Further Readings
Jim Crow’s Pink Slip: The Untold Story of Black Principal and Teacher Leadership. (Harvard Education Press, 2022, 189 pp.)
Howard University scholar Leslie T. Fenwick documents the purge of 100,000 African-American teachers and principals after the landmark Brown v. the Board of Education ruling in 1954 led to school desegregation in the South and border states. Fenwick shows that less experienced whites were hired on the fly to replace veteran Black teachers and principals with better credentials – a story largely ignored by the white press at the time.
Mala’s Cat (Pegasus Books, 2022, 306 pp.)
Holocaust survivor and memoirist Mala Kacenberg describes fleeing a Jewish ghetto in Poland at age 12 with her cat, Malach, as the Nazis round up her loved ones and send them to the death camps. Relying on her wits for years, she outfoxes the enemy time after time.
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. (Random House, 2020, 476 pp.)
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson describes caste systems in India, Nazi Germany and the United States. Caste is more than race and skin color, she argues. It’s an enduring system of routines, expectations and social rank based on how individuals look, the roles they’re assigned, and the stereotypical ways they’re categorized. Caste determines who gains respect, privileges and resources – and who doesn’t.
Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People. (Delacorte Press, 2013, 254 pp.)
Psychologists Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald discuss “implicit bias” tests and the results showing that all of us harbor unconscious biases that affect how we treat people of different social groups. Our snap decisions about them are based not only on race or ethnicity, but also on age, weight, gender, religion, sexuality and disability – decisions that can affect their housing, schooling, employment, health and safety.
Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works. (Basic Books, 2019, 320 pp.)
Economist Rucker C. Johnson presents data to make a compelling case that school integration benefits African-American children without harming whites. The Black students tend to gain in earnings, academic degrees, social stability, and lower rates of incarceration. To reduce prejudice and racial isolation, Johnson recommends three major reforms: integrated classrooms, high-quality preschools and equitable school funding.
We Were Eight Years in Power. (One World, 2017, 367 pp.)
Bestselling author Ta-Nehisi Coates reflects on the unfulfilled promise of the eight Obama years and the racial backlash that elected Donald Trump. The book features eight Coates essays from the Atlantic in these years, including his celebrated “The Case for Reparations.” A vivid autobiographical essay analyzing the Obama era introduces each piece. Coates is our most eloquent and poetic essayist on race since James Baldwin.