Black Lives Matter
Gleeson Library aims to work vigorously for freedom and justice for Black people and, by extension, all people. We acknowledge, respect, and celebrate differences and commonalities. We also acknowledge the roles our institution and many other academic libraries play, both historically and today, in the ongoing subjugation of Black people and the intersections between librarianship and systemic racism. We affirm that Black Lives Matter.
— Shawn P. Calhoun, Acting Library Dean (June 2020 from the Black Lives Matter Statement)
Using This Guide
This page presents online materials you can use to begin to engage with anti-racism and social justice, to deepen your understanding of how our history, societal frameworks, and power structures are built to uphold racism, violence, and white supremacy. This guide was a collaborative effort by Gleeson Library workers, and represents their personal efforts to uphold social justice and dismantle white supremacy in their everyday work. The resources on this guide will continue to be updated as we source and purchase content. For information on white allyship and privilege, please also visit our White Privilege Resource Guide.
Learning and Processing
Anti-racist work is an ongoing commitment — it is not something you can check off a list. Doing this work and grappling with our histories — and how our complacency has contributed to harm — is uncomfortable work, but that should not stop us from engaging with it. Below are a selection of USF resources which can support learning about racial justice and allyship, processing uncomfortable feelings, or finding community.
Black Student Communities at USF
- USFCA Black Student Union (BSU)
- Black Achievement Success & Engagement (BASE)
- Black Community Council (BCC)
- Black Resource Center
Campus Resources
- Student Services
- Office of Diversity Engagement and Community Outreach
- Bias Education and Resource Team (BERT)
- Center for Academic and Student Achievement (remote appointments available)
- Counseling and Psychological Services (remote therapy services available for California residents)
- Crisis Services & Resources
- Health Promotion Services (remote appointments available)
Gleeson Library Collections
Below is a selection of eBooks available from Gleeson Library - new titles are forthcoming.
- Amalgamated Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism
Jared Sexton, Professor of African American Studies and Film & Media Studies at UC Irvine, examines contemporary multiracialism from political movements to media, and how it intersects with radical Black politics. - Anti-Racism
Anti-Racism, by Alastair Bonnett. An introductory text on the history of race and anti-racism. - Antiracism Inc: Why the Way We Talk About Racial Justice Matters
This collection traces the complex ways people along the political spectrum appropriate, incorporate, misuse, and neutralize antiracist discourses to perpetuate injustice. - As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation
Arguing that Blacks have always been considered non-citizens in the United States, Samudzi and Anderson make the case for a new program of transformative politics for African Americans, one rooted in an anarchist framework. - Between the World and Me
In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. - Black Feminist Thought
In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals and writers, both within the academy and without. Here Collins provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. - Black Skin, White Masks
A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements around the world, Fanon shares his own experiences in addition to presenting a historical critique of the effects of racism and dehumanization, inherent in situations of colonial domination, on the human psyche. - A Black Women's History of the United States
A vibrant and empowering history that emphasizes the perspectives and stories of African American women to show how they are—and have always been—instrumental in shaping our country. - The Body is Not an Apology
In a revolutionary departure from the corporate self-help and body-positivity movement, Taylor forges the inextricable bond between radical self-love and social justice. Radical self-love not only dismantles shame and self-loathing in us but has the power to dismantle global systems of injustice-because when we make peace with our bodies, only then do we have the capacity to truly make peace with the bodies of others. - Cambridge University Press: Protests, Policing, & Race
A collection of articles, book chapters, and complete books published by Cambridge University Press, made available with complimentary access for a limited time. This collection includes the book, "Discrimination Laundering: The Rise of Organizational Innocence and the Crisis of Equal Opportunity Law", by USF Law Faculty, Tristin Green. - The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap
The Color of Money pursues the persistence of this racial wealth gap by focusing on the generators of wealth in the black community: black banks. Studying these institutions over time, Mehrsa Baradaran challenges the myth that black communities could ever accumulate wealth in a segregated economy. - Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
In vivid, intimate prose, Desmond provides a ground-level view of one of the most urgent issues facing America today. Based on years of embedded fieldwork and painstakingly gathered data, this masterful book transforms our understanding of extreme poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving a devastating, uniquely American problem. - Experiencing Racism: Exploring Discrimination Through the Eyes of College Students
Collecting essays on personal experiences of race and racism from a wide spectrum of college students, the essays and associated analyses capture the impact of racism on its perpetrators and victims, highlighting how individuals choose to cope with racist experiences in their lives. - Feminism is For Everybody: Passionate Politics
In this short, accessible primer, bell hooks explores the nature of feminism and its positive promise to eliminate sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. - The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race
Author Jesmyn Ward has gathered short essays, memoir, and a few essential poems to engage the question of race in the United States and has turned to some of her generation's most original thinkers and writers to give voice to their concerns. The Fire This Time is divided into three parts that shine a light on the darkest corners of our history, wrestle with our current predicament, and envision a better future. - Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
The definitive, dramatic biography of the most important African-American of the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era. - Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?
