Books and Papers

The ScholarWorks website for Amilcar Shabazz, professor in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies. “My research interests include African Americans in the history of education, cultural and political movements against oppression, and comparative studies in the African world. I am active in educational policy affairs and public history.”   

Retired Amherst College physics professor Robert Romer remembers how he joined a dedication to teaching young people about science with a quest to transform hearts and to change minds. His journeys brought him from a laboratory on Long Island to the March on Washington, a 1963 civil rights demonstration at the nation's capitol. He moved his family to rural South Carolina so that he could teach at an all black college. Back in Western Massachusetts, he speaks of participating in Vietnam era anti-war protests at Westover Air Force Base. He concludes that despite the optimism of the civil rights demonstrators who gathered in Washington on August 28, 1963, the promise of that day has not been realized in the United States.  See some of his published works here.

Publications by Richard Rothstein
Richard Rothstein is a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and senior fellow of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of California (Berkeley) School of Law. He is the author ofGrading Education: Getting Accountability Right (Teachers College Press and EPI, 2008) and Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap (Teachers College Press 2004). He is also the author of The Way We Were? Myths and Realities of America’s Student Achievement (1998). Other recent books include The Charter School Dust-Up: Examining the Evidence on Enrollment and Achievement (co-authored in 2005); andAll Else Equal: Are Public and Private Schools Different? (co-authored in 2003)

Racism and Psychiatry by Alexander Thomas, Samuel Sillen, with introduction by Kenneth B. Clark 
In this volume, addressed to a broad audience, the authors examine the impact of racist thinking, past & present, on the disciplines dealing with human behavior, especially psychiatry. 
Myths from the Past
The Genetic Fallacy
The Mark of Oppression
The Illusion of Color Blindness
The Deficient "Deficit" Model
Family and Fantasy
The Sexual Mystique
The "Sickness" of White Racism
Pitfalls of Epidemiology
The Black Patient: Separate & Unequal
Challenge to the Profession

Uprooting Racism: How white people can work for racial/social justice by Paul Kivel
In 2008 the United States elected its first black president, and recent polls show that only twenty-two percent of white people in the United States believe that racism is a major societal problem. On the surface, it may seem to be in decline. However, the evidence of discrimination persists throughout our society. Segregation and inequalities in education, housing, health care, and the job market continue to be the norm. Post 9/11, increased insecurity and fear have led to an epidemic of the scapegoating and harassment of people of color.
Uprooting Racism offers a framework for understanding institutional racism. It provides practical suggestions, tools, examples, and advice on how white people can intervene in interpersonal and organizational situations to work as allies for racial justice. Completely revised and updated, this expanded third edition directly engages the reader through questions, exercises, and suggestions for action, and takes a detailed look at current issues such as affirmative action, immigration, and health care. It also includes a wealth of information about specific cultural groups such as Muslims, people with mixed-heritage, Native Americans, Jews, recent immigrants, Asian Americans, and Latinos.

The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nahisi Coates, Atlantic Magazine article, June 2014


Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

It is a personal examination of the way in which racial privilege shapes the daily lives of white Americans in every realm: employment, education, housing, criminal justice, and elsewhere.  He discusses how racial privilege can harm whites in the long run and make progressive social change less likely. He explores the ways in which whites can challenge their unjust privileges, and explains in clear and convincing language why it is in the best interest of whites themselves to do so. Using anecdotes instead of stale statistics, Wise weaves a narrative that is at once readable and yet scholarly, analytical and yet accessible. See Tim Wise's website for more info.

"And Don't Call Me Racist!" by Ella Mazel
A treasury of quotes from well known and influential people on the past, present, and future of the color line in America / Selected and arranged by Ella Mazel.  
Most of us white folk go through life comfortably without being conscious of the innumerable ways in which we are automatically privileged by the luck of our racial draw. This may not make us "racists" -- but it makes us, unwittingly, beneficiaries of racism.
It's primarily to "disturb the comfortable" that I've assembled in this book a progression of quotes that convey -- in the voices of both blacks and whites -- the history, the perceptions, the psychic scars, and the despair, that underlie the racial breach in the United States today. Out of the pain, finally, comes the hope for healing, which seems the only option if the country is to progress, let alone survive.

Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color Blind Society

by Michael K. Brown, Martin Carnoy, Elliott Currie and Troy Duster (Jan 21, 2005)

White Americans, abetted by neo-conservative writers of all hues, generally believe that racial discrimination is a thing of the past and that any racial inequalities that undeniably persist—in wages, family income, access to housing or health care—can be attributed to African Americans' cultural and individual failures. If the experience of most black Americans says otherwise, an explanation has been sorely lacking—or obscured by the passions the issue provokes. At long last offering a cool, clear, and informed perspective on the subject, this book brings together a team of highly respected sociologists, political scientists, economists, criminologists, and legal scholars to scrutinize the logic and evidence behind the widely held belief in a color-blind society—and to provide an alternative explanation for continued racial inequality in the United States.

