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The New York City Commission on Human Rights’ Antiracist Resource Guide

The Commission is committed to fighting all manifestations of racism and discrimination. This work bridges culture, policy, research, law enforcement and community engagement – all necessary for transformative change.

Challenging the structures that foment racism around and within us is a lifelong journey. The New York City Commission on Human Rights has curated a set of antiracism resources to foster critical engagement and dialogue regarding historical and contemporary manifestations of bias, racism, and discrimination.

This set of resources is a start but is certainly not consummate. It includes books, articles, videos, documentaries, podcasts and links to organizations. For those resources that do not have links, many of them can be found by searching online.

Antiracism work cannot be done passively; these resources provide a foundation to understand and engage with the role of race and identity in the United States, and to take action towards dismantling white supremacy.

We hope these resources inspire you.

(For our younger readers, please also visit Stories For All: A Human Rights Reading List).

Select resources that investigate structural and institutional racism, white supremacy culture, and personal bias.  The focus is on resources that address the U.S. context, though these issues manifest globally.

History

Books:

  • A Different Mirror A History of Multicultural America: A History of Multicultural America by Ronald Takaki
  • A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
  • A People's History of American Empire by Howard Zinn
  • American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World by David Stannard
  • American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear by Khaled Beydoun
  • An African American and Latinx History of the United States by Paul Ortiz
  • Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 by Carol Anderson
  • Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence Against Mexicans in the United States, 1848-1928 by Clive Webb and William D. Carrigan
  • Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference, and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls by Jessica McDiarmid
  • Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law by James Q. Whitman
  • Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment by Gary Y. Okihiro and Linda Gordon
  • Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen
  • Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano
  • Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi
  • The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikole Hannah-Jones
  • The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minorities by Madeline Y. Hsu
  • The Making of Asian America: A History by Erika Lee
  • The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez
  • The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
  • The Young Lords: A Radical History by Professor Johanna Fernandez
  • They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
  • Two Faces of Exclusion: The Untold Story Of Anti-Asian Racism In The United States by Lon Kurashige
  • We Too Sing America: South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multiracial Future by Deepa Iyer
  • White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson

Articles, Essays, Reports, and Other Online Resources:

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Criminal Justice / Legal System

Books:

  • Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis
  • Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California by Ruth Wilson Gilmore
  • Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color by Andrea Ritchie
  • Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson
  • Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment by Angela Davis
  • The End of Policing by Alex Vitale
  • The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in The Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
  • Women, Race and Class by Angela Davis

Articles, Essays, Reports, and Other Online Resources:

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Economics & Finance

Books:

  • Black Wealth / White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality Thomas Shapiro and Melvin Oliver
  • How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems In Race, Political Economy And Society by Manning Marable
  • The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap by Mehrsa Baradaran
  • The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist
  • The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation by Daina Ramey Berry
  • The Sum of Us : What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee

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Education

Books:

  • Ghosts In The Schoolyard: Racism And School Closings On Chicago’s South Side by Eve L. Ewing
  • Haste to Rise: A Remarkable Experience of Black Education during Jim Crow by David Pilgrim and Franklin Hughes
  • Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools by Monique W. Morris
  • Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks
  • We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom by Bettina L. Love
  • When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America by Ira Katznelson
  • Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations about Race by Beverly Daniel Tatum

Articles, Essays, Reports, and Other Online Resources:

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Climate & Environment

Books:

  • A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind by Harriet Washington
  • As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock by Dina Gilio-Whitaker
  • Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States by Carl Abraham Zimring
  • Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility by Dorceta Taylor

Articles, Essays, Reports, and Other Online Resources:

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Housing & Home Ownership

Books:

  • Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
  • Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
  • Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities by Jessica Trounstine
  • The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein

Articles, Essays, Reports, and Other Online Resources:

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Immigration

Books:

  • Baby Jails: The Fight to End the Incarceration of Refugee Children in America by Philip G. Schrag
  • No Justice in the Shadows: How America Criminalizes Immigrants by Alina Das
  • The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect On America Edited By Nikesh Shukla And Chimene Suleyman

Articles, Essays, Reports, and Other Online Resources:

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Gender & Sexuality

Books:

  • Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity by C. Riley Snorton
  • Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings
  • Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall
  • How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective Edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
  • Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More by Janet Mock
  • Sister Citizen: Shame Stereotypes, and Black Women in America by Melissa Harris-Perry
  • Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
  • Stop Telling Women to Smile: Stories of Street Harassment and How We're Taking Back Our Power by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh
  • Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman
  • You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience by Tarana Burke and Brené Brown

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Labor and Employment

Books:

  • Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual, and Political Freedom by Mireya Loza
  • For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865, by Robert H. Zieger
  • No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor by Cindy Hahamovitch
  • The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History by David R. Roediger
  • Tomatoland: From Harvest of Shame to Harvest of Hope by Barry Estabrook
  • Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America by Joe William Trotter

Articles, Essays, Reports, and Other Online Resources:

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Personal Narratives

Books:

  • Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • Black Boy by Richard Wright
  • Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing: A Library of America by Illan Stavans
  • Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzualda
  • Citizen 13660 (Graphic Novel) by Mine Okubo
  • Chopper! Chopper!: Poetry from Bordered Lives by Verónica Reyes
  • Country Called Amreeka U S History Retold Through Arab American Lives by Alia Malek
  • Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Brittney Cooper
  • Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations by Mira Jacob
  • Have Black Lives Ever Mattered? by Mumia Abu-Jamal
  • Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon
  • How Does It Feel to Be A Problem? Being Young and Arab In America by Moustafa Bayoumi
  • I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
  • Latinx Comic Book Storytelling: An Odyssey by Interview by Frederick Luis Aldama
  • Living on the Borderlines by Melissa Michal
  • Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds by Pamela Rotner Sakamoto
  • Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong
  • Names We Call Home: Autobiography on Racial Identity, edited by Becky Thompson & Sangeeta Tyagi
  • The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir by Thi Bui
  • They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement by Wesley Lowery
  • The Pink Box Poems by Yesenia Montilla

Articles, Essays, Reports, and Other Online Resources:

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Science & Medicine

Books:

  • Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland by Jonathan Metzl
  • Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century by Dorothy Roberts
  • Killing the Black Body: Race Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty by Dorothy E. Roberts
  • Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet Washington
  • The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Articles, Essays, Reports, and Other Online Resources:

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Social and Political Analysis

Books:

  • Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture by Angela Davis
  • As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
  • Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon
  • Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
  • Culture of Anti-Racism in Latin America and the Caribbean by Peter Wade, James Scorer, and Ignacio Aguiló
  • Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Davis
  • Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century by Barbara Ransby
  • Pedagogy of the oppressed by Paulo Freire
  • Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Barbara and Karen Fields
  • Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
  • The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism by Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz 
  • The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
  • The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter
  • The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison
  • The Purpose of Power by Alicia Garza
  • The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
  • We Do This ‘Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba
  • Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear by John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats

Articles, Essays, Reports, and Other Online Resources:

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Voting

Books:

  • Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy by Darryl Pinckney
  • Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America by Ari Berman
  • One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy by Carol Anderson
  • Uncounted: The Crisis of Voter Suppression in America by Gilda R. Daniels

Articles, Essays, Reports, and Other Online Resources:

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Guides to Practice

Books:

  • Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
  • For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood…and the Rest of Y’all Too by Christopher Emdin
  • Good White Racist: Confronting Your Role in Racial Injustice by Kerry Connelly
  • How to be Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi
  • How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide by Crystal Marie Fleming
  • Legacy: Trauma, Story, and Indigenous Healing by Suzanne Methot
  • Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor by Layla Saad
  • So You Wanna Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
  • This Book is Anti-Racist: 20 Lessons on How to Wake Up, Take Action, and Do the Work by Tiffany Jewell
  • The Racial Healing Handbook: Practical Activities to Help You Challenge Privilege, Confront Systemic Racism, and Engage in Collective Healing by Anneliese Singh
  • Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work For Racial Justice by Paul Kivel
  • White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son by Tim Wise

Articles, Essays, Reports, and Other Online Resources:

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Documentaries/Films/Podcasts

  • 13th by Ava DuVernay
  • 1700% Project: Mistaken for Muslim, short film by artist Anida Yoeu Ali and filmmaker Masahiro Sugano.
  • 2016 NPS Finals - San Diego - "Islamophobia" by Rudy Francisco, Natasha Hooper, and Amen Ra, a poetry slam performance.
  • 4 Little Girls by Spike Lee
  • A Matter of Place by The Fair Housing Justice Center
  • A Stray by Musa Syeed
  • Brick by Brick: A Civil Rights Story by Bill Kavanaugh
  • Chicano! History of the Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement by Hector Galan
  • Dark Girls by Bill Duke
  • Dolores by Peter Bratt
  • Ethnic Notions by Marlon Riggs
  • Explained: Racial Wealth Gap, short web documentary by Vox
  • Free Angela and All Political Prisoners by Shola Lynch
  • Frontera! Revolt and Rebellion on the Río Grande, short documentary by John Jota Leaños
  • I Am Not Your Negro by Raoul Peck
  • Immigration Nation by Christina Clusiau and Shaul Schwarz
  • LA 92 by T. J. Martin, Daniel Lindsay
  • Los graduados by Bernardo Ruiz
  • Moonlight by Barry Jenkins
  • Paris is Burning by Jennie Livingston
  • Reconstruction: America After the Civil War by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
  • Reel Bad Arabs by Jack Shaheen
  • RiverBlue by Roger Williams and David McIlvride
  • (T)error by Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe
  • The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution by Stanley Nelson
  • The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 by Göran Olsson
  • The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson by David France
  • The New Jim Crow Museum, video tour of Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University (Trigger Warning: the video depicts images of anti-Black violence).
  • The Pruitt-Igoe Myth by Chad Freidrichs
  • True Justice by Bryan Stevenson
  • When They See Us by Ava DuVernay
  • (Podcast) Black Wall Street 1921 hosted by Nia Clark and Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial
  • (Podcast) Code Switch, hosted by Shereen Marisol Meraji, Gene Demby, and other NPR staff
  • (Podcast) Intersectionality Matters, hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw
  • (Podcast) Justice in America hosted by Josie Duffy Rice and Clint Smith III
  • (Podcast) Uncivil hosted by Jack Hitt and Chenjerai Kumanyika
  • (Podcast) On Asian America: Sex, gender and the 'exotic other' by Kristin Leong and John O’ Brien

Where to Buy Literature and Watch Documentaries

Support Black-owned and independent bookstores when looking to purchase antiracist literature. You can search for your local brick-and-mortar or web-based stores online. Additionally, many news and media sites have compiled lists of Black-owned bookstores.

While many documentaries are available on popular streaming services, you can also look to the New York Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library, Queens Public Library, and your own educational intuitions to access some material.

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