This collection examines the history of policing in America with its origins in the white slave patrols of the antebellum South and an explicit mission to terrorize the country's black population. - Hood Feminism
A collection of essays taking aim at the legitimacy of the modern feminist movement, arguing that it has chronically failed to address the needs of all but a few women. - How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society
Marable offers profound insight into the deeply intertwined problems of race and class in the United States historically and today. - How to Be An Antiracist
This is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond the awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a just and equitable society. - How to Be Less Stupid About Race
How to Be Less Stupid About Race is your essential guide to breaking through the half-truths and ridiculous misconceptions that have thoroughly corrupted the way race is represented in the classroom, pop culture, media, and politics. - I Hear My People Singing: Voices of African American Princeton
Abundantly filled with photographs, I Hear My People Singing personalizes the injustices faced by generations of black Princetonians and highlights the community's remarkable achievements. - I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric
Focusing particularly on the challenges posed by white identities to performativity and moving between narrative and theoretical engagement, this book names and argues for critical shifts in the understandings and rhetorical practices that attend antiracist activism. - Inner Lives: Voices of African American Women In Prison
The rate of women entering prison has increased nearly 400 percent since 1980, with African American women constituting the largest percentage of this population. Inner Lives provides readers the rare opportunity to intimately connect with African American women prisoners. - The Inner Work of Racial Justice
The practice of embodied mindfulness--paying attention to our thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations in an open, nonjudgmental way--increases our emotional resilience, helps us to recognize our unconscious bias, and gives us the space to become less reactive and to choose how we respond to injustice. - Interrogating Race and Racism
Interrogating Race and Racism, Edited by Vijay Agnew. This interdisciplinary collection of essays examines how race informs policies from immigration to workplace hiring practices. - Me And White Supremacy
Me and White Supremacy takes readers on a 28-day journey of how to dismantle the privilege within themselves so that they can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on people of color, and in turn, help other white people do better, too. - Medical Bondage
Medical Bondage explores how, in the nineteenth century, experimental surgeries on enslaved and laboring women enabled the rise of American gynecology as a medical specialty, and shaped our understanding of race. - The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Scholar and civil rights litigator Michelle Alexander discusses race and mass-incarceration within the United States. - Parable of the Brown Girl
The stories of girls of color are often overlooked, unseen, and ignored rather than valued and heard. In Parable of the Brown Girl, minister and youth advocate Khristi Lauren Adams introduces readers to the resilience, struggle, and hope held within these stories. - Power Interrupted: Antiracist and Feminist Activism Inside the United Nations
In Power Interrupted, Sylvanna M. Falcón considers how a race and gender intersectionality approach broadened opportunities for feminist organizing at the global level. - The Price for Their Pound of Flesh
The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives--including from before birth to after death--in the American domestic slave trades. Covering the full "life cycle", historian Daina Berry shows the lengths to which slaveholders would go to maximize profits. - Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools
Black girls represent 16 percent of female students but almost half of all girls with a school-related arrest. Pushout exposes a world of confined potential and supports the growing movement to address the policies, practices, and cultural illiteracy that push countless students out of school and into unhealthy, unstable, and often unsafe futures. - Reading for Racial Justice Collection
Minnesota University Press presents a collection of antiracist books, freely accessible until August 31, 2020. - Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture
Resisting State Violence is a clear-sighted and uncompromising guidebook for those who want to understand the forces that hinder social change, and to effectively move beyond them. - Ruptures: Anti-Colonial and Anti-Racist Feminist Theorizing
