Essential Reading for Inclusive Schools: A Round Up of New Antiracist Books for Educators
Over the past few years, there has been a steady publication of impressive books on antiracism — both for educators and the general public. This year is no different. At the top of our list, of course, is Learning and Teaching While White, by Teaching While White founders Jenna Chandler-Ward and Elizabeth Denevi (available for preorder now and for purchase on July 26, 2022). Here’s a short list of other books that stand out for their connection to the work white educators are doing to build antiracist schools and classrooms — as part of the larger push to build a truly just and equitable society.
The intense backlash against efforts to build antiracist schools often tries to describe the work as “indoctrination” into the political left’s way of seeing things. But these books all make it clear that it’s not about indoctrination — and never has been. It’s about seeing the nation and its institutions clearly and honestly and engaging in conversations that will help us collectively create the kind of change we want — indeed, need — to see in the world.
The 1619 Project
Edited by Nicole Hannah JonesThe 1619 Project started in the pages of the New York Times Magazine in 2019 as a way to mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first shipped loaded with enslaved Africans at the Jamestown colony and to correct the historical narrative on the founding and development of the United States. In late 2021, One World Press released a book version of The 1619 Project, with updated articles, new material, and a new introduction by the Project’s creator, Nicole Hannah-Jones.
For educators, the book is a vital resource as well as an encouragement to rethink how we tell the story of America, past and present, in schools. In her Preface, Hannah-Jones lays out the core argument of The 1619 Project, quoting, among others, Hassan Kwame Jeffries, a historian at Ohio State University and a member of the advisory board that produced the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Teaching Hard History” report. “Although we teach [students] that slavery happened…” Jeffries says, “in some cases we minimize slavery’s significance so much that we render its impact — on people and on the nation — inconsequential.” This is troubling, Jeffries continues, because it leaves America ill-equipped to understand racial inequality today, and that leads to intolerance, opposition to efforts to address racial injustice, and the enacting of laws and polices detrimental to Black communities and America writ large.
“In other words,” Hannah-Jones writes, “we all suffer from the poor history we’ve been taught.”
The 1619 Project aims to change how each generation sees the past. In this way we can improve how we live in the present and plan for the future — with the goal of equity and justice for all.
Contributors to the book include Ibram X. Kendi, Bryan Stevenson, Elizabeth Alexander, and other remarkable scholars and writers. Folded into the chapters are related poetry — starting with Claudia Rankine’s poem on the arrival of the White Lion in Jamestown in 1619 and ending with Sonia Sanchez on the murder of George Floyd. Also included are short stories and both historical and contemporary photography by and of Black Americans.
A companion children’s book, The 1619 Project on the Water, by Nicole Hannah-Jones and Renée Watson (with illustrations by Nikkolas Smith) tells the story of a young student who receives a family tree assignment in school and, with the help of her grandmother, traces her ancestry to 1619 and earlier.
Nicole Hannah-Jones is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who covers civil rights and racial injustice for the New York Times Magazine.
Literacy Is Liberation: Working Toward Justice Through Culturally Relevant Teaching
By Kimberly N. Parker As we know, literacy is the foundation for all learning and must be accessible to all students. This fundamental truth is where Kimberly Parker begins to explore how culturally relevant teaching can help students work toward justice. Her goal is to make the classroom a place where students can safely talk about key issues, move to dismantle inequities, and collaborate with one another.
In Literacy Is Liberation (ASCD, 2022), Parker gives teachers the tools to build culturally relevant intentional literacy communities (CRILCs). Through CRILCs, teachers can better shape their literacy instruction by:
reflecting on the connections between behaviors, beliefs, and racial identity;
identifying the characteristics of culturally relevant literacy instruction and grounding their practice within a strengths-based framework;
curating a culturally inclusive library of core texts, choice reading, and personal reading, and teaching inclusive texts with confidence;
developing strategies to respond to roadblocks for students, administrators, and teachers; and
building curricula that can foster critical conversations between students about difficult subjects — including race.
Through the practices in this book, teachers can create the more inclusive, representative, and equitable classroom environment that all students deserve.
Kimberly N. Parker, Ph.D., is currently the director of the Crimson Summer Academy at Harvard University and the 2020 recipient of the NCTE Outstanding Elementary Educator Award. She is also the current president of the Black Educators’ Alliance of Massachusetts (BEAM).
