotry, and violence against black people and other marginalized communities
  • Dedicated to reducing the number of New Yorkers subjected to unnecessary pretrial detention while simultaneously providing much needed social services to this population. They provide bail and case management services
  • Through the development of powerful strategic campaigns, they seek to expand the power of Black people across the Twin Cities metro area and Minnesota
  • Organizes Minneapolis community & city council members to move money from the police department into other areas of the city’s budget that truly promote community health & safety
  • A Minneapolis organization that was created to deal with police brutality on an ongoing basis and provides support for survivors and families of victims

Links to Black businesses to support (organized by state) (We know there are so many out there, please reach out and share and we will add to the list):

  • Website and app that allows people to search for Black-owned businesses
  • We have aggregated the many lists and spreadsheets by city and state. You can share by copying and pasting this link: https://bit.ly/3dBqGBN

Click to go back to Table of Contents

TAKE ACTION: (We know there is so much more out there, please reach out and share and we will add to the list):

Election Resources

  • Election Dates:
  • June 30th: CO, UT, OK
  • A "one-stop-shop" for election related information. It provides nonpartisan information to the public with both general and state-specific information. There is an interactive ballot portion to research candidates and issues.
  • It’s mission is to simplify political engagement, increase voter turnout, and strengthen American democracy
  • Launched in 2018 by co-chairs Michelle Obama, Tom Hanks, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Janelle Monae, Chris Paul, Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, When We All Vote is changing the culture around voting using a data-driven and multifaceted approach to increase participation in elections
  • Ballotpedia is the digital encyclopedia of American politics and elections. Their goal is to inform people about politics by providing accurate and objective information about politics at all levels of government. You can search and find details on your specific local elections

Direct Action

  • Text, email or call
  • Within this link, you will find:
  • Numbers to call
  • Email addresses and email templates
  • Links to petitions
  • Add’l info
  • 50-a: Law used to shield law enforcement from accountability by preventing people who have been accused of a crime from knowing whether the police officers testifying against them have a history of misconduct
  • Step-by-step directions on how to act if you’re a NYS resident
  • Email government officials and council members to reallocate egregious police budgets towards education, social services, and dismantling racial inequality
  • Petitions to sign
  • Their mission is to call on major retailers to pledge 15% of their shelf space to Black-owned businesses
  • Engage in dialogue

Additional Resources

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Credits to/Accounts to Follow: