After the tragic death of George Floyd, many people are working to tackle issues around racial equity and justice. As part of this endeavor, many groups, including the American Bar Association’s Civil Rights & Civil Liberties Section, have created a 21-day Racial Equity Reading Challenge. The idea is that it takes 21 days to change a habit, so taking time every day to better understand racial justice issues will assist our progress towards a more equitable society. We agree. We stand firm behind racial unity and justice. The problem we see is that so many of these reading lists lump black American thought into a homogeneous mass, failing to encompass alternative voices that are contrarian to the current racial dogma. We have taken the ABA Racial Challenge, modifying it slightly to include a day to review issues in law enforcement, and have provided supplemental readings/videos/podcasts from other prominent black voices (among a few others) for each day. We believe that the only way to really achieve racial unity and justice is through having genuine and uncomfortable discussions around a variety of views, engaging in Critical Thought missing in Critical Race Theory, that moves us past empty slogans to arrive at real solutions… together.

To the coming of a better time,

W.F. Twyman, Jr. & J.D. Richmond

 

Day 1

• Nikole Hannah-Jones, America Wasn’t a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made It One, The New York Times (August 14, 2019)
• Supplemental: John McWhorter, The 1619 Project Depicts an America Tainted by Original Sin, Reason (January 30, 2020)

Day 2

• How to Not (Accidentally) Raise a Racist, Longest Shortest Time Podcast
• Supplemental: I Have A Dream, Speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Day 3

• Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations, The Atlantic (May 21, 2014)
• Supplemental: Coleman Hughes, My Testimony on Reparations, Quillette (June 20, 2019)

Day 4

• Danielle Cadet, Your Black Colleagues May Look Like They Are Okay – Chances Are They Are Not (May 2020)
• Katy Waldman, A Sociologist Examines The “White Fragility” That Prevents White Americans From Confronting Racism, New Yorker (July 23, 2018)
• Supplemental: Helen Pluckrose and Jonathan Church, The Flaws in White Fragility Theory: A Primer, New Discourses (June 8, 2020)
• Supplemental: Michelle Elizabeth, Stop Calling it White Privilege, Medium.com (June 17, 2020)

Day 5

• Megan Ming Francis, Let’s get to the root of racial injustice, TEDTalks (March 21, 2016)
• Supplemental: Larry Elder, Conservatives, Black Lives Matter, Racism Rubin Report (January 15, 2016)

Day 6

• Project Implicit, Implicit Association Test (IAT), (This exercise requires navigating the sign up for the tests, which includes answering a series of questions for the researchers, but it is recommended that everyone do at least these tests: Race, Skin Tone, and Weapons-Race. Also, everyone is encouraged to add these tests if you are able: Asian American, Native American, and Arab-Muslim.)
• Supplemental: Olivia Goldhill, The World is Relying on a Flawed Psychological Test to Fight Racism, Quartz (December 3, 2017)

Day 7

• How microaggressions are like mosquito bites, Sam Difference (October 5, 2016)
• Heben Nigatu, 21 Racial Microaggressions You Hear On A Daily Basis: A photographer at Fordham asked her peers to write down the microaggressions they’ve encountered. Here is what they had to say, BuzzFeed (December 9, 2013)
• Essence Grant, 27 Workplace Microaggressions That’ll Make You Ask “How’d They Even Get Hired?” In conclusion, adults can be wildly dumb, BuzzFeed (October 8, 2017)
• Ali Vingiano, 63 Black Harvard Students Share Their Experiences In A Powerful Photo Project, BuzzFeed (March 3, 2014)
• Supplemental: Thomas Sowell, Affirmative Action Creates Academic Failure and Resentment, C-SPAN Booknotes interview (June 10, 1990)
• Supplemental: Toni Airaksinen, Forget Microaggressions, Some Students Face Hunger and Homelessness, Quillette Magazine (June 11, 2016)
• Supplemental: Heather Mac Donald, The Microagression Farce, City Journal (Autumn 2014)
• Supplemental: Althea Nagai, The Pseudo-Science of Microaggressions, National Association of Scholars (Spring 2017)

 

 

Day 8

• James McWilliams, Bryan Stevenson On What Well Meaning White People Need To Know About Race: An interview with Harvard University-trained public defense lawyer Bryan Stevenson on racial trauma, segregation, and listening to marginalized voices, Pacific Standard (updated February 18, 2019)
• Supplemental: Desi-Rae, Sick of Identity Politics, YouTube video (March 14, 2017)

Day 9

• Media Portrayals and Black Male Outcomes, The Opportunity Agenda
• Supplemental: Zach Goldberg, How Media Let the Great Racial Awakening, Tablet Magazine (August 4, 2020)

Day 10

• Cheryl I. Harris, Whiteness As Property, Harvard Law Review, Vol. 106 No. 8 (June 1993)
• Supplemental: Lawrence Otis Graham, I Taught My Black Kids That Their Elite Upbringing Would Protect Them, The Washington Post (November 16, 2014)

Day 11

• Karma Allen, More than 50% of homeless families are black, government report finds, ABCNews (January 22, 2020)
• Scott Winship, Richard V. Reeves, and Katherine Guyot, The Inheritance of Black Poverty: It’s All About the Men, Brookings (March 22, 2018)
• Supplemental: Coleman Hughes, The Case for Black Optimism, Quillette (September 28, 2019)
• Supplemental: Randall Kennedy, Black America’s Promised Land: Why I Am Still A Racial Optimist, The American Prospect (Fall 2014)

Day 12

• Hannah Giorgis, Black Art is dangerous because it marries the personal and the political, The Guardian (February 22, 2015)
• Reggie Ugwu, Lena Waitheʼs Art of Protest: The “Queen & Slim” writer on mixing art and politics, the key to collaboration and those infamous comments about Will Smith and Denzel Washington, The New York Times (December 2, 2019)
• Bryan Stevenson ’85, “We can’t recover from this history until we deal with it.” Legacy of slavery and the vision for creating the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and The Legacy Museum, Harvard Law School YouTube (January 30, 2019)
• Supplemental: Michael Kilian, A Deeper Look at an Artist who Refused to be White, Chicago Tribune (November 25, 2004)
• Supplemental: On Being Brought from Africa to America by Phillis Wheatley, Narrated by Teyuna T Darris, YouTube video (July 8, 2015)
• Supplemental: Edmonia Lewis, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Day 13

• Rebecca Epstein, Jamilia J. Blake, and Thalia González, Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood, Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality
• Adrienne Green, How Black Girls Aren’t Presumed to Be Innocent: A new study finds that adults view them as less child-like and less in need of protection than their white peers, The Atlantic (June 29, 2017)
• Supplemental: Dr. Carol D. Swain, From rural poverty to Ivy League professor, 1776 Unites (July 20, 2020)
• Supplemental: Chloe Valdary, Opinion: Why I Refuse to Avoid White People The New York Times (August 22, 2017)

Day 14

• Perspectives in Poetry:
  • Alice Walker – The World Rising
    • Author Bio
  • Audre Lorde –  Who Said it Was Simple
    • Author Bio
  • June Jordan – Poem for Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer
    • Author Bio
  • Langston Hughes – Harlem
    • Author Bio
  • Richard Wright – Between the World and Me
    • Author Bio
  • Claudia Rankine – You are in the dark, in the car . . .
    • Author Bio

 

• Supplementals:
  • Lucy Terry, Bars Fight
    • Author Bio
  • Jupiter Hammon, An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ with Penitented Cries
    • Author Bio
  • Phyllis Wheatley, On Messrs Hussey and Coffin
    • To the Hon. T.H. Esq.; on the Death of his Daughter
    • An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of the Celebrated Divine George Whitefield
    • On Being Brought from Africa to America
    • His Excellency General Washington
    • Author Bio
  • George Boyer Vashon – A Life Day

• Author Bio

 

• Perspectives on Change:
  • The Beatles – Revolution #1 
  • Nina Simone – Revolutions 1 and 2 
  • Nina Simone – Mississippi Goddam 
  • Supplemental: James Cleveland – What Shall I Do
  • Supplemental: James Cleveland – This Too Will Pass
  • Supplemental: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – We Shall Overcome           

Day 15

• Peggy McIntosh, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack of White Privilege
• Supplemental: Vincent Harinam & Rob Henderson, Why White Privilege is Wrong: Part I, Quillette (August 22, 2019)

Day 16

• George Johnson, White gay privilege exists all year, but it is particularly hurtful during Pride, NBC News (June 30, 2019)
• Laverne Cox Talks about Intersectionality at Harvard (Video clips) (March 11, 2014)
• D-L Stewart, Black Trans* Lives Matter (TEDxTalks) (April 22, 2019)
• Supplemental: Kamilah Newton, Black Trans Women are Essential to Black Lives Matter Yahoo! (June 24, 2020)
• Supplemental: John Eligon, Transgender African Americans’ Open Wound: ‘We’re Considered a Joke’, New York Times (August 6, 2017)
• Supplemental: Daniel Reynolds, Why We Can’t Talk About Homophobia in the Black Community, The Advocate (May 26, 2015)

Day 17

• Wenei Philimon, Not Just George Floyd: Police Departments have a 400-year History of Racism, USAToday (June 7, 2020)
• Ibram X Kendi, The American Nightmare, The Atlantic (June 1, 2020)
• German Lopez, How Systemic Racism Entangles all Police Officers – Even Black Cops, Vox (August 15, 2016)
• Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration, The Atlantic (October 2015)

• Supplemental: Heather Mac Donald, The Myth of Systemic Police Racism, WSJ (June 2, 2020)
• Supplemental: Sam Harris Podcast, Can We Pull Back From the Brink?, (June 18, 2020)
• Supplemental: Glenn C Loury, Peter Winkler, Racism is an Empty Thesis, City Journal (June 11, 2020)
• Supplemental: Roland Fryer, Public Safety in an Era of Criminal Justice Reform, Manhattan Institute (May 27, 2020)

 

Day 18

• Sam Dylan Finch, 9 Phrases Allies Can Say When Called Out Instead of Getting Defensive, Everyday Feminism (May 29, 2017)
• Supplemental: Izabella Tabarovsky, The American Soviet Mentality: Collective Demonization Invades Our Culture, Tablet (June 15, 2020)

Day 19

• Jolie A. Doggett, 4 Questions About Hair that Black Girls Are Tired of Answering, HuffPost (February 14, 2020)
• Jessica Moulite, Exclusive: Rep. Ayanna Pressley Reveals Beautiful Bald Head and Discusses Alopecia for the First Time, The Root (January 16, 2020)
• Hair Love, Oscar®-Winning Short Film (Full), Sony Pictures Animation, YouTube (December 5, 2019)
• Supplemental: Brenda A. Randle, I Am Not My Hair: African American Women and Their Struggles with Embracing Natural Hair, Rampages (October 26, 2016)
• Supplemental: Chante Griffin, How Natural Black Hair at Work Became a Civil Rights Issue, Daily JSTOR (July 3, 2019)
• Supplemental: Cheryl Thompson, Black Women and Identity: What’s Hair Got to Do With It, Politics and Performativity, Vol. 22, no. 1, (Fall 2008 – 2009)

Day 20

• National Conference for Community and Justice, Colorism 
• Natasha S. Alford, Why Some Black Puerto Ricans Choose ‘White’ on the Census: The island has a long history of encouraging residents to identify as white, but there are growing efforts to raise awareness about racism, The New York Times (February 9, 2020)
• Supplemental: Thomas Chatterton Williams, Black, Blue and Blond: Where does race fit in the construction of modern identity? Virginia Quarterly Review (Winter 2015).
• Supplemental: J.D. Richmond and W.F. Twyman, Jr, An Open Letter to the Tan, Olive and Almost Black, White People, Truth in Between on Medium.com (October 6, 2020).

Day 21

• Karyn Lacy, How to Convince a White Realtor You’re Middle Class, The New York Times (January 21, 2020)
• Who is “Karen” and Why Does She Keep Calling the Police on Black Men?, On the Media (Podcast) (May 29, 2020)
• Supplemental: Wilfred Reilly, A Fragile Argument, Commentary (September 2020)
• Supplemental: Brandon Tatum, How to End White Privilege, YouTube (January 20, 2020)