At JVR, we want to share resources examining systemic inequity that we think are critical to our conversations in animal welfare and beyond.
Click through the list below to get an overview of all the topics we are highlighting around resources examining systemic inequity.
Table of Contents
Handouts
Co-creating the Future of Sheltering
DEI work is not about changing process and protocols. Protocols and processes can be shifted but if the systems and thoughts that underlay the existing structures are not changed, modifying processes and protocols simply paints an external image that the organization is thinking about DEI, without transformative change and equity.
The following questions serve as starting points in your journey to becoming an equitable organization.
Co-creating the Future of Sheltering: social justice, equity, and the unlearning process
Non-Fiction
There are a lot of great non-fiction books to dive into on the topic of race. If you are wanting to just get a taste for the conversation, consider the following three books as starting points:
How To Be An Antiracist by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi
So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
Killing Rage: Ending Racism by bell hooks
Update April 2021 – Here are a few more good and recent resources:
This Book is Anti-Racist: 20 Lessons on How to Wake Up, Take Action, and Do the Work by Tiffany Jewell and Aurelia Durand
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
Mindful of Race: Transforming Racism from the Inside Out by Ruth King
Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation by angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens, and Jasmine Syedullah
The rest of the list will be grouped into a few wider topics to direct your research:
Feminist Thought
Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins
Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Dr. Brittney Cooper
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
Women, Race, and Class by Angela Y. Davis
Colonialism and Its Effects
The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon
Settlers, the Myth of the White Proletariat by J Sakai
Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Dubois
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney
Memoirs and Biographies
Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon
Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
Redefining Realness by Janet Mock
Prisons
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis
If They Come in the Morning by Angela Y. Davis
Instead of Prisons by Prison Policy Initiative
Activism and Organizing
Road Map for Revolutionaries by Elisa Camahort Page, Carolyn Gerin and Jamia Wilson
When They Call You a Terrorist, by BLM Co-founder Patrisse Cullors and Asha Bandele
As Black As Resistance by William C. Anderson and Zoé Samudzi
Unlearning Racism
Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad
White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Race by Robin DiAngelo
Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice by Paul Kivel
Raising Our Hands by Jenna Arnold
Witnessing Whiteness by Shelly Tochluk
Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race by Derald Wing Sue
The Emperor Has No Clothes: Teaching about Race and Racism to People Who Don’t Want to Know (Educational Leadership for Social Justice) by Tema Jon Okun
Towards the Other America: Anti-Racist Resources for White People Taking Action for Black Lives Matter by Chris Crass
Understanding White Privilege: Creating Pathways to Authentic Relationships Across Race (Teaching/Learning Social Justice) by Frances Kendall
Waking Up White, and Finding Myself in the Story of Race by Debby Irving
How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood by Jim Grimsley
Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History (Feminist Classics) by Vron Ware
Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence by Chad Williams, Kidada E. Williams, Keisha N. Blain
Acting White?: Rethinking Race in Post-Racial America by Devon W. Carbado, Mitu Gulati
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race by Beverly Daniel Tatum
Feeling White: Whiteness, Emotionality, and Education by Cheryl E. Matias
Disrupting White Supremacy by Jennifer Harvey, Karin A. Case, Robin Hawley Gorsline
Living Into God’s Dream: Dismantling Racism in America by Catherine Meeks, Jim Wallis
Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge
Promise And A Way Of Life: White Antiracist Activism by Becky Thompson
What Does It Mean to Be White?: Developing White Racial Literacy by Robin Diangelo
Race: What Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession by Studs Terkel
Systematic Oppression, Class, and Privilege
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi
White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son by Tim Wise
White Trash: Race and Class in America by Annalee Newitz, Matt Wray
Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces by Radley Balko
Race Traitor by Noel Ignatiev, John Garvey
Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times by Amy Sonnie, James Tracy, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood… and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education (Race, Education, and Democracy) by Christopher Emdin
Benign Bigotry: The Psychology of Subtle Prejudice by Kristin J. Anderson
How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America by Karen Brodkin
Racism Without Racists by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America by Jim Wallis, Bryan Stevenson
Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities by Craig Steven Wilder
Cornel West
Cornel West is a phenomenal professor that I had the pleasure of taking courses from during my undergraduate years at Princeton University. I would like to highlight a few of his books here on race and equality.
Fiction
There are a lot of fiction books on the topics of race and slavery. I want to highlight one particular author, Toni Morrison, who as a professor at Princeton University gave incredible lectures and seminars that made a profound impact on me during my college years.
Books to Teach Race Equity in Schools
On June 15th, 2020, the Supreme Court passed a bill to include sexual orientation and gender identity in a law prohibiting discrimination in the workplace. One teacher, Brett Bigham, took to Twitter to detail his experience of being discriminated against and blackmailed by district officials after coming out as gay in the Oregon school system while also being nominated for Teacher of the Year. His experience was used in the Supreme Court case as definitive evidence of the need to include prohibition of discrimination of LGBTQ+ people in the workplace. You can read his story here. While Brett was fighting against blackmail and discrimination, he worked with the organization NNSTOY, a network of teachers who advocate for policy change, to put together a document containing 300 books, vetted by Teachers of the Year all over the US, to teach race equity in schools.
You can find the compiled document of all books, broken out into age groups here.
We have also compiled a list of some of the books that have also received accolades from other organizations in this field below.