While not denying the economic advances of black Americans since the 1960s, Whitewashing Race draws on new and compelling research to demonstrate the persistence of racism and the effects of organized racial advantage across many institutions in American society—including the labor market, the welfare state, the criminal justice system, and schools and universities. Looking beyond the stalled debate over current antidiscrimination policies, the authors also put forth a fresh vision for achieving genuine racial equality of opportunity in a post-affirmative action world.

Waking Up White by Debby Irving (2014)
By sharing her sometimes cringe-worthy struggle to understand racism and racial tensions, she offers a fresh perspective on bias, stereotypes, manners, and tolerance. As she unpacks her own long-held beliefs about colorblindness, being a good person, and wanting to help people of color, she reveals how each of these well-intentioned mindsets actually perpetuated ill-conceived ideas about race. Irving also explains why and how she changed the way she talks about racism, works in racially mixed groups, and understands the racial justice movement as a whole. Exercises at the end of each chapter prompt readers to explore their own racialized ideas. Waking Up White's personal narrative is designed to work well as a rapid read, a book group book, or support reading for courses exploring racial and cultural issues.  

Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism by Shannon Sullivan (June 1, 2014)
Shannon Sullivan identifies a constellation of attitudes common among well-meaning white liberals that she sums up as “white middle-class goodness,” an orientation she critiques for being more concerned with establishing anti-racist bona fides than with confronting systematic racism and privilege. Sullivan untangles the complex relationships between class and race in contemporary white identity and outlines four ways this orientation is expressed, each serving to establish one’s lack of racism: the denigration of lower-class white people as responsible for ongoing white racism, the demonization of antebellum slaveholders, an emphasis on colorblindness—especially in the context of white childrearing—and the cultivation of attitudes of white guilt, shame, and betrayal. To move beyond these distancing strategies, Sullivan argues, white people need a new ethos that acknowledges and transforms their whiteness in the pursuit of racial justice rather than seeking a self-righteous distance from it.

“…Sullivan posits that it is white liberals’ own ‘anti-racism’ that actually perpetuates racism by shutting down frank or nuanced discussions not only of race, but of white privilege, which created racial problems and still sustains them … In advising white liberals how to honestly live their whiteness, rather than disown it or pretend it doesn’t exist, Sullivan expertly deconstructs the familiar defenses … Like W.E.B. DuBois and James Baldwin before her, Sullivan sees white domination as a spiritual problem that afflicts one group in particular but that touches us all.” —Ms. Magazine


The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide by Meizhu Lui, Barbara Robles, Betsy Leondar-Wright and Rose Brewer (Jun 1, 2006)
An eye-opening field guide to the wealth gap.
For every dollar owned by the average white family in the United States, the average family of color has less than a dime. Why do people of color have so little wealth? The Color of Wealth lays bare a dirty secret: for centuries, people of color have been barred by laws and by discrimination from participating in government wealth-building programs that benefit white Americans.
This accessible book—published in conjunction with one of the country's leading economics education organizations—makes the case that until government policy tackles disparities in wealth, not just income, the United States will never have racial or economic justice. 
Written by five leading experts on the racial wealth divide who recount the asset-building histories of Native Americans, Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, and European Americans, this book is a uniquely comprehensive multicultural history of American wealth. With its focus on public policies—how, for example, many post-World War II GI Bill programs helped whites only—The Color of Wealth is the first book to demonstrate the decisive influence of government on Americans' net worth.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness  by Michelle Alexander (Jan 16, 2012) 

This book directly challenges the notion that the election of Barack Obama signals a new era of colorblindness. With dazzling candor, legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control—relegating millions to a permanent second-class status—even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness. In the words of Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, this book is a "call to action."




In this groundbreaking historical expose, Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history—an “Age of Neoslavery” that thrived from the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II.Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Douglas A. Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude shortly thereafter. By turns moving, sobering, and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals the stories of those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking, the companies that profited most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.

The School to Prison Pipeline 

by Catherine Y. Kim, Daniel J. Losen and Damon T. Hewitt (May 1, 2012)

The “school-to-prison pipeline” is an emerging trend that pushes large numbers of at-risk youth—particularly children of color—out of classrooms and into the juvenile justice system. The policies and practices that contribute to this trend can be seen as a pipeline with many entry points, from under-resourced K-12 public schools, to the over-use of zero-tolerance suspensions and expulsions and to the explosion of policing and arrests in public schools. The confluence of these practices threatens to prepare an entire generation of children for a future of incarceration.
In this comprehensive study of the relationship between American law and the school-to-prison pipeline, co-authors Catherine Y. Kim, Daniel J. Losen, and Damon T. Hewitt analyze the current state of the law for each entry point on the pipeline and propose legal theories and remedies to challenge them. Using specific state-based examples and case studies, the authors assert that law can be an effective weapon in the struggle to reduce the number of children caught in the pipeline, address the devastating consequences of the pipeline on families and communities, and ensure that our public schools and juvenile justice system further the goals for which they were created: to provide meaningful, safe opportunities for all the nation’s children.

by Edited by Sofía Bahena, North Cooc, Rachel Currie-Rubin and Paul Kuttner (Nov 8, 2012)

A trenchant and wide-ranging look at this alarming national trend, Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline is unsparing in its account of the problem while pointing in the direction of meaningful and much-needed reforms.

