Reading the News: Race in the United States

Many are watching the news about student protests at the University of Missouri, Yale, Claremont McKenna, and other colleges in the past few weeks over issues of race and representation on campus. Here is a small selection of items at Holman Library that you can check out if you want to follow up on these topics beyond the news:

Race Relations in the United States Today

Between the World and Me  (2015)

Ta-Nehisi Coates

New Books shelf - 305.800973 C652b 2015

Coates book is a personal essay on what it means to grow up black in contemporary America. It was selected as the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction this November.

Racism without racists: color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States (2010)

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

Main Collection 305.800973 B715r 2010

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva examines how racism persists through institutional biases in the United States.

Ebony & Ivy: race, slavery, and the troubled history of America's universities (2013)

Craig Steven Wilder

Main Collection 379.26 W673e 2013

Craig Steven Wilder’s book was one of the first to look explicitly at the connections US universities had with slavery, and the unexpected ways colleges may have benefited from those relationships.

College Athletics & Race

Bowled Over: big-time college football from the sixties to the BCS era (2009)

Michael Oriard

Main Collection 796.332 O69b 2009

Some commenters have pointed to the participation of the University of Missouri football players as the element that “tipped the scales” on the student protests at that campus. Here Oriard looks at the influence college football has on its campuses and at the “big business” college football has become in the 20th century.

Race & Language in the United States

Dear White People: a guide to inter-racial harmony in "post-racial" America (2014)

Justin Simien

Main Collection 818.602 S589d 2014

Simien’s book is tongue-in-cheek humor, but also provides examples of how actions that people who identify as white can take without realizing (such as microaggressions in language) can be unsettling for those targeted.

The N word: who can say it, who shouldn't, and why (2007)

Jabari Asim

Main Collection 305.896 A832n 2007

Jabari Asim looks at the uses (and abuses) of one racial slur in US society, both past and present.