Resources: Racism
In an overview of social justice, why include a list of resources specifically about racism? Racism is not the most important ‘-ism’, but understanding racism helps us discern how the misuse of power in other kinds of relationships leads to other kinds of -isms. All of the following resources share a common definition of racism: RACISM = RACE PREJUDICE + THE MISUSE OF SYSTEMIC AND INSTITUTIONAL POWER. This definition translates to other -isms when you substitute race prejudice for any other kind of prejudice—sexuality, gender, income level, education level, nationality, religion, age, etc. Understanding racism provides a foundation for understanding the misuse of power and the abuse of God’s children. Overcoming racism provides a foundation for healing.
Getting started ... for all ages
FICTION: The Land, Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry, Let
the Circle be Unbroken, and The Road to Memphis
by Mildred D. Taylor
In these historical fiction novels for youth life is not fair, hard
work doesn't always pay off, and the good guy doesn't always win. That's because
this extraordinary author tells the stories of her African American family
in the Deep South during and after the Civil War, a time of ugly, painful
racism.
FILM: RACE—The Power of Illusion
series created and produced by Larry Adelman (PBS)
A provocative three-hour series that questions the very idea of race
as biology. Scientists tell us that believing in biological races is
no more sound than believing the sun revolves around the earth. So if
race is a biological myth, where did the idea come from? And why should it
matter today?
FILM: Rabbit-Proof Fence
directed by Philip Noyce
Powerful true story of hope and survival. At a time when it was Australian
government policy to train aboriginal children as domestic workers and integrate
them into white society, young Molly decides to lead her little sister and
cousin in a daring escape from their internment camp!
FILM: Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible
directed by Shakti Butler
Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible is a brilliant documentary
and a must-see for all people who are interested in justice, spiritual growth
and community making. It features the experiences of white women and men who
have worked to gain insight into what it means to challenge notions of racism
and white supremacy in the United States. Appropriate for high school
age and older.
Next steps
BOOK: Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-first
Century Challenge to White America
by Joseph Barndt (Fortress)
With great clarity Barndt traces the history of racism, especially
in white America, revealing its various personal, institutional, and cultural
forms. Without demonizing anyone or any race, he offers specific, positive
ways in which people in all walks, including churches, can work to bring racism
to an end. He includes the newest data on continuing conditions of People
of Color, including their progress relative to the minimal standards of equality
in housing, income and wealth, education, and health. He discusses current
dimensions of race as they appear in controversies over 9/11, New Orleans,
and undocumented workers. Includes analytical charts, definitions, bibliography,
and exercises for readers.
Enter the River: Healing Steps from White Privilege Toward Racial
Reconciliation
by Tobin & Jody Miller Shearer (Herald Press)
Rarely do White American males speak out on racism, and this is especially
lacking in the Christian Church, which remains frightfully split along racial
lines. Miller-Scherer writes out of his experience especially to other White
Christians in America, giving biblical, historical, personal, and and social
reasons to examine racism and work toward reconciliation.
BOOK: White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism
by Ashley W. Doane (Routledge)
What does it mean to be white? This remains the question at large
in the continued effort to examine how white racial identity is constructed
and how systems of white privilege operate in everyday life. White Out brings
together the original work of leading scholars across the disciplines of sociology,
philosophy, history and anthropology to give readers an important and cutting-edge
study of "whiteness".
BOOK: Soul Work: Anti-Racist Theologies in Dialogue
by Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley (Skinner House Books)
Papers and discussion transcripts from the UUA Consultation on Theology
and Racism held in Boston in January 2001. Addresses such questions as: What
theological or philosophical beliefs bind us together in our shared struggle
against racism? What are the costs of racism, both for the oppressors and
the oppressed?
FILM: The Color of Fear
by Lee Mun Wah (www.stirfryseminars.com)
The Color of Fear is an insightful, groundbreaking film about the
state of race relations in America as seen through the eyes of eight North
American men of Asian, European, Latino and African descent. In a series of
intelligent, emotional and dramatic confrontations the men reveal the pain
and scars that racism has caused them. What emerges is a deeper sense of understanding
and trust. This is the dialogue most of us fear, but hope will happen sometime
in our lifetime.
