In his memoir, Kendi weaves together an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science–including the story of his own awakening to antiracism. He begins by helping us rethink our most deeply held, if implicit, beliefs and our most intimate personal relationships (including beliefs about race and IQ and interracial social relations) and reexamines the policies and larger social arrangements we support. 

“Often, being a person of color in a white-dominated society is like being in an abusive relationship with the world. Every day is a new little hurt, a new little dehumanization.” – Ijeoma Oluo

In this book, Oluo helps readers navigate conversations about race by encouraging them to recognize their own defensiveness, to be willing to be uncomfortable and make missteps, and to refuse to be sidetracked.

“Whiteness rests upon a foundational premise: the definition of whites as the norm or standard for human, and people of color as a deviation from that norm.” – Robin Diangelo

This book explicates the dynamics of White Fragility and how we might build our capacity in the on-going work towards racial justice.

In this book, journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge talks about why she finds it frustrating and useless to talk about race with white people who don’t recognize structural racism as real—especially when the power to change racist power structures lies in their hands. 

“We don’t live in a meritocracy, and to pretend that simple hard work will elevate all to success is an exercise in willful ignorance.” -Reni Eddo-Lodge

“Black women turn to sass when rage is too risky—because we have jobs to keep, families to feed, and bills to pay.” – Brittney Cooper

Brittany Cooper’s pithy and powerful words spotlight how the world is built for white people (and, really, white men) to thrive in. Humor and anger go hand-in-hand in Cooper’s fight song for Black women. 

“When you believe niceness disproves the presence of racism, it’s easy to start believing bigotry is rare, and that the label racist should be applied only to mean-spirited, intentional acts of discrimination. The problem with this framework—besides being a gross misunderstanding of how racism operates in systems and structures enabled by nice people—is that it obligates me to be nice in return, rather than truthful.” —Austin Channing Brown

“The point of this language of ‘intention’ and ‘personal responsibility’ is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. ‘Good intention’ is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.” -Ta-Nehisi Coates 

“We have created a caste system in this country, with African Americans kept exploited and geographically separate by racially explicit government policies. Although most of these policies are now off the books, they have never been remedied and their effects endure.” – Richard Rothstein

“Battling Over Birth: Black Women and the Maternal Health Care Crisis reveals hard truths— powerful findings on the role of racism, coercion, inadequate prenatal care, the pressures undermining breastfeeding and the lack of access to alternatives to a broken maternal health-care system as key threads of black women’s birth experiences.” —Kimberly Seals Allers, author, The Big Letdown

“Twenty years ago, Dorothy Roberts, the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology at Penn Law School and the School of Arts & Sciences, released her formative book… which laid bare the systematic assault on the bodies of black women in the United States.

“Roberts says the original motivation for her research—the prosecutions of black women who use drugs during pregnancy—continues to this day, with states passing fetal protection laws to make it easier to prosecute women for their conduct during pregnancy.” –Penn Today