The Identity-Conscious Educator: Building Habits and Skills for a More Inclusive School
By Liza A. TalusanLiza A. Talusan, who wrote an essay for Teaching While White on the Model Minority Myth, recently published The Identity-Conscious Educator (Solution Tree, 2022). This book provides an excellent framework for building awareness and understanding of five identity categories — race, social class, gender, sexual orientation, and disability. Teachers can use this framework to address identity topics in their personal and professional lives and develop the skills to engage in meaningful interactions with students and peers.
Talusan also offers research-based strategies and activities for having difficult conversations and creating more inclusive communities.
“Talusan weaves the conceptual and the practical in ways few authors have managed to do,” writes Paul C. Gorski, founder, Equity Literacy Institute. “Her conversational tone reminds readers they are her collaborators in the collective work she’s laid out.”
Liza A. Talusan, Ph.D., is an educator, speaker, leader, writer, life/leadership coach, and parent with over 25 years of experience in pre-K–20 education. Her focus — in her work and in this book — is on empowering individuals to create highly inclusive organizations, environments, communities and teams.
Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm
By Robin DiAngeloBuilding on the groundwork laid out in the New York Times bestseller White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo’s newest book, Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm (2021, Beacon Press) explores the ways in which a culture of niceness inadvertently promotes racism.
In White Fragility, DiAngelo explains how racism is a system into which all white people are socialized, and challenges the belief that racism is a simple matter of good versus bad people. DiAngelo, in fact, makes the point that white progressives cause the most daily harm to people of color. In Nice Racism, she explains how they do so. Drawing on her background as a sociologist and more than 25 years working as an antiracist educator, she picks up where White Fragility leaves off and moves the conversation forward.
Writing directly to white people, DiAngelo identifies how well-intentioned white people unknowingly perpetuate racial harm. These patterns include:
rushing to prove that we are “not racist”
downplaying white advantage
romanticizing Black, Indigenous, and other peoples of color (BIPOC)
pretending white segregation “just happens”
expecting BIPOC people to teach us about racism
and feeling immobilized by shame
A review in The Guardian calls Nice Racism a powerful new book that “reveals why profound racism is often found in supposedly liberal spaces…. DiAngelo underscores that nice racism, as a concept, doesn’t just impede racial consciousness but can also foster hostility towards those prompting it.”
As a companion to DiAngelo’s new book, you can also listen to our “White Fragility” podcast with the author.
Robin DiAngelo is a writer and an Affiliate Associate Professor of Education at the University of Washington. Her area of research is in Whiteness Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis, tracing how whiteness is reproduced in everyday narratives.
Our Problem, Our Path: Collective Anti-Racism for White People
By Ali Michael and Eleonora BartoliThe tagline for Our Problem, Our Path (Corwin Press, August 2022) sums up the ultimate aspirations of this important book: “A healthy multiracial society could be ours.”
As authors Ali Michael and Eleonora Bartoli make clear, building a healthy multiracial society is possible. But it can’t be done without millions of white people seeing racism as their problem and choosing to walk an antiracist path. The authors invite white people — especially educators — to join them on an antiracist journey to learn to talk about race with one another in ways that lead to real change. Drawing on decades of personal and professional experiences engaging in antiracism, the authors:
emphasize the need for white people to have honest, meaningful relationships not only with People of Color and Native people, but also with other white people, in order to change systems shaped by racism;
provide strategies for parents and teachers to support white children to become contributing members of a healthy multiracial society;
introduce trauma-informed tools from psychology that enable readers to understand and overcome their own resistance and fear around taking antiracist action; and
demonstrate how white people can take antiracist action today, exactly where they are and as they are.
Grounded in an understanding of antiracism as a daily, lifelong practice, Our Problem, Our Path encourages white people to help one another find the trailhead and start moving along the path toward a more just, equitable and loving multiracial society for all.
Ali Michael, Ph.D. is the Director of the Race Institute for K-12 Educators. She works with schools and organizations across the country to help make research on race, whiteness, and education more accessible and relevant to educators. Michael has also written for Teaching While White. Her other books include Raising Race Questions: Whiteness, Inquiry and Education (Teachers College Press, 2015), and the bestselling Guide for White Women Who Teach Black Boys (Corwin Press, 2017).
