Anti-Racist Resources – Preparing Future Faculty

Anti-Racist Resources for Educators

This is a time of great despair and struggles against marginalization, racism, and oppression that lead to the systemic erasure of Black presence, voices, and lives. And educators want to act. The information out there is riddled with visual and verbal misinformation and misrepresentations that amplify anti-Black rhetoric and that make it hard for us to find the resources we want to support our work in classrooms and communities. It is so much harder in the cacophony of voices and noise to understand what we are seeing and experiencing and to do that rapidly as things shift around us and new situations emerge. What is our call to action? What can we do that is not futile?

As educators, we not only struggle for our own comprehension but seek to stand in solidarity and help our students in their understanding of oppression and anti-blackness, and actualize the ardent hope we have for change. What can we do to support our students’ responses to these horrific times in ways that help them keep that hope alive and active through open, compassionate, and positive conversations and actions in our classrooms? What can we do to ensure our teaching addresses the present crisis and the future work we do?

We have gathered resources that we hope will help you in this task. This is by no means finite. We will be updating our page as we find new resources. If you know of good resources for information, teaching ideas, and opportunities to engage please email pff@cgu.edu.

Websites

Black Lives Matter

What Matters Documentary – Documentary interviews that clarify issues and create a safe dialog to promote freedom, justice, and collective liberation. There are frequent updates with new podcasts and videos teachers and students can use as a basis for conversation in classrooms.

Resource Toolkits for Healing Justice, Healing Action, Conflict Resolution, and many others that have information and action ideas, many of which can be learning actions in classrooms and communities.

Black Lives Matter at School

This national coalition started from a single day of action in Seattle in 2016 for educators, families, and students. This has grown to become an organization for racial justice in education. During their annual week of action Black Lives Matter at School, the first week of February each year, they promote teaching and learning about structural racism, intersectional black identities, black history, and anti-racist movements. This movement has the following advocacy and action areas:

End zero-tolerance discipline and implement restorative justice.
Hire more black teachers.
Mandate Black history and ethnic studies in the K-12 curriculum
Fund counselors, not cops.

Their 13 guiding principles are Restorative Justice, Empathy, Loving Engagement, Diversity, Globalism, Trans-Affirming, Queer Affirming, Collective Value, Intergenerational, Black Families, Black Villages, Black Women, and Unapologetically Black.

Racial Equity Tools

This website has good resources that focus on racial equity – “tools, research, tips, curricula and ideas for people who want to increase their own understanding and to help those working toward justice at every level – in systems, organizations, communities and the culture at large.” The pages focus specifically on a list of articles and actions on structural racism.

National Education Association (NEA)_Ed Justice

The National Education Association is the nation’s largest professional organization, representing more than 3 million elementary and secondary teachers, higher education faculty, education support professionals, school administrators, retired educators, and students preparing to become teachers.

NEA EdJustice engages and mobilizes activists in the fight for racial, social, and economic justice in public education. Readers will find timely coverage of social justice issues in education and ways they can advocate for our students, our schools, and our communities. They also have a great resources page.

Movement for Black Lives (M4BL)

This is a space for Black organizations to work together to create positive change in policy and leadership for Black lives and voices. They have 6 “tables” or areas they work on: Policy, Organizing/Base-Building, Electoral Justice, The Rising Majority, Culture, and resources.

Teaching Tolerance

Teaching Tolerance is a project started in 1991 by the Southern Poverty Law Center. It has been named “Friend of the UN” and recognized by the Desmond Tutu Peace Foundation. They see tolerance as a way of thinking and acting “that gives us peace in our individuality, respect for those unlike us, the wisdom to discern humane values and the courage to act upon them.” They provide free resources to educators to supplement the curriculum, inform practice, and create civil and inclusive school communities that emphasize social justice and anti-bias.

Reading List

This is by no means a finite list. It is our first curation and we hope to develop this into an active, responsive resource. If there are resources you think are important to add to this list, please email pff@cgu.edu.

America’s racial history of oppression, violence, and erasure stands ironically in tension with its freedom and inalienable rights ethic. This paradox seems to flow like an underground stream through time, seeping into all parts of American life and infrastructure. We’ve gathered a starting list of books that can help us reflect and understand where we are at this moment in time and maybe … what we can do better.

Books

Michelle Alexander – The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
Gloria Ladson Billings – Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children
Angela Davis – Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture
Angela Davis – If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance
Robin D’Angelo – Why It’s So Hard For White People to Talk About Fragility
Frantz Fanon – Black Skin, White Masks
bell hooks – Teaching to Transgress
bell hooks – Ain’t I A Woman? Black Women and Feminism
Ibram X. Kendi – Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
Ibram X. Kendi – How To Be An Anti-Racist
Bettina Love – We Want to Do More Than Survive. Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom
Howell Raines – My Soul is Rested. The Story of the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South.
Christina Sharpe – In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
Beverly Daniel Tatum – Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria. And Other Conversations About Race
Craig Steven Wilder – Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities.

Speeches

Martin Luther King Jr. – The Other America. (Speech given in 1967 at Stanford)
James Baldwin – 1965 Speech at Cambridge University (UK)

Poetry

Langston Hughes – The Ways of White Folks
Langston Hughes – Not Without Laughter
Claudia Rankine – Citizen: An American Lyric
Maya Angelou – And Still I Rise. Video
Maya Angelou – We Wear the Mask. Video

Fiction

Maya Angelou – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Zora Neale Husrton – And Their Eyes Were Watching God
Toni Morrison – Sula
Toni Morrison – Beloved