Learning Resources
Video Resources
Just Mercy
Bryan Stevenson, author of the new book, "Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption." With growing focus on the failures of the criminal justice system, Stevenson has been fighting those injustices case by case. He is founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a group based in Alabama that represents some of this country's most marginalized people — the poor and the wrongfully convicted.
Racism Prejudice Discrimination
We can’t talk about race without also discussing racism, so today we are going to define and explain prejudice, stereotypes, and racism. We’ll look at five theories for why prejudice exists. We’ll discuss discrimination and the legacies of institutional racism. We’ll also provide an overview of four types of racial interaction: pluralism, assimilation, segregation, and genocide.
A Tale of Two Schools
Aljazeera spent a day in the life of two U.S. high school students on both sides of the education divide. Here's their story in their own words.
The Legacy of American Slavery
Professor Melissa -Harris-Lacewell, Princeton University explains how the 'Electoral College' is to most serious Legacy of American slavery
Book Resources
The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee
February 2021
This book draws on insights gleaned from travel across the United States, work at public policy and advocacy organization Demos, and life experience as a Black American woman to examine why racism is harmful to all Americans, not just the people who are most affected by it. In the process, she demonstrates why it is in everyone’s best interest to dismantle racial hierarchies.
When Affirmative Action was White by Ira Katznelson
October 24, 2016
When Affirmative Action Was White elaborates on this core theme in four stages. First, the author looks at how African Americans were denied access to economic relief during the New Deal. Although many federal officials understood that black sharecroppers were the hardest hit group during the Great Depression, a full 65 percent of African Americans were denied access to social security benefits, government grants, elderly poor assistance, and unemployment insurance. Administered by local politicians throughout the South, New Deal relief programs were simply not given to the vast majority of African Americans. The result was the deepening of black rural poverty.
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
October 24, 2016
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a book by Michelle Alexander, a civil rights litigator and legal scholar. The book discusses race-related issues specific to African-American males and mass incarceration in the United States, but Alexander notes that the discrimination faced by African-American males is prevalent among other minorities and socio-economically disadvantaged populations. Alexander's central premise, from which the book derives its title, is that "mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow..
Research & Articles
Poverty and Mythologies (based on The Geography of Poverty project, 2015) - by Matt Black
The most vulnerable Americans are being crushed by the grip of poverty, from the deserts of the Southwest through the black belt in the South, to the post-industrial, rusting factory towns that dot the Midwest and Northeast.
The Social Construction of Whiteness - Racism by Intent, Racism by Consequence - by Teresa J. Guess
Sociology engages in studies of racial inequality, however, the sociology of race relations has historically failed to observe and report on the social construction of both sides of America’s black/white binary paradigm (Perea 1997) when addressing racial inequality.
The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration - by
Ta-Nehisi Coates
American politicians are now eager to disown a failed criminal-justice system that’s left the U.S. with the largest incarcerated population in the world. But they've failed to reckon with history. Fifty years after Daniel Patrick
Moynihan’s report “The Negro Family” tragically helped create this system, it's time to reclaim his original intent.