This book provides tools and theoretical frameworks to make sense of how the world is regulated, governed, controlled with regard to the exclusivity of certain members of the society, and in particular, women from marginalized groups. - Struggles in the Promised Land: Towards a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States
Salzman asserts that the true history of Black-Jewish relations remains largely untold. To communicate that history, the essays gathered here move from the common demonization of Blacks and Jews in the Middle Ages to the conflicts over Black Power and the struggle in the Middle East that effectively ended that alliance. - Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom
Addressing questions of race, gender, and class in this work, bell hooks discusses the complex balance that allows us to teach, value, and learn from works written by racist and sexist authors. - Theorizing Anti-Racism: Linkages in Marxism and Critical Race Theories
The essays in Theorizing Anti-Racism examine topics which range from reconsiderations of anti-racism in the work of Marx and Foucault to examinations of the relationships among race, class, and the state that integrate both Marxist and critical race theory. - They Were Her Property
Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South's slave market. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave-owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America. - Thick: and Other Essays
In eight highly praised treatises on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom covers topics such as Black womanhood, body image, and her experience as a Southern Black woman academic. - Too Heavy a Yoke
In this book, the author, a psychologist and pastoral theologian, examines the burdensome yoke that the ideology of the Strong Black Woman places upon African American women. She demonstrates how the three core features of the ideology--emotional strength, caregiving, and independence--constrain the lives of African American women and predispose them to physical and emotional health problems, including obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and anxiety. - Understanding Inequality
This reader explores the continual transformation and interconnections between ethnicity, class, and gender as systems of stratification that work to reinforce one another. - The Warmth of Other Suns
In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. - We Have Not Been Moved: Resisting Racism & Militarism in 21st Century America
A compendium of writings that detail the grassroots actions of social and political activists from the civil rights era of the early 1960s to the present day. This book reviews the major points of intersection between white supremacy and the war machine through historic and contemporary articles from a diverse range of scholars and activists. - What’s True About Race & Social Change? A Quest, A Study, A Call to Action
A powerful study illuminates our nation's collective civic fault lines. Race and Social Change: A Quest, A Study, A Call to Action focuses on a provocative social science experiment with the potential to address these needs. - Where We Stand: Class Matters
Drawing on both her roots in Kentucky and her adventures with Manhattan coop boards, bell hooks provides a successful black woman's reflection, personal, straightforward, and rigorously honest on how our dilemmas of class and race are intertwined, and how we can find ways to think beyond them. - White Fragility
In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively. - White Rage: the Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage. - Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race
Exploring issues from eradicated black history to the political purpose of white dominance, whitewashed feminism to the inextricable link between class and race, Reni Eddo-Lodge offers a timely and essential new framework for how to see, acknowledge and counter racism. - Women, Race & Class
From the widely revered and legendary political activist and scholar Angela Davis, a powerful study of the women's liberation movement in the U.S., from abolitionist days to the present, that demonstrates how it has always been hampered by the racist and classist biases of its leaders. - Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice
Noted cultural critic bell hooks models the constructive ways scholars, activists, and readers can challenge and change systems of domination. From the films Precious and Crash to recent biographies of Malcolm X and Henrietta Lacks, hooks offers provocative insights into the way race is being talked about in this "post-racial" era.
