Anti-Racism Challenge

1. Watch 13th (started, watched) 
2. Read Blog Post "Dear White People" (read)
3. Read Fences. (requested, got, started, read)
4. Book Launch event for Anti-Racist Baby (found one, started, watched)
5. Read article "So You Want to Know About Juneteenth" (reread)
6. Podcast "Case for Defunding the Police" (downloaded/listened)
7. Blog "Reflections From a Token Black Friend" (read)
8. Listen to Dirty Computer (found on spotify, started, completed)
9. Read "Performative Allyship is Deadly" (read)
10. Watch "The House I Live In" (looking)
11. Listen to "When Colored Girls Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enough (read it)
12. Read/Watch Just Mercy. (read. Read the YA adaptation. Watched the movie.)
13. Listen to an episode of Pod Save the People (downloaded one, listened)
14. Read "We Protest Police in the Streets But Why Do We Let Police In Our Schools" (found, read)
15. Watch Episode 1 of "Dear White People (found, started, done)
16. Listen to Code Switch "A Decade of Watching Black People Die" (completed)
17. Watch American Son (Netflix) (started)(Interrupted for BookMarks)(Interrupted for Social Media docu)
18. Read "More States Are Trying to Protect Black Employees Who Want to Wear Natural Hairstyles At Work" (found, read)
19. Listen to an episode from podcast 1619 (found, downloaded, heard.)
20. Read "The Case For Reparations"(started, completed)
21. Listen to "To Pimp a Butterfly"(found on Spotify, finished. Um. More explicit that I'm used to)

Hey, there's another Challenge at the 21 Day Anti-Racism Challenge, and this one comes with a chart I can maintain.

These are the tasks. You pick your own order. For these, I'll strikethrough the ones I've done so I don't mess up the formatting.

The Challenge

Pick one of the resources listed every day for 21 days.

Diversify your understanding by doing some of each.

Track and reflect by using the planning tool below.

Share your reflections at the end of the challenge.

Pray for the places you are challenged and for those you are learning about whose lives may be different than yours.

Join us for conversation on June 7th and 21st at 4:00 pm via Zoom.

Planning Tool

Watch

Racism is Real, A split-screen video depicting the differential in the white and black lived experience. (3 minutes)

Confronting ‘intergroup anxiety’: Can you try too hard to be fair? Explores why we may get tongue tied and blunder when we encounter people from groups unfamiliar to us. (5 minutes)

CBS News Analysis: 50 states, 50 different ways of teaching America’s past, Ibram X. Kendi reviews current history curriculum production and use across the U.S. (5 minutes)

The Disturbing History of the Suburbs, An “Adam Ruins Everything” episode that quickly and humorously educates how redlining came to be. (6 minutes)

What Kind of Asian Are You? Humorous two minute YouTube video that illustrates the utter silliness of the way many white Americans interact with Asian Americans. (2 minutes)

Birth of a White Nation, Keynote speech by legal scholar Jacqueline Battalora, offers a blow-by-blow description of the moment the idea of, and word for, “white” people entered U.S. legal code. (36 minutes)(working on it)

13th, Netflix documentary by Ava DuVernay about the connection between US Slavery and the present day mass incarceration system. (1 hour, 40 minutes)

This is Us, Dr. Eddie Glaude explains why blaming current racial tensions on Donald Trump misses the point. (3 minutes)

How to overcome our biases? Walk boldly toward them, TED Talk by Vernā Myers, encourages work vigorously to counter balance bias by connecting with and learning about and from the groups we fear. (19 minutes)

The danger of a single story, TED Talk by Chimamanda Adiche, offers insight to the phenomenon of using small bits of information to imagine who a person is. (18 minutes)

How to deconstruct racism, one headline at a time, TED Talk by Baratunde Thurston that explores patterns revealing our racist framing, language, and behaviors. (10 minutes) 

Indigenous People React to Indigenous Representation in Film And TV, Conversation with a diverse range of Indigenous people by FBE about  media depictions of Indigenous people, Columbus day, and Indigenous identity. (15 minutes)  

What Being Hispanic and Latinx Means in the United States, Fernanda Ponce shares what she’s learning about the misunderstanding and related mistreatment of the incredibly diverse ethnic category people in U.S. call Hispanic. (12 minutes) 

Tyler Merrit Project: Before You Call (3 minutes)

