5 Readings to Help You Be a Better Workplace Activist
In Ambiguous Privilege: The Everyday Practice of Race in America Dr. Utz Mcknight, studies race as an idea that has become part of our everyday life in America.
McKnight describes how we reproduce race as an idea daily through our uses and deployments of seemingly objective things in service of racist beliefs or processes. It is not merely our material conditions then that create racism, but rather the use of race as a device for who gets what and why. As Mcknight goes on to explain in Ambiguous Privilege, today’s practice of race is ambiguous and hard for us to see because it utilizes the processes we have called objective such as the alarm system in the bookstore that detects “objectively” for theft; however, in reality when the alarm goes off some are allowed to pass on under the idea the there must be some mistake while ‘others’ may be stopped and asked to empty their belongings. The alarm then only serves as an alibi for the discriminatory processes that belie our objective systems.
Sister Outsider is a collection of essays and poems by one of the O.G. black feminists, Audre Lorde. With her prose style and her personal voice, Audre Lorde tackles several issues at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. Often writing to the white feminists and black anti-feminists of her time, sister Lorde does an amazing job of weaving together a perfect image of all the intersecting matrices of oppression as they are lived while doing so at a level easily grasped by any beginner of critical race studies.
Presumed Incompetent is an entire anthology filled with the experiences of high achieving Black academics who were ridiculed, harassed, and designated incompetent even in the face of their extreme accomplishments or excellence. This ruthless harassment is rooted in a tradition of misogynoir, a term coined to describe the special brand of sexism that racism always has baked, hot, and ready for black women. Presumed incompetent is an excellent collection of essays for anyone looking to study deeply how racism and sexism intersect in the workplace.
How to Be An Anti-Racist is a book by Ibram X. Kendi that examines anti-racism in the 21st century. Kendi speaks on how to uproot racism from within society AND within ourselves in his courageous unapologetic take on racial politics in modern America. He explores anti-racism as a transformative concept that nuances our conversations on race, elevating them from a negative discussion of what is “not racist” towards a positive prescription of what is anti-racist. Kendi takes the reader through the various forms of racism as a warped ideology about human value and walks them through a vision of a better future.
Evelyn Brooks Higgabotham is a star member of the cohort of groundbreaking black scholars who paved a way out of no way in the academy by theorizing what it means to grapple with the history of racism today. In calling for the support of Anita Hill’s worktivism within the academy, Higginbotham was a pioneer of a new wave of intersectional critical race scholars thinking through current events. She wrote African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race to address the way issues of race were talked about strictly in terms of the black male perspective leaving a gaping blindspot in the pertinence of gender issues to the discussion of anti-racist thought and praxis. Since its debut in 1992 she has written The Metalanguage of Race,” Then and Now which works through more current events surrounding race in the 21st century.