Anti-Racism Resources

Our Statement of Solidarity: 

Dear Members of the BU Community,

The Boston University Graduate Student Organization (GSO) condemns the incredibly upsetting violence being committed against the Black community in America. We rebuke this violence and stand in support of the Black communities on our campus, in Boston, and beyond who have continued to endure the repeated violent and racist events unfolding around them.

As a graduate student organization, GSO pledges to improve. We admit that we can and should be doing more. We promise to better support our fellow Black graduate students and the organizations that support them, such as the Underrepresented Graduate Student Organization (UGSO), to push for better institutional-supported short- and long-term action, allyship, and self-care. We promise to use our ability to closely interact with administrative offices and student groups to change the BU environment by pushing for more anti-racist programming and education across disciplines.

 One small action we can perform is to continue to circulate knowledge for our graduate student body. This google document created by @abjectcriticism contains a continuously growing resource for direct and indirect action such as signing petitions, donating to local funds, contacting officials, and ways to provide allyship and solidarity. 

The GSO knows that a statement does not suffice. Actual change requires continuous and unrelenting effort. We pledge to do better for our community. Please do not hesitate to contact us at gso@bu.edu to discuss ways in which we can better support you.

We, as a collective student body, must offer extra support and comradery, both in the heightened sense of urgency now and forever going forward.

Sincerely,
Boston University Graduate Student Organization

What follows is a list of Anti-Racism resources. We encourage you to use them to educate yourself and to become a more effective and active ally.

BU Ally and Activist Groups: A google spreadsheet with a list of activist groups on campus + contact information.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10k5LAOfYH3fDErcBzvDYc1xFhlGJgA_L1XLhor6UzM/edit#gid=0

MHC Pre-Law Association BLM Resources:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VKg76D7ms43zUOWzLv0yFkdnA-RtSVvB691CjQoo9dw/edit#

Scaffolded Anti-Racist Resources:

https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1PrAq4iBNb4nVIcTsLcNlW8zjaQXBLkWayL8EaPlh0bc/mobilebasic

How to be a Better Ally:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1bUJrgX8vspyy7YttiEC2vD0DawrpPYiZs94V0ov7qZQ/htmlview

Ways To Engage, Educational Resources, and Recent Cultural Materials: Resources shared by the faculty and staff of Cornell’s Latina/o Studies Program:

Ways To Engage:

Educational Resources:

Recent cultural materials—2020 Pulitzer prize winners to feed your soul:

A Strange Loop, by Michael R. Jackson: Usher is a black, queer writer, working a day job he hates while writing his original musical: a piece about a black, queer writer, working a day job he hates whilewriting his original musical. Michael R. Jackson’s blistering, momentous new musical follows a young artist at war with a host of demons — not least of which, the punishing thoughts in his own head — in an attempt to capture and understand his own strange loop.

The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday): A spare and devastating exploration of abuse at a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida that is ultimately a powerful tale of human perseverance, dignity and redemption.

The Central Park Five, by Anthony Davis: In 1980’s New York, five African American and Latino teenagers were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were unjustly convicted of a Central Park rape but exonerated through DNA evidence thirteen years later. Davis’ opera is a passionate story about an issue that still rocks America today.

The Tradition, by Jericho Brown (Copper Canyon Press): Beauty abounds in Jericho Brown’s daringnew poetry collection, despite and inside of the evil that pollutes the everyday. The Tradition questionswhy and how we’ve become accustomed to terror: in the bedroom, the classroom, the workplace, andthe movie theater. From mass shootings to rape to the murder of unarmed people by police, Brown interrupts complacency by locating each emergency in the garden of the body, where living things grow and wither—or survive. In the urgency born of real danger, Brown’s work is at its mostinnovative. Jericho Brown here wields this power as never before, touching the very heart of our cultural crisis.

Resources for international and immigrant students seeking to participate:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NW2AyRI5FnledweyW5cNHxfve0bLJoXlSZNeNG9NQ-U/edit#heading=h.s0ire7i4fm3

Reading List: Books!

REVOLUTIONARY THOUGHTS:

  • Keisha Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom
  • George Breitman, ed., Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements 
  • Charles E. Cobb Jr., This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible
  • Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide
  • Assata Shakur, Assata 
  • Robyn Spencer, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland

 

BLACK FEMINIST THEORY 

 

PRISON/POLICE ABOLITION

 

CRITICAL RACE STUDIES

  • James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time 
  • Ta Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
  • Cathy Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics
  • Matthew Desmond, Racial Domination, Racial Progress
  • Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks 
  • Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
  • Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
  • Jonathan S. Holloway, Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America Since 1940
  • bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
  • Michael Kats, Why Don’t American Cities Burn
  • Aida Levy-Hussen, How to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of Interpretation
  • Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study
  • Imani Perry, More Terrible, More Beautiful 
  • Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
  • Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

 

FICTION

    • Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
    • Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Talents
    • Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man 
    • Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing
    • Zora Neale Huston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
    • LeRoi Jones, The Dutchman and The Slave (two plays)
    • Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
    • ZZ Packer, “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” (short story) 
    • Ann Petry, The Street
    • Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys 
    • Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

  • Richard Wright, Native Son

 

SHORTER READS