Read

10 Ways Well-Meaning White Teachers Bring Racism Into Our Schools, by Jamie Utt

21 Racial Microaggressions You Hear on a Daily Basis, by Heben Nigatu

Climbing the White Escalator, by Betsy Leondar-Wright

Explaining White Privilege To A Broke White Person, by Gina Crosley-Corcoran

Guide to Allyship, Created by Amélie Lamont

It’s Not Just the South: Here’s How Everyone Can Resist White Supremacy, by Sarah van Gelder

Making America White Again, by Toni Morrison

Understanding the Racial Wealth Gap, by Amy Traub, Laura Sullivan, Tatjana Mescheded, & Tom Shapiro 

What White Children Need to Know About Race, by Ali MIchael and Elenora Bartoli

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, by Peggy McIntosh 

Presbytery of Charlotte letter from Antiracism Team

My President Was Black, by  Ta-Nehisi Coates (started)

Caught Up In God, by Willie James Jennings

Who Gets to Be Afraid in America?, by Ibram X Kendi

Listen

Code Switch, hosted by journalists Gene Demby and Shereen Marisol Meraji (downloaded)

Black Like Me, host Dr. Alex Gee 

Scene on Radio – Seeing White Series, host John Biewen and collaborator Chenjerai Kumanyika 

TED Radio Hour – Mary Bassett: How Does Racism Affect Your Health? host Guy Raz speaks with Dr. Mary T. Bassett, Director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University 

Here & Now – Without Slavery, Would The U.S. Be The Leading Economic Power? host Jeremy Hobson and author Edward Baptist

NPR Morning Edition – You Cannot Divorce Race From Immigration journalist Rachel Martin talks to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas

Pod Save the People, Activism. Social Justice. Culture. Politics. On Pod Save the People, organizer and activist DeRay Mckesson

 

Notice

Test Your Awareness: Do The Test, This video shows us the importance of paying attention, and how much more we see when we are looking for particular things around us.

Use each question below separately as one day’s challenge.

• Who is and is not represented in ads?
• What are the last five books you read? What is the racial mix of the authors?
•  What is the racial mix of the main characters in your favorite TV shows? Movies?
• Who is filling what kinds of jobs/social roles in your world?  Can you correlate any of this to racial identity?

And I'm still tracking books I've been reading: 

Books by/featuring Black people read:

• New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction By People of Color, Nisi Shawl.
• A Properly Unhaunted Place, William Alexander. Black co-protagonist.
• The Parker Inheritance, Varion Johnson. Black kids solve a puzzle involving black history.
• Deep, River Solomon. What if the children of pregnant Africans tossed overboard by slavers survived?
• Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, Ibram X. Kendi.
• Ordinary Hazards, Nikki Grimes. Verse memoir of growing up in foster care and then with a mentally ill mom who struggled to stay on meds.
• Heavy, Kiese Laymon. A memoir of growing up in an abusive family in a racist world, where poverty and sexual abuse is just a normal part of growing up. He looks at the history of addiction in his family and how it plays out in his life, warmping some of his choices and options. 
• Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler. 8/20. This near-future dystopia has a lot of modern resonances in a very grim way. I like her matter-of-fact presentation of racial dynamics, and the acknowledged reactions to the age disparity with the guy she is attracted to. The brief and sudden flurries of violence are very realistic and also heart-wrenching.
• Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, Rey Terciero and Bre Indigo. 8/22/20. Little Women rewritten as a biracial New York family.
• Me and White Supremacy, Layla F. Saad 8/26/20. An Instragram challenge expanded into a book, inviting the reader to ask themselves tough questions.
• Crush, Svetlana Chmakova. 9/10/20. I think the super awesome Jorge is black. 
• Elysium, Jennifer Marie Brissert. 9/10/20. Neat concept. Characters and author are Black.
• It's Trevor Noah: Born a Crime, Trevor Noah 9/15/20. Not just funny, it also gives a representation of life in South Africa for non-white people -- Trevor straddled a lot of color lines, which gave him a sharp perspective on many of them.
• Don't Call Us Dead, Danez Smith 9/17/20. Poems about being black, being gay, seeing your community attacked by authorities, fearing AIDS, and being human.
• Reaching For the Moon, Katherine Johnson. 9/26/20. Yes, this is a hero from Hidden Figures, but even better, because we see her whole life and it's not filtered for movies!
• The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, Kai Ashante Wilson. Great setting and character. Dull romance.
• Clap When You Land, Elizabeth Acevedo. Annoying verse novel, but I liked the characters.
• This Book Is Anti-Racist, Tiffany Jewell. How kids can join the antiracist movement.
• Deadly Sexy, Beverly Jenkins. Fun romance with good characters.
• Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, Jason Reynolds & Ibram X. Kendi. Reynolds revisits Kendi's books for kids, simplifying the structure and personalizing the tone. It's still great.
• This Promise of Change, Jo Ann Allen Boyce & Debbie Levy. Memoir by one of the Clinton 12, the famous desegregation team I had completely forgotten.
• We Are Power, Todd Hasek-Lowy. There are a lot of PoC in these chapters on nonviolent resistance.
• All Boys Aren't Blue, George Johnson. Teen memoir of growing up Black and gay.
• The Talk, Wade Hudson. Different authors matched with artists discuss preparing kids in their community for life in a racist world.
• Jubilee, Margaret Walker. A classic! A story covering before, during and after the Civil War showing a woman and her strength and the people around her: her father, the plantation owner, his wife, her husbands and children, and  her half sister, the daughter of the plantation. 
• Changing the Equation: 50 + US Black Women in STEM, Tonya Bolden. A collection of short biographies of an often overlooked demographic.
• The Last Mirror on the Left, Lamar Giles 11/8/20. Two kids have adventures that save the world. Well, that was the last book. This time they save themselves and a bunch of parallel dimensions.
• Fledgling, Octavia Butler. 11/6/20. Interesting vampire story that should have had two sequels. Butler is great at exploring power imbalances. 
• My Name Is Tani ... and I Believe in Miracles, Tanitoluwa Adelumi 11/25/20. A poor immigrant boy is great at chess and his family wins the GoFundMe sweepstakes -- they get a home! I hope they also get approved to immigrate (they are refugees).
• John Lewis: Civil Rights Leader and Congressman, Duchess Harris & Tammy Gagne. 12/5/20 Biography for 1-3rd grades.
• Lifting As We Climb: Black Women's Battle For the Ballot Box, Evette Dionne. 12/7/2020
• Call Me America, Abdi Nor Iftin. A Somali's memoir about growing up with a fascination for America and then becoming an immigrant.
• Becoming Muhammad Ali, James Patterson & Kwame Alexander. 12/10/2020. Boyhood biography of Cassius Clay, who grew up to be Muhammad Ali.
• Education, Race and the Law, Duchess Harris & Cynthia Kennedy Henzel 12/18/2020. Good overview of the history of these intersections in America.
• Walk Toward the Rising Sun, Ger Duany 12/23/2020. Memoir by a boy who went from herding cattle in the Sudan to basketball, modeling and acting in the US. And now he works for war refugees.
• The Camping Trip, Jennifer K. Man. A little girl goes camping with her aunt. 
• Marriage, Race & the Law, Duchess Harris & Rebecca Morris. 12/15/2020. I learned a lot about how racist structures use marriage law to promote white supremacy. And how many countries have very different rules for men and women on what marriage means (women tend to lose citizenship, for example).
• Punching the Air, Ibi Zoboi & Yusef Salaam. 2/13/21. YA verse novel about a young man locked in juvenile detention after being wrongfully convicted. It's realistic and emotionally tough, even tougher because of the realism. 
• Take a Hint Dani Brown, Talia Hibbert. 1/28/21. Fun romance with a fake relationship that turns real between an ex rugby player and a feminist post-grad. 
• Sal and Gabi Break the Universe, Carlos Hernandez. 2/20/21. I can't remember which characters are Black as well as Hispanic, but the school is definitely multiracial so I'm including this wonderful fantasy in the genre of Percy Jackson but with a more subtle fantasy element.
