Anti-Racism Resources

We believe education is crucial to foster personal growth, learn about white supremacy and gain a better understanding of racial challenges in our country. We recommend signing up for the Anti-Racism Daily newsletter which allows Nicole Cardoza to help us dismantle white supremacy through education and action ~ each and every day. Anti Racist Education and Teaching Black Lives Matter Resources is a comprehensive toolkit on overcoming racism. Tema Okum’s website has everything you need to know about White Supremacy Culture and how damaging it is to everyone involved.

In addition, SURJ San Mateo has provided the following educational opportunities to our members through book and movie discussions:

​​

• RAISING OUR HANDS: How White Women Can Stop Avoiding Hard Conversations, Start Accepting Responsibility, and Find Our Place on the New Frontlines (Jenna Arnold)
  Examines why one of the most influential demographics in America, white women, sit idly on the sidelines opting out of raising their hands to do, learn, and engage in ways that could make a difference.

​

• SKIN (Guy Nattiv)
  Oscar-winning short film about a moment that sends two gangs into a ruthless war that ends with a shocking backlash.
   

• CASTE: The Origins of Our Discontents (Isabel Wilkerson)
  #1 New York Times bestseller gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as the author explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.

​

• WHEN THEY SEE US (Ava DuVernay)
  Emmy Award-winning film based on the true story of five Harlem teens who become trapped in a nightmare when they’re falsely accused of a brutal attack in Central Park.
   

• THE NEW JIM CROW: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (Michelle Alexander)
  Challenges the civil rights community—and all of us—to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America.

​

• 13TH (Ava DuVernay)
  Oscar-nominated film that analyzes the tragic impact of the 13th Amendment on the American system of incarceration, specifically how the prison industrial complex affects people of color.

​

• THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS: Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (Isabel Wilkerson)
  In this critically acclaimed, modern classic of narrative nonfiction, three