The school-to-prison pipeline has received much attention in the education world over the past few years. A fast-growing and disturbing development, it describes a range of circumstances whereby children are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Scholars, educators, parents, students, and organizers across the country have pointed to this shocking trend, insisting that it be identified and understood and that it be addressed as an urgent matter by the larger community.

This new volume from the Harvard Educational Review features essays from scholars, educators, students, and community activists who are working to disrupt, reverse, and redirect the pipeline. Alongside these authors are contributions from the people most affected: youth and adults who have been incarcerated, or whose lives have been shaped by the school-to-prison pipeline. Through stories, essays, and poems, these individuals add to the book s comprehensive portrait of how our education and justice systems function and how they fail to serve the interests of many young people.


Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

by James Allen, John Lewis, Leon F. Litwack and Hilton Als (Feb 1, 2000)

Searching through America's past for the last 25 years, collector James Allen uncovered an extraordinary visual legacy: photographs and postcards taken as souvenirs at lynchings throughout America. With essays by Hilton Als, Leon Litwack, Congressman John Lewis and James Allen, these photographs have been published as a book "Without Sanctuary" by Twin Palms Publishers . Features will be added to this site over time and it will evolve into an educational tool. Please be aware before entering the site that much of the material is very disturbing. We welcome your comments and input through the forum section.

Experience the images as a flash movie with narrative comments by James Allen, or as a gallery of photos which will grow to over 100 photos in coming weeks. Participate in a forumabout the images, and contact us if you know of other similar postcards and photographs. 
The second edition of Melanie Bush's acclaimed Everyday Forms of Whiteness looks at the often-unseen ways racism impacts our lives. The author has interviewed and surveyed hundreds of college students and reveals that even though we talk as though we live in a "post-racial" world after the election of Barack Obama, racism is still very much a factor in everyday life. The second edition incorporates new data and interviews to show how the everyday thinking of ordinary people contributes to the perpetuation of systemic racialized inequality. The book introduces key terms for the study for race and ethnicity, reveals the mechanisms that support the racial hierarchy in U.S. society, then outlines ways we can challenge long-standing patterns of racial inequality.


In this follow-up to his landmark bestseller, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, James Loewen continues to break silences and change our perspectives on U.S. history. Loewen takes history textbooks to task for their perpetuations of myth and their lack of awareness of today's multicultural student audience (not to mention the astonishing number of facts they just got plain wrong). 

How did people get here? Why did Europe win? Why Did the South Secede? In Teaching What Really Happened, Loewen goes beyond the usual textbook-dominated viewpoints to illuminate a wealth of intriguing, often hidden facts about America's past. Calling for a new way to teach history, this book will help teachers move beyond traditional textbooks to tackle difficult but important topics like conflicts with Native Americans, slavery, and race relations. Throughout, Loewen shows time and again how teaching what really happened connects better with all kinds of students to get them excited about history.
Americans have lost touch with their history, and in Lies My Teacher Told Me Professor James Loewen shows why. After surveying eighteen leading high school American history texts, he has concluded that not one does a decent job of making history interesting or memorable. Marred by an embarrassing combination of blind patriotism, mindless optimism, sheer misinformation, and outright lies, these books omit almost all the ambiguity, passion, conflict, and drama from our past.


Witnessing Whiteness: The Need to Talk about Race and How To Do It by Shelly Tochluk (Jan 16, 2010)
Witnessing Whiteness invites readers to consider what it means to be white, describes and critiques strategies used to avoid race issues, and identifies the detrimental effect of avoiding race on cross-race collaborations. The author illustrates how racial discomfort leads white people toward poor relationships with people of color. Questioning the implications our history has for personal lives and social institutions, the book considers political, economic, socio-cultural, and legal histories that shaped the meanings associated with whiteness. Drawing on dialogue with well-known figures within education, race, and multicultural work, the book offers intimate, personal stories of cross-race friendships that address both how a deep understanding of whiteness supports cross-race collaboration and the long-term nature of the work of excising racism from the deep psyche. Concluding chapters offer practical information on building knowledge, skills, capacities, and communities that support anti-racism practices, a hopeful look at our collective future, and a discussion of how to create a culture of witnesses who support allies for social and racial justice. For book discussion groups and workshop plans, please visit www.witnessingwhiteness.com.

Daniel Hunter
Daniel has spent more than a decade as an activist educator, teaching a vast array of activists in twelve countries on five continents.  He works full-time training activists for direct action as a trainer with Training for Change – and is regularly sought out by local and national groups, including folks fighting natural gas fracking, Greenpeace USA, The Yes Men, and Canadian unions wanting to deepen popular education.  For more about Daniel Hunter clickSee excerpts and info about "Strategy & Soul"