Eleonora Bartoli, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist, specializing in trauma, resilience-building, and multicultural/social justice counseling. Throughout her career, Bartoli has held leadership positions in professional organizations at both the state and national levels. She has also presented at conferences and is the author of a number of publications focused on multicultural counseling competence, white racial socialization, and the integration of social justice principles in evidence-based counseling practices.
Teaching Beautiful Brilliant Black Girls
By Multiple AuthorsAli Michael is also a contributor to another recent book, Teaching Beautiful Brilliant Black Girls (Sage Publishing, 2021). This book is a collective call-to-action for educational justice and fairness for all Black girls — focusing on transforming how Black Girls are understood, respected, and taught. Editors and authors intentionally present the harrowing experiences Black girls endure and calls on educators to disrupt and transform their learning spaces in order to ensure that Black girls thrive in our schools and communities.
Other authors in this important collection include Omobolade Delano-Oriaran, Marguerite W. Penick, Shermariah J. Arki, Orinthia Swindell, and Eddie Moore, Jr.
Birth of a White Nation: The Invention of White People and Its Relevance Today (Second Edition)
By Jacqueline BattaloraBirth of a White Nation, Second Edition (Routledge, 2021) examines the social construction of race through the invention of white people. Surveying colonial North American law and history, the book interrogates the origins of racial inequality and injustice in American society, and details how the invention still impacts the present day.
This second edition documents the proliferation of ideas imposed and claimed throughout history that have conspired to give content, form, and social meaning to one’s racial classification. This new edition addresses the historic and ongoing production and reproduction of whiteness as a distinct and dominant social category. It also offers a framework for countering racial inequality and promoting greater awareness of antiracist policies and practices.
Birth of a White Nation aim is to help teachers and students make sense of the dramatic racial inequities of our time and to forge an antiracist path forward.
Jacqueline Battalora is an attorney and Professor of Sociology at Saint Xavier University in Chicago. In addition to this book, Battalora is an editor of the journal Understanding & Dismantling Privilege and she frequently develops and delivers lectures and training that advance the understanding of the construction of race and its impact today.
Open Windows, Open Minds: Developing Antiracist, Pro-Human Students
By Afrika Afeni MillsOpen Windows, Open Minds: Developing Antiracist, Pro-Human Students (Corwin, 2022) builds on Rudine Sims Bishop and Emily Style’s concept of Windows and Mirrors to explore why learning to appreciate the experiences and perspectives of others is essential for white students. It also offers an approach to teaching and learning that will equip white students as informed, empathetic, inclusive global citizens who genuinely value diversity and will actively engage in dismantling systemic inequities, as well as what white antiracist practitioners wish they had known when they were K-12 students.
Afrika Afeni Mills is a Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and an education consultant. She works with colleagues, teachers, coaches, and administrators to transform instructional practices. Mills has been featured on podcasts, blogs, delivered keynote addresses, and facilitated sessions at conferences both virtually and across the United States. She also wrote Teaching While White’s most-read blog post, “A Letter to White Teachers of My Black Children” “and cowrote “Evolving Our Narrative About Race in Schools” with Jenna Chandler-Ward and Elizabeth Denevi.
Preparing and Sustaining Social Justice Educators
Edited by Annamarie Francois and Karen Hunter QuartzAs the editors note in their Introduction, Preparing and Sustaining Social Justice Educators (Harvard Education Press, 2021) brings to life “the challenging work of preparing and sustaining educators to disrupt educational inequality in urban communities.” The collection of essays here arises out of the 30 years of experience at Center X, which was established on the campus of UCLA following the 1992 Rodney King verdict. Center X is a community of educators working to transform public schooling to create a more just, equitable, and humane society. The thirty contributing authors to Preparing and Sustaining Social Justice Educators focus on the work of teachers and school leaders to enact the principles of social justice — racial equity, cultural inclusivity, and identity acceptance — in their daily practice.
The book is divided into three sections. The first focuses on preparing educators to transform teaching and learning. The second examines ways educators can sustain and deepen their practice. The third looks at compelling examples of public schools that have been transformed by this work.
In explaining the work of Center X and the goal of their book, editors Francois and Quartz quote Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, “We must always refill and ensure there is a critical mass of leaders and activists committed to nonviolence and racial and economic justice who will keep seeding and building transforming movements.”
At the heart this work, in each generation, are our teachers.
Annamarie Francois is the executive director of Center X and a faculty member in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.
Karen Hunter Quartz directs the Center for Community Schooling and is a faculty member in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.