Antiracist Resources

What follows are resources for thought, reflection, writing, reaction. We have made available documents on antiracist and inclusive pedagogy; writings on racial issues gathered from sources outside and inside Barnard; and essays by and recommended readings from our faculty members. We will update these resources periodically.

• Modern Language Association: Antiracist Resources for Your 2020-2021 Teaching
• bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
• Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (See chapter 5: "Speaking About Racism”)
• Critical Race Conversations: Cultivating an Anti-Racist Pedagogy
• Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future

The following items are recommended by the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW).

Resources and reading lists

• Study this policing timeline from Critical Resistance
• Use the Prison Culture essential reading list from Mariame Kaba
• Visit Transforming Harm, a resource hub about ending violence created by Mariame Kaba
• Use this syllabus, Institutionalized Racism: Understanding George Floyd's Death in Context from JSTOR

Recommended Books

• Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture by Angela Davis
• Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Davis
• Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter, edited by Christina Heatherton and Jordan T. Camp
• Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color by Andrea J. Ritchie
• The End of Policing by Alex Vitale, free e-book available from Verso
• From Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation by Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor
• More on policing and incarceration from Haymarket Books

• Barnard's Africana Studies Department's page of recommended resources

Prof. James Basker

• A Message from Gilder Lehrman Institute President James Basker

Visiting Writer Regan Good, BC '90

• "My Father’s Work," Interim 36.1

Prof. Kim F. Hall

• Folger Shakespeare Library, "African Americans and Shakespeare," Shakespeare Unlimited Podcast 20 (featuring Prof Kim Hall)
• Kimberly Anne Coles, Kim F. Hall, and Ayanna Thompson, "BlacKKKShakespearean: A Call to Action for Medieval and Early Modern Studies," MLA Profession (Fall 2019).
• Kim F. Hall, "Beauty and the Beast of Whiteness: Teaching Race and Gender," Shakespeare Quarterly 47.4 (Winter, 1996): 461-475.

Prof. Monica Miller

• "The Grain of her Voice: Nina Simone, Josette Bushell Mingo and Intersections between Art, Politics, and Race," with Anna Adeniji, Barbara Asante, and Anna Lundberg. PARSE, special issue on Intersectional Engagement in Politics and Arts 11 (Summer 2020).
• "On Having Your Cake and Eating It Too: Black (Diasporic/Nordic) Arts," Social Text: Periscope ‘Shady Convivialities’ on Tavia N’yongo’s Afrofabulations (January 28, 2020).
• "Figuring Blackness in a Place Without Race: Sweden, Recently." ELH (English Literary History) 84:2 (2017): 377-97.
• "Introduction: Singing a Black Girl’s Song at Barnard and Beyond," with Kim F. Hall. Ntozake Shange double issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online, 12.3-13.1 (Summer/Fall 2014). Eds. Kim F. Hall, Monica L. Miller, and Yvette Christiansë.
• “Introduction: Zoramania.” Jumpin’ at the Sun: Reassessing the Life and Work of Zora Neale Hurston. The Scholar and Feminist Online, 3.2 (Winter 2005). Ed. Monica L. Miller.

Fiction

• Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman (Harper, 2020).
• Joaquim Maria Machado De Assis, The Posthumous Memoir of Brás Cubas (1881), trans. Flora Thomson-Devaux (Penguin, 2020).

Non-Fiction

• Elizabeth Alexander, "The Trayvon Generation," The New Yorker (June 22, 2020).
• Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow, New Edition (The New Press, 2020).
• Joshua Bennett, Being Property Once Myself (Belknap Press, 2020).
• Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House: A Memoir (Grove Press, 2019).
• Vinson Cunningham, "The Argument of  'Afropessimism,'" The New Yorker (July 20, 2020).
• Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, Second Edition (Harvard UP, 2019).
• Zadie Smith, Intimations: Six Essays (Penguin Books, 2020).
• Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (Random House, 2020).

Poetry

• Jericho Brown, The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, 2019).
• Jericho Brown, "Bullet Points"
• Ross Gay, “A Small Needful Fact”
• Morgan Parker, "I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against A Sharp White Background: An Elegy"
• Danez Smith, “not an elegy for Mike Brown”

Consider ordering books from black-owned independent bookstores.