Digging deeper: books
Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding
School Experience
by David Wallace Adams (University Press of Kansas)
Education for Extinction, a thorough and thoughtful study of the federal
government's Indian education program that was explicitly aimed at extinguishing
a culture. Much more than a study of federal Indian policy, this book vividly
details the day-to-day experiences of Indian youth living in a "total institution" designed
to reconstruct them both psychologically and culturally. The assault on identity
came in many forms: the shearing off of braids, the assignment of new names,
uniformed drill routines, humiliating punishments, relentless attacks on native
religious beliefs, patriotic indoctrinations, and the suppression of tribal
languages.
Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White
by Frank H. Wu (Basic Books)
Mixing personal anecdotes, current events, academic studies, and
court cases, Wu not only debunks the myth of a "model minority" but
also makes discomfiting observations about attitudes toward affirmative action,
mixed marriages, racial profiling, and the "false divisions" of
integration versus pluralism and assimilation versus multiculturalism.
Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching
by Alana Murray and Deborah Menkart (Teaching for Change and PRRAC)
An incredible, informative, collection of essays, articles, analysis,
interviews, primary documents and interactive & interdisciplinary teaching
aids on civil rights, movement building, and what it means for all of the
inhabitants of the planet. With sections on education, economic justice, citizenship,
and culture, it connects the African-American Civil Rights Movement to Native
American, Latina, Asian-American, gay rights, and international struggles;
while highlighting the often-ignored roles of women in social justice movements.
White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism
by Paula S. Rothenberg (Worth Publishers)
In White Privilege, whiteness is traced from it's multiple origins
and entry points giving a basic understanding on how whiteness developed as
a social construct, what whiteness has meant to numerous people, how various
Others have become white, and how whiteness is navigated and construed by
people of color.
Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?
by Beverly Daniel Tatum (Basic Books)
As Tatum sees it, blacks must secure a racial identity free of negative
stereotypes. The challenge to whites, on which she expounds, is to give up
the privilege that their skin color affords and to work actively to combat
injustice in society.
Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years
by Juan Williams and Julian Bond (Penguin)
Eyes On the Prize is an outstanding contribution to the memory of the
lessons of the Civil Rights Movement. Williams brings the events of the nonviolent
civil rights years to life with photographs and lucid text, as well as brief
asides interspersed throughout to provide participants' perspectives.
Latino Politics in the United States: Race, Ethnicity, Class
and Gender in the Mexican American and Puerto Rican Experience
by Victor M. Rodriguez (Kendall-Hunt)
Víctor Rodríguez shows us the similarities and the differences
between Chicanos and Boricuas in the paths they took into the racialized American
space. The following chapters, full of interesting historical events and empirical
details, build on the theorizing of the first. The urban explosion of Los
Angeles in 1992, following the acquittal of police officers in the brutal
beating of Rodney King, Rodriguez explains, was perhaps the first example
of a "multicultural" uprising in the United States. The author presents
to us a complex web: the social, economic and racial matrix, that has turned
our urban cores into economic "badlands," providing the explosive
mixture that ignited in the 1992 Los Angeles events.
Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts its Legacy
as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History
by Thomas Norman DeWolf (Beacon Press)
Inheriting the Trade is a candid, powerful and insightful book about how
one family dealt with the infamous slave trade. This book is jarring in its
candor, and revealing in its honest assessment of slavery and the Dewolf family.
