Anti-Racist Toolkit & Resources for Civic Engagement
Image courtesy of a protest in Pittsburgh against police brutality.
Amid the coronavirus pandemic, we’ve seen increases in racism and xenophobia (prejudice against people from other countries).
Here are tools we can all use to break systemic racism and build confidence to be more civically engaged.
“2020 has brought us the COVID-19 Pandemic, and its attendant rise in both anti-Asian racism and anti-immigrant actions. Socioeconomic inequities have been amplified by the disease and a host of public health policy failures, with the worst outcomes occurring in black and Latino communities. Then, with the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd among others, protesters have taken to the streets to proclaim “enough is enough” to anti-black police brutality and more broadly to systemic racism throughout American culture and institutions.
We need to educate ourselves about racism past and present.
We need to understand the role of racism in the institution in which we work and study and in the communities in which we live. We need to examine the insidious effects of bias in our academic fields and in our classrooms, and do the work of acknowledging these forces to begin overcoming them. And we can start by understanding our own racism and privilege. This is not a quick or easy fix. It is in fact a “lifelong task.”
The following list focus on three action areas: educating and assessing ourselves; examining and revising our work; and enacting change. It is a work in progress and all suggestions are welcome.” —The Department of Asian Studies at UNC Chapel Hill
Educating & Assessing Ourselves
READ
READ: Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019)
READ: Robin J. DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (2018)
READ: essay by Garnett Cadogan, Walking While Black
READ: essay by Audre Lorde, The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism
READ novels:
Angie Thomas’s The Hate You Give (2017)
Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2014)
Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987)
James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)
Zora Neal Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
LISTEN
LISTEN: Under the Blacklight (Video/Podcast from African American Policy Forum & Kimberly Crenshaw)
LISTEN: Code Switch podcast episode: A Decade of Watching Black People Die
LISTEN: All episodes of podcast White Lies (NPR)
LISTEN: All episodes of podcast The 1619 Project (New York Times)
LISTEN: True stories from the Civil War podcast: Uncivil (Gimlet Media)
WATCH
WATCH: What Matters (Documentary video and narratives from Black Lives Matter)
WATCH: 13th (Ava DuVernay’s examination of the U.S. prison system looks at how the country’s history of racial inequality drives the high rate of incarceration in America)
WATCH: White Privilege (Poem by Kyla Lacey)
WATCH: 5 Tips for Being an Ally (Video by @Chescaleigh)
WATCH: The Urgency of Intersectionality (2016 TED Talk by Kimberly Crenshaw)
Examining & Revising Our Work
READ
READ: Letters for Black Lives (crowdsourced, multilingual, and culturally-aware resources aimed at creating a space for open and honest conversations about racial justice, police violence, and anti-Blackness – includes letters in all languages taught in DAS)
READ: Seeding Change: Solidarity Statements and Articles in Support of #BlackLivesMatter (A Center for Asian American Movement Building, San Francisco)
READ: Anti-Asian Racism and COVID-19, by friend of the department Dr. Jennifer Ho, professor of ethnic studies and director of the Center for Humanities & the Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder
READ: How Asian Immigrants Learn Anti-Blackness From White Culture, And How To Stop It (Jezzika Chung, Huffpost, 2017)
READ: Anti-blackness in Asian and Asian-American Communities (Elena Kuran, Northeastern University Political Review, 2018)
READ: ‘Model Minority’ Myth Again Used As A Racial Wedge Between Asians And Blacks (Kat Chow, Code Switch, 2017)
READ: Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness Across the Disciplines, ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw et al (University of California Press, 2019)
READ: Black and Asian American Feminist Solidarities: A Reading List
WATCH
WATCH: American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs
WATCH: The Next American Revolution
WATCH: Heartbeat of Struggle
WATCH: “Chinese Virus”: Why Anti-Asian Racism is So Contagious, USC Race and Equity Center
WATCH: COVID-19 Webinars with the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee
WATCH: Know Your Rights as a Protestor (Council on American-Islamic Relations)
Enacting Change
REVISE OUR COURSES: Anti-Racist Pedagogy Guide, USC Libraries
REVISE OUR COURSES: The Race Institute for K-12 Educators Anti-Racism-Resources for Teachers
REVISE OUR COURSES: Educational Resources on Arab American Civil Rights
INTERVENE: “Show Up: Your Guide to Bystander Intervention,” (PDF), Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP)
SUPPORT BLACK COMMUNITIES: 20+ Allyship Actions for Asians to Show Up for the Black Community Right Now (Michelle King, Medium)
SUPPORT ASIAN COMMUNITIES: Asian People Are Being Targeted By Racist Attacks. Here’s How You Can Be An Ally (Josephine Harvey, Huffpost, 2020)
TEACH: How to Respond to Coronavirus Racism (Teaching Tolerance)
REBUILD THE UNIVERSITY: How Higher Ed Can Fight Racism: ‘Speak Up When It’s Hard’ (Chronicle of Higher Education)
ENGAGE: Campaign Zero – 10 steps to end police brutality
ENGAGE: find your local bail fund supporting protesters such as the Anti-Racist Activist Fund here in Chapel Hill.
ENGAGE: The Bail Project
ENGAGE: The LGBTQ Freedom Fund
ENGAGE: The Black Trans Femmes in the Arts (BTFA) Collective
ENGAGE: Stop AAPI HATE/Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council
ENGAGE: Arab Resource and Organizing Center
ENGAGE: Council on American-Islamic Relations
ENGAGE: Palestine Legal
ENGAGE: Jewish Voice for Peace, Triangle, NC
SUPPORT/LISTEN/LEARN: Black Lives Matter, Long Beach
READ AND WATCH MORE: https://www.racialequitytools.org/fundamentals/resource-lists/book-and-film-lists
STRATEGIZE: https://www.racialequitytools.org/act/strategies
These resources were courtesy of The Department of Asian Studies at UNC Chapel Hill through suggestions from Department of Asian Studies faculty as well as a from a huge range of online lists and articles, including the following:
—This guide is courtesy of The Department of Asian Studies at UNC Chapel Hill, June 4, 2020—
A Class Divided
VIDEO DOCUMENTARY—One teacher’s way of explaining racism with an experiment in her third-grade class.
Video below is about one hour long.
TRIGGER WORDS: Racial slurs. Third-grade teacher Jane Elliott's lesson in discrimination. Filmed in 1985 in a rural town in northern Iowa.
On the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in April 1968, Jane Elliott’s third graders from the small, all-white town of Riceville, Iowa, came to class confused and upset. They recently had made King their “Hero of the Month,” and they couldn’t understand why someone would kill him. So Elliott decided to teach her class a daring lesson in the meaning of discrimination. She wanted to show her pupils what discrimination feels like, and what it can do to people.
Elliott divided her class by eye color — those with blue eyes and those with brown. On the first day, the blue-eyed children were told they were smarter, nicer, neater, and better than those with brown eyes. Throughout the day, Elliott praised them and allowed them privileges such as a taking a longer recess and being first in the lunch line. In contrast, the brown-eyed children had to wear collars around their necks and their behavior and performance were criticized and ridiculed by Elliott. On the second day, the roles were reversed and the blue-eyed children were made to feel inferior while the brown eyes were designated the dominant group.