This is an edited version of an email I wrote to participants in a 2023 session for practicing talking about structural racism (which is hard, and takes practice!). Please note the participants were predominantly white and felt very early in the journey to learning how to talk about structural racism.

Thank you again for participating in the event last night.

Here are some resources that might be helpful. I am happy to talk more about any of them with you via email.

The book that is at the top of my mind is “White Like Me” by Tim Wise, who is a white man. I read it a while ago, but I am pretty sure it still holds up. The major take aways I got from reading this book were:
a) that racism impacts my community, even though I am white. There are many more resources that develop this concept of allyship, but this was the first book I read that felt like it enunciated the impact of racism on my community, and did not just compress the impact of structural racism on me as a white person to merely “benefiting” from it.
b) that we as white people can interrupt assumptions and modes of conversation that exclude other non-white people. Wise writes about things like awkward jokes that set the mood of a conversation to give permission for racism by not quite saying something racist, but approaching it, and using words to enforce power dynamics that prioritize white people. There are ways to call that out, and signal that you are not on board with those racist assumptions.

The other book at the top of my mind is “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. This work is a letter from a black man to his son about racism. It may be very eye opening to how non-white people experience the world if you are white and live in a predominantly white community. Coates includes his experiences which highlight the persistent attention that he as a black man employs to try to ensure he does not attract the attention of police. I read this when I already had a lot of other material under my belt, so I hope it is approachable to everyone at all stages of the learning journey. One major take-away is that racism and structural racism are persistently draining the energy of the people who are viewed by white culture with negative stereotypes.

The last thing I will list are a few books and TV shows that are not documentaries but speak to the authors’ lived experiences of being non-white. Diversifying your media consumption counts as one of many steps towards learning about racism and structural racism! So: “Borealis” by Aisha Sabatini Sloan, “My Broken Language” by Quiara Alegria Hudes, “Atlanta” the TV show, written by Donald Glover, and “Reservation Dogs”, an Indigenous American series created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi.