Anti-Racism Resources

What are your favorite picture books for young children on race and/or anti-racism?

• Embrace Race’s list: 20 Picture Books for 2020
• Kveller’s list: A Jewish Anti-Racist Reading list
  • Books not included in these lists that Franny recommends:
  • Can I Touch Your Hair: Poems of Race, Mistakes and Friendship by Irene Latham, Charles Waters, Sean Qualls, and Selina Alko
  • Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness by Anastasia Higgenbotham

Also important:

• Books NOT explicitly about race or racialized stories, but featuring BIPOC protagonists.
• Reading the books we have and naming differences as we read them to our kids
• And next level: reading to our kids, and doing so with a racial equity lens, and naming that with our kids. For more on that, check out interactive workshop/webinar for white anti-racists.

What are your reading suggestions for parents/educators who want to delve deeper into anti-racism?

• We’re not including Saad, Kindi, Wilkerson, Oluo, DiAngelo, Coates since they remain on the top of all the lists so you probably know those are good books to read!
• If you have never read a book about race and US context, we recommend Ijeoma Oluo’s or Dolly Chugh’s books below as starters. They are excellent.

General Books:

• The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias by Dr. Dolly Chugh
• My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem
• Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice by Paul Kivel
• So You Want to Talk about Race by Ijeoma Olou

On Anti-Racism and Youth:

• Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves by Louise Derman-Sparks & Julie Olsen Edwards with Catherine M. Goins
• Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations about Race by Dr. Beverly Tatum
• Ali Michael’s books – specifically for white adults educating or raising children of any race
• Continuum of Awareness to Action: Overcoming Roadblocks to Personal Transformation by Dr. Sandra Chapman

Books we are excited to read, but haven’t yet:

• We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom by Dr. Bettina Love
• Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown

Other media related to race and Jewishness specifically:

• Transcending Jewish Trauma by Jo Kent Katz

What do you mean when you talk about being on stolen land?

When we talk about stolen land we’re referring the transition of occupants and power from pre-1492 to today.

• For a sample story, we recommend the podcast episode “Little War on the Prairie” from Scene On Radio’s “Seeing White” series.
• An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is also a good journey in perspective taking.
• The blog Unsettling America, “created and curated as one settler’s labor of love and resistance” also offers this solid “Settler Colonialism Primer.”
• For a shorter piece, the essay by Daniel José Camacho, “Unlearning the Doctrine of Discovery,” places us in the context of history from the Doctrine of Discovery to 2018.
• For a connection between Jewish American history and the notion of stolen land, read “The Jews’ Indian: Colonialism, Pluralism, and Belonging in America.” You can also read an interview with author David S. Koffman here.

Since noticing differences is a normal part of who we are, are there other ways besides identifying bias to ensure that the differences aren’t prejudiced?

• Harvard has developed a number of Implicit Associations Tests. Implicit bias is not always a determinant of behavior but it can interfere.
• Psychologists believe proximity is an antidote to racial bias. Criminal justice lawyer Bryan Stevenson discusses this, among other strategies, in his TED Talk.
• Understanding internalized dominance, as described in this article by Kel Kray from Everyday Feminism or this one from Sensoy and DiAngelo.

Our Website

Who designed your website?

Our website was created by Alison Rollman. For more information about her work or to get in touch, send her an email: arollman18 [at] gmail [dot] com

Why do you use image descriptions below the photos on your website?

Accessibility is important to us. Image descriptions can be helpful for people who use screen readers and who are Blind/low vision, or who otherwise can use support deciphering images. Helpful to us in the process of making image descriptions was this article by Alex Chen.

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We sourced our photos from Burst by Shopify. Imani also created this document which lists other sites that have photos of people often not represented in mainstream stock photos.

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