Anti-Racism Reading List March 2026

“When I started this work, I didn’t know it would become my work. But it has. And this work has brought me a lot, and it has cost me a lot. I’ve faced threats, harassment, violence - all for writing my truth in the world. All for trying desperately to make things better. I’m not alone in this. There have always been risks to this work. Everyone who speaks up is made to pay in some way.”

“From the description: Research shows that 86% of professionals work harder than their colleagues to be perceived as competent — but for Black Women, that effort often comes with an additional “excellence tax.” From foundational taxes to survival taxes, these hidden demands contribute to chronic stress, burnout, and a growing desire to leave organizations altogether.”

“Recognising the problem is one thing. Stopping it is something else altogether. This time around, would-be empire builders have new, extraordinarily powerful technological tools at their disposal – and the leaders of the world’s largest tech companies have fully endorsed that vision of the future.”

“Though Black women only account for about 14% of the workforce, they represented over half of all women’s job losses during the U.S. employment market’s most volatile months in 2025, like March, April, June, and December. Cutting federal programs and erratic tariff schedules made Black women especially vulnerable, per the IWPR.”

“The empire is the vampire: ageless, elegant, forever starving. It does not only drink blood—it drinks memory. It feeds on culture, on rhythm, on land, on labor, on the brilliance it refuses to protect. It survives by aestheticizing what it has already wounded, by turning survival into spectacle and suffering into style. Its true power has never been the bite, but the invitation—the soft glamour of proximity, the promise of safety in exchange for silence, the velvet lie that one can live inside extraction and remain untouched.”

“The budget is never too limited for opening night cocktails and galas. It is only too limited when it comes to treating Global Majority experts with basic dignity.”

“Decisions must be made in order to change this current reality. Decisions around anti-blackness and white adjacency. Decisions around racism and humanity. Decisions around political power and a functioning equitable society. We did not just arrive at this point .. America sprinted to this very spot.”

“Hearing my own child reject the symbol I offered her for her Blackness flipped the same switch that’s been wired into Black parents for generations—the urge to wrap your child in armor against every act of white supremacy she hasn’t even seen yet, all in this one moment.”

“the difference is not in the existence of racism, but in the style of its denial. Europe performs whiteness through institutional amnesia. The United States performs it through violent repetition. One hides it behind bureaucracy and multicultural slogans. The other shouts it with guns, laws, and mass incarceration. But both are governed by the same foundational logic.”

“The only groups who can claim American culture as their own are Indigenous people and the Black descendants of slaves, who had their history and cultural heritage robbed from them. Those groups should be regarded as protected. Protected from whiteness and white supremacy.

Yet they are not.”