Books for Children
Let’s Talk About Race by Julius Lester
Seeds of Change: Planting a Path to Peace by Jen Johnson
The Name Jar by Yangsook Choi
Lailah’s Lunchbox: A Ramadan Story by Reem Faruqi
Marisol McDonald Doesn’t Match/Marisol McDonald No Combina by Monica Brown
For Middle Schoolers:
The Favorite Daughter by Allen Say
The Trouble With Half a Moon by Danette Vigilante
Ninth Ward by Jewell Parker Rhodes
The Misadventures of the Family Fletcher by Dana Alison Levy
For Young Adults:
This Side of Home by Renée Watson
Mexican Whiteboy by Matt de la Peña
American-Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang
Shine, Coconut Moon by Neesha Meminger
Black-Owned Bookstores
If you cannot find a copy available at one of the links, we encourage you to reconsider ordering any of these from Amazon, and look to black owned digital and brick-and-mortar bookstores to purchase these texts whenever possible. The following is a list of black-owned bookstores to try:
Elizabeth’s Bookshop and Writing Center
Ashay by the Bay – focuses on children’s books, also builds custom collections for schools and libraries
Fulton Street Books and Coffee
Films / Documentaries
Here are 8 films recommended by James Evans, CEO of CARE, an Animal Welfare Organization dedicated to promoting and instituting programs for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the field of Animal Welfare.
James recommends watching the following films in the order listed:
– The West (1996) – 8 ep. Documentary Series, dir. Ken Burns
The West, a nine-part series, chronicles the turbulent history of one of the most extraordinary landscapes on earth – a mythic landscape, simultaneously enticing and forbidding, filled with stories of both heartbreaking tragedy and undying hope beginning in the era when the land belonged only to Native Americans and ending in the 20th century.
– 12 Years a Slave (2013) – Drama, 2h14m, dir. Steve McQueen
In the pre-Civil War United States, Solomon Northup, a free black man from upstate New York, is abducted and sold into slavery. Facing cruelty as well as unexpected kindnesses Solomon struggles not only to stay alive, but to retain his dignity. In the twelfth year of his unforgettable odyssey, Solomon’s chance meeting with a Canadian abolitionist will forever alter his life.
– The Civil War (1990) – 9 ep. Documentary Series, dir. Ken Burns
The Civil War is a nine-part series that explores the most important conflict in our nation’s history. The war was fought in 10,000 places, more than 3 million Americans fought in it, and over 600,000 men – 2 percent of the population – died in it. What began as a bitter dispute over Union and States’ Rights ended as a struggle over the meaning of freedom in America. At Gettysburg in 1863, Abraham Lincoln said perhaps more than he knew. The war was about a “new birth of freedom.”
– MudBound (2017) – Drama, 2h15m, dir. Dee Rees
In the post–World War II South, two families are pitted against a barbaric social hierarchy and an unrelenting landscape as they simultaneously fight the battle at home and the battle abroad.
– Loving (2016) – Drama, 2h03m, dir. Jeff Nichols
The story of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple, whose challenge of their anti-miscegenation arrest for their marriage in Virginia led to a legal battle that would end at the US Supreme Court.
– Malcom X (1992) – Biopic, 3h22m, dir. Spike Lee
A tribute to the controversial black activist and leader of the struggle for black liberation. He hit bottom during his imprisonment in the ’50s, he became a Black Muslim and then a leader in the Nation of Islam. His assassination in 1965 left a legacy of self-determination and racial pride.
– I Am Not Your Negro (2016) – Documentary, 1h33m, dir. Raoul Peck
Working from the text of James Baldwin’s unfinished final novel, director Raoul Peck creates a meditation on what it means to be Black in the United States.
– 13th (2016) – Documentary, 1h40m, dir. Ava DuVernay
An in-depth look at the prison system in the United States and how it reveals the nation’s history of racial inequality.
Our Additional Recommendations
Additionally, here are a few more films that we recommend watching to further your education:
– Prison in 12 Landscapes (2016) – Documentary, 1h30m, dir. Brett Story
More people are imprisoned in the United States at this moment than in any other time or place in history, yet the prison itself has never felt further away or more out of sight. This is a film about the prison in which we never see an actual penitentiary. The film unfolds a cinematic journey through a series of landscapes across the USA where prisons do work and affect lives, from an anti-sex-offender pocket park in Los Angeles, to a congregation of ex-incarcerated chess players shut out of the formal labor market, to an Appalachian coal town betting its future on the promise of prison jobs.
– Black Panthers (1968) – Documentary / Short, 31m, dir. Agnes Varda
This riveting documentary, transports you to the pivotal Free Huey rally held on February 17th, 1968, at Oakland Auditorium in Alameda, California. Newton, the charismatic young college student who, along with Bobby Seale, created the Black Panther Party, had been jailed for allegedly killing a police officer. His arrest–widely believed at the time to be a setup–galvanized Party support throughout the nation and led to a boom in Party membership, bringing a new level of public attention to the Panthers’ cause.
– Handsworth Songs (1986) – Documentary, 1h1m, dir. John Akomfrah
The Black Audio Film Collective’s acclaimed essay film, ‘Handsworth Songs’, examines the 1985 race riots in Handsworth and London. Interweaving archival photographs, newsreel clips, and home movie footage, the film is both an exploration of documentary aesthetics and a broad meditation social and cultural oppression through Britain’s intertwined narratives of racism and economic decline.
Where to watch (until June 21)
– Black Girl (1966) – Drama, 1h, dir. Ousmane Sembane
Eager to find a better life abroad, a Senegalese woman becomes a mere governess to a family in southern France, suffering from discrimination and marginalization.
– When they See Us (2019) – 4 ep. miniseries, dir. Ava DuVernay
Five teens from Harlem become trapped in a nightmare when they’re falsely accused of a brutal attack in Central Park. Based on the true story of the Central Park Five.
– The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971) – Documentary, 1h28m, dir. Howard Alk
Fred Hampton was the leader of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party. This film depicts his brutal murder by the Chicago police and its subsequent investigation, but also documents his activities in organizing the Chapter, his public speeches, and the programs he founded for children during the last eighteen months of his life.