Anti-Racism Reading List September 2023

“That something as relatively innocuous as a sculpture of a woman in a sun hat and sundress, sitting on a chair, can provoke this level of rage and animosity is, in my opinion, solely because the woman is Black.”

“Creating an inclusive workplace for people with darker skin tones is not a one-and-done fix. Simply taking an anti-colorism stance by itself isn’t good enough. Real change can happen only when leaders proactively educate themselves — and their teams — about how colorism shows up in the workplace and its outsize impacts on a person’s career.”

“These misguided talking points neglect the research the indicates how impactful reparations could be to the lives of Black Americans. Although American companies profited from slavery in a multitude of ways, we rarely explore what specific actions American workplaces can take to address the harms that Black employees have faced throughout history.”

“There is a tendency to avoid the hard questions or avoid race altogether. There is also a tendency to increase our defences and a tendency to shut down on our compassion. Many people would agree that they want to be anti-racist, but the very act of taking a proactive stance against racism deeply challenges our personal identity on a bodily, emotional and cognitive level, and we can find ourselves sometimes turning into the type of person we don’t even like.”

“The social movements that shook North African political regimes constituted a critical event and a turning point for anti-racist activism. Before 2011, the issue of racism was rarely discussed in public debates. The ‘culture of silence’ characterized not only Moroccan society but the general attitude vis-à-vis overt racism in all North Africa.”

“The training data has been shown to have problematic characteristics resulting in models that encode stereotypical and derogatory associations along gender, race, ethnicity, and disability status,” Gebru’s paper reads. “White supremacist and misogynistic, ageist, etc., views are overrepresented in the training data, not only exceeding their prevalence in the general population but also setting up models trained on these datasets to further amplify biases and harms.”

“A “power over” mentality is rooted in saviorism and paternalism, and it is entrenched within our sector starting at its origin story (see part 1 and part 2 of The Racist Roots of Nonprofits and Philanthropy on The Ethical Rainmaker.) White women have internalized (and benefited from) those frameworks; we often think we are being helpful when we are instead causing great harm.”

“On Barbados, reparations have moved from a fringe idea to a thing everyone is talking about. And this island, long regarded—some would say intentionally misconstrued—as so compliant with the colonial project that it is sometimes called Little Britain, has moved into a regional leadership position.”

“To define someone by their challenges is the definition of stigmatizing them. But very often in our work, that’s what we do, and there are real cognitive consequences for that.

There are far more black kids doing well than not, but the imagery we see so often is of black failure, so our associative mind treats that imagery as the norm thought it is far from it.”

“When the Nama and Herero rebelled, the German occupiers decided to exterminate them. They hunted them down, killed them, and drove the survivors deep into the Khalari desert, where they poisoned their water sources. Those that weren’t killed were taken to concentration labor camps where they died of disease and exhaustion. Many were subject to sexual exploitation, and medical experimentation.”