We must read important books like this one, if we dare to appreciate
every aspect of our history, and as the Dewolf family does, dare to change
our judgments about the wretched history of slavery
Digging deeper: films
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
directed by Yves Simoneau (HBO)
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee intertwines the perspectives of three
characters: Charles Eastman, Ohiyesa, a young, Dartmouth-educated, Sioux doctor
held up as living proof of the alleged success of assimilation; Sitting Bull,
the proud Lakota chief who refuses to submit to U.S. government policies designed
to strip his people of their identity, their dignity and their sacred land -
the gold-laden Black Hills of the Dakotas; and Senator Henry Dawes, who was
one of the architects of the government policy on Indian affairs. While Eastman
and patrician schoolteacher Elaine Goodale work to improve life for the Indians
on the reservation, Senator Dawes lobbies President Grant for more humane treatment,
opposing the bellicose stance of General William Tecumseh Sherman. Hope rises
for the Indians in the form of the prophet Wovoka and the Ghost Dance - a messianic
movement that promises an end of their suffering under the white man. This hope
is obliterated after the assassination of Sitting Bull and the massacre of hundreds
of Indian men, women and children by the 7th Cavalry at Wounded Knee Creek
Last Chance for Eden
directed by Lee Mun Wah (www.stirfryseminars.com)
Last Chance for Eden is a documentary about eight men and women discussing
the issues of racism and sexism in the workplace. They examine the impact of
society's stereotypes on their lives in the workplace, in their personal relationships
and within their families and in their communities. In the course of their dialogue,
they also explore the differences and similarities between racism and sexism
- an area that has seldom been researched, but has heatedly become a very important
issue needing to be understood and dealt with.
Time of Fear
directed by Sue Williams (PBS)
In World War II, more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans were forced
into relocation camps across the US. This film traces the lives of the 16,000
people who were sent to two camps in southeast Arkansas, one of the most racially
segregated places in America at that time. Through interviews with the internees
and local citizens, the program explores how the influx of outsiders overwhelmed
and exposed racial tensions within the southern communities.
At the River I Stand
directed by David Appleby with Allison Graham and Steven Ross (California
Newsreel)
At the River I Stand skillfully reconstructs the two eventful months
that transformed a local labor dispute into a national conflagration, and disentangles
the complex historical forces that came together with the inevitability of tragedy
at the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This 58-minute documentary brings
into sharp relief issues that have only become more urgent in the intervening
years: the connection between economic and civil rights, the debate over violent
vs. nonviolent change, and the demand for full inclusion of African Americans
in American life.
What’s Race Got to Do With It?
produced by Jean Cheng (California Newsreel)
What’s Race Got to Do with It? is a new 49-minute documentary
film that goes beyond identity politics, celebratory history and interpersonal
relations to consider social disparities and their impact on student success
in today’s post-Civil Rights world.
Free Indeed: Of White Privilege and How We Play the Game
by the Mennonite Central Committee (www.mcc.org)
A video drama about racism that challenges white viewers to think
about the privileges that come with being white in North America. In the drama
four white middle-class young adults play a simulation as a pre-requisite
for doing a service project for a black Baptist church. It provides them with
specific examples of white privilege.
Rather than encouraging guilt, the video suggests ways viewers can
examine old assumptions and begin to dismantle racism.
The New Americans
directed by Laura Simon, Steve James and Gordon Quinn (episode of Independent
Lens)
Follow a diverse group of immigrants and refugees as they leave their
home and families behind and learn what it means to be new Americans in the
21st century.
Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North
directed by Katrina Browne, Alla Kovgen, Jude Ray
A Sundance film selection for 2008, this personal documentary tells
the story of first-time filmmaker Katrina Browne's Rhode Island ancestors,
the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. At Browne’s invitation,
nine fellow descendants agree to journey with her to retrace the steps of
the Triangle Trade. They soon learn that slavery was business for more than
just the DeWolf family—it was a cornerstone of Northern commercial life.
The family travels from Bristol, Rhode Island, where the family “business” was
based, to slave forts in Ghana where they meet with African-Americans on their
own homecoming pilgrimages, to the ruins of a family-owned sugar plantation
in Cuba. At each stop, the family grapples with the contemporary legacy of
slavery, not only for black Americans, but also for themselves as white Americans. To
be released on DVD in 2008.