• Kobe Bryant: Basketball Superstar, Tammy Gagne 3/9/21. I learned a lot about basketball careers (Kobe's dads as well as his own) and the dangers of helicopters. Safer than cars, though!
• Class Act, Jerry Craft 3/15/21. Black scholarship kids at a prep school with mostly wealthy kids face all the usual parts of growing along with navigating sometimes well meaning but always clueless administrators and fellow students. 
• You Bring Me the Ocean, Alex Sanchez. Two boys in a small town fall in love, but one is out and the other can barely admit to himself he is gay, let alone to his mom and best friend, whom he suddenly notices has a crush on him. They work this out with the delicacy of teen boys, so there's a lot of crashing and bungling and hurt feelings (and a few punches). There's also a superhero aspect, as the closeted boy is also the mutated son of a supervillain, but that wasn't all that important.
• The Murders of Tupac and Biggie, Sue Bradford Edwards. The bits about their lives and careers was interested, but it didn't manage to make the conspiracy theories relevant to anyone not already interested. Aimed at junior high school kids or so.
• The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennet. The story of two sisters and their families looks at family loyalty, abuse, race, and even some queer issues while always being about this family.
• Reckless, Selena Montgomery. 4/25/21. I read this because Stacey Abrams is awesome, but I didn't really like the dude. The heroine was cool.
• Tempest, Beverly Jenkins. 4/19/21. This was a fun historical but a bit of a dull romance, since the couple met, learned about each other, and then fell in love. The love story part wasn't really a plot. Once I started reading it for the rest of the story I liked it. It was interesting seeing how race mattered at some times and disappeared at other times, which felt realistic.
• King and the Dragonflies, Kacen Callender. A young boy admits he is gay while mourning the sudden death of his older brother and his lost friendship with a possible abuse victim as his parents cope with the death of their son through several frightening mechanisms. Did I mention the shifting peer group and the girl who wants to be his girlfriend? And his doubts whether his parents can accept him if he is gay? A good book but a bit overstuffed.
• Medical Apartheid, Harriett A. Washington. Historical recounting of the grotesque and horrendous relationship between American medical systems, from doctors and insurance to funeral services and research, and African American people, who have been brutalized, lied to, experimented on, and generally treated with contempt for as long as we've been a country. Or longer. There is no question why the trust is low between many communities and medical advisors. 
• Snapdragon, Kat Leyh. 6/18/21 A middle schooler makes friends by being obnoxious and loud. The old witch lady is cool, though. 
• Handful of Earth, Handful of Sky, Lynell George 6/28/21. An examination of Octavia Butler driven by the notes and records she left behind, showing how she helped shaped herself into the writer she wanted to be. 
• Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead 6/1/21. Two boys in a Florida reformatory in a state full of violent racists. A school famous for its brutality. And great writing (the book, not the school).
• High Cotton, Kristie Robin Johnson 6/1/21. Essays about growing up and living as a Black writer in America, raising two sons and juggling work, love, and parenting. 
• You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey, Amber Ruffin & Lacey Lamar 8/4/2021. It's funny because it's true. And also heartbreaking and maddening.
• Riot Baby, Tochi Onyebuchi. 8/16/21. Hugo novella finalist. Supremely evocative and angry.
• An Extraordinary Union, Alyssa Cole 7/18/21. Good historical book, although the romance was rather lame. (Hunger Games effect, probably). I liked seeing Maryland from an enslaved spy's point of view, and also the stolen pilot ship, because I recognized the real event it was based on. 
• From Scratch, Tembi Locke. 8/10/21. Memoir of love and grief, with lots of great thoughts on family. There's the in-laws, traditional Italian (Sicilian) people who weren't keen on their son marrying and Black American, her family, with deep roots in the south of America and all that implies (including land stolen from them by local government, references in other reading while I read this book), and the family they create with their adopted daughter.  Good meal companion.
• Forever Strong, Piper J. Drake. 8/29/21. Fun romance with a cute dog and two people I could respect building a relationship while dodging kidnapping thugs.
• Beautiful Struggle (Young Readers), Ta-Nehisi Coates. 9/29/21 (I also read half the adult version before I switched). Vivid story of growing up in Baltimore, in a racist world with a complicated but loving family. A great window book for me. 
• You Should See Me In a Crown, Leah Johnson. 10/10/21. Teen story where the protagonists is one of a small number of Black students in school, while also being a lesbian, a band kid, and ambitious. And she goes for Prom Queen (for the scholarship).
• For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Ntozake Shange. 9/22/21. Some good poems but mostly I couldn't really hear them. I think I want to watch a performance of this to really understand it.
• In Bibi's Kitchen, Hawa Hassan & Julia Turshen. 10/8/21. Fascinating cookbook that is mostly too ambitious for me to try but I really enjoyed meeting the various women who provide the recipes and tell about their countries. 
• Race Against Time, Sandra Neil Wallace & Rich Wallace, 10/16/21. YA nonfiction about Scipio Jones and his ultimately successful effort to save 12 Arkansas men sentenced to death after a KKK type massacre of a Black community that was called "a race riot." The white murderers managed to kill some of their own people with friendly fire, and so they wanted to kill more Black men. Jones averted this, and set some good legal precedents along the way.
• They Better Call Me Sugar, Sugar Rodgers, 10/24/21. Autobiography of a WNBA player.