LibGuides: Community & Equity Council: Recommended Reading: Articles

To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice
A forum organized by Walter Johnson, Winthrop Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, where he is also director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History.
Martin Luther King’s Radical Legacy, From the Poor People’s Campaign to Black Lives Matter
By Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou. The Rev. Sekou was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Martin Luther King Education and Research Institute at the time of Michael Brown Jr.’s killing, and traveled to Ferguson in mid-August 2014 on behalf of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (the country’s oldest interfaith peace organization) to organize alongside local and national groups.
The Combahee River Collective Statement
A classic position statement from the 1970s.

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh
Peggy McIntosh is an American feminist and anti-racism activist, the associate director of the Wellesley Centers for Women and a speaker and the founder and co-director of the National S.E.E.D. Project on Inclusive Curriculum (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity). This article, authored in 1988, is the foundational to the process of examining one’s white privilege.

Casual Racism and Political Discussion in St. Louis Private School by Leah Thomas
Leah Thomas is a writer at KimberlyElise.com. She published this short article that shares experiences and context from her time as a student and alumna of MICDS as a young African-American woman.

The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates’s brief history of the decisions that impoverished black residents of Chicago makes plain that racism can indeed be systemic. He asks for an acknowledgement of not only the history but the legacy of white supremacy, the government housing policies and private contracts that account for the racial gap in wealth in the United States.