Hello folks! In addition to our raffle, we wanted to make sure that individuals who either did not enter the raffle or did not win, still have access to important anti-racist resources. Therefore, here is an Anti- Racist book list compiled by the PICA and DSL team.
Feel free to reach out to us if there is a book that you would like mentioned on this blog post! You can reach out to us on PICAs Instagram and/or DSLs Instagram. Also feel free to email us at pica@ucsc.edu & demterseedlibrary@gmail.com
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley and Malcolm X
In the searing pages of this classic autobiography, originally published in 1964, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and anti-integrationist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Black Muslim movement. His fascinating perspective on the lies and limitations of the American Dream, and the inherent racism in a society that denies its nonwhite citizens the opportunity to dream, gives extraordinary insight into the most urgent issues of our own time. The Autobiography of Malcolm X stands as the definitive statement of a movement and a man whose work was never completed but whose message is timeless. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand America.
Between the World and me by Ta-Neisi Coates
Between the World and Me is a 2015 nonfiction book written by American author Ta-Nehisi Coates and published by Spiegel & Grau. It is written as a letter to the author's teenage son about the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being Black in the United States.
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
Alexander explains how the "war on drugs," in concert with our criminal justice system, has intentionally and comprehensively installed a new system of racial control as thoroughly as any Jim Crow era initiative.
Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism by Laura Gómez
In Inventing Latinos, Laura Gómez, a leading expert on race, law, and society, illuminates the fascinating race-making, unmaking, and re-making of Latino identity that has spanned centuries, leaving a permanent imprint on how race operates in the United States today.
Sister, Outsider by Audre Lorde
A collection of essential essays and speeches written by Audre Lorde, a woman who wrote from the particulars of her identity: Black woman, lesbian, poet, activist, cancer survivor, mother, and feminist writer. This collection, now considered a classic volume, of Lorde's most influential works of non-fiction prose has had a groundbreaking impact in the development of contemporary feminist theories. In fifteen essays and speeches dating from 1976 to 1984, Lorde explores the complexities of intersectional identity, while explicitly drawing from her personal experiences of oppression to include: sexism, heterosexism, racism, homophobia, classism, and ageism.
Black Faces in White Spaces by Caroyln Finney
The book examines the relationship between African Americans and the environment, particularly challenging the notion of the environment and environmentalism as white spaces. Finney explores the subject through the lenses of environmental history, feminist and critical race theories.
As Black As Resistance by William C. Anderson and Zoé Samudzi
Expanding on their original essay The Anarchism Of Blackness, Samudzi and Anderson make the case for a new program of transformative politics for Black Americans, one rooted in an anarchistic framework likened to the Black experience itself.
Ain’t I A Feminist? By Aaronette White
Ain’t I a Feminist? presents the life stories of twenty African American men who identify themselves as feminists, centering on the turning points in their lives that shaped and strengthened their commitment to feminism, as well as the ways they practice feminism with women, children, and other men.
The Rose That Grew From Concrete By Tupac Shakur
The Rose That Grew from Concrete is a collection of poetry written between 1989 and 1991 by Tupac Shakur, published by Pocket Books through its MTV Books imprint. A preface was written by Shakur's mother Afeni Shakur, a foreword by Nikki Giovanni and an introduction by his manager, Leila Steinberg.
Half Of A Yellow Sun By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Half of a Yellow Sun is a novel by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Published in 2006 by Fourth Estate, the novel tells the story of the Biafran War through the perspective of the characters Olanna, Ugwu, and Richard
Their Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neale Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching God is a novel by American writer Zora Neale Hurston.Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston.The novel explores main character Janie Crawford's "ripening from a vibrant, but voiceless, teenage girl into a woman with her finger on the trigger of her own destiny".
Are Prisons Obsolete? By Angela Davis
Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. ... With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison.
As Long As Grass Grows By Dina Gilmore-Whitaker
Through the unique lens of “Indigenized environmental justice,” Indigenous researcher and activist Dina Gilio-Whitaker explores the fraught history of treaty violations, struggles for food and water security, and protection of sacred sites, while highlighting the important leadership of Indigenous women in this centuries-long struggle.
As We Have Always Done By Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
In As We Have Always Done, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson locates Indigenous political resurgence as a practice rooted in uniquely Indigenous theorizing, writing, organizing, and thinking.
How We Get Free By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
In this collection of essays and interviews edited by activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, founding members of the organization and contemporary activists reflect on the legacy of its contributions to Black feminism and its impact on today's struggles.
Killing the Black Body by Dorothy E. Roberts
Killing the Black Body exposes America’s systemic abuse of Black women’s bodies.
White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo
DiAngelo calls out past indifference from whites when facing critiques of race and class and challenges their often "fragile" response of tears and anger.
The Tradition by Jericho Brown
Jericho Brown’s daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie?
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
Future of ecological and political downfall of america/the world, about a black girl and her understanding of the world around her as she works with others to survive, build resilience, and make community when the world is a hard place to be - plus includes seed saving.
Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
A modern classic in the African literary canon and voted in the Top Ten Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th Century, this novel brings to the politics of decolonization theory the energy of women’s rights. An extraordinarily well-crafted work, this book is a work of vision. Through its deft negotiation of race, class, gender and cultural change, it dramatizes the ‘nervousness’ of the ‘postcolonial’ conditions that bedevil us still. In Tambu and the women of her family, we African women see ourselves, whether at home or displaced, doing daily battle with our changing world with a mixture of tenacity, bewilderment and grace.
All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson
In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia. From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young-adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys.
Farming While Black by Leah Penniman
Farming While Black is the first comprehensive “how to” guide for aspiring African-heritage growers to reclaim their dignity as agriculturists and for all farmers to understand the distinct, technical contributions of African-heritage people to sustainable agriculture. At Soul Fire Farm, author Leah Penniman co-created the Black and Latinx Farmers Immersion (BLFI) program as a container for new farmers to share growing skills in a culturally relevant and supportive environment led by people of color. Farming While Black organizes and expands upon the curriculum of the BLFI to provide readers with a concise guide to all aspects of small-scale farming, from business planning to preserving the harvest. Throughout the chapters Penniman uplifts the wisdom of the African diasporic farmers and activists whose work informs the techniques described—from whole farm planning, soil fertility, seed selection, and agroecology, to using whole foods in culturally appropriate recipes, sharing stories of ancestors, and tools for healing from the trauma associated with slavery and economic exploitation on the land. Woven throughout the book is the story of Soul Fire Farm, a national leader in the food justice movement.
An Indigenous People’s History of the U.S. by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a book written by the activist and historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and published by Beacon Press. It is the third of a series of five ReVisioning books which reconstruct and reinterpret U.S. history from marginalized peoples' perspectives.
Begin Again by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
We live, according to Eddie S. Glaude Jr., in a moment when the struggles of Black Lives Matter and the attempt to achieve a new America have been challenged by the election of Donald Trump, a president whose victory represents yet another failure of America to face the lies it tells itself about race. From Charlottesville to the policies of child separation at the border, his administration turned its back on the promise of Obama’s presidency and refused to embrace a vision of the country shorn of the insidious belief that white people matter more than others.
We have been here before: For James Baldwin, these after times came in the wake of the civil rights movement, when a similar attempt to compel a national confrontation with the truth was answered with the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In these years, spanning from the publication of The Fire Next Time in 1963 to that of No Name in the Street in 1972, Baldwin transformed into a more overtly political writer, a change that came at great professional and personal cost. But from that journey, Baldwin emerged with a sense of renewed purpose about the necessity of pushing forward in the face of disillusionment and despair.
In the story of Baldwin’s crucible, Glaude suggests, we can find hope and guidance through our own after times, this Trumpian era of shattered promises and white retrenchment. Mixing biography—drawn partially from newly uncovered interviews—with history, memoir, and trenchant analysis of our current moment, Begin Again is Glaude’s endeavor, following Baldwin, to bear witness to the difficult truth of race in America today. It is at once a searing exploration that lays bare the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we all must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new America.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants is a 2013 nonfiction book by Robin Wall Kimmerer and published by Milkweed. The book is about plants and botany as seen through Native American traditions and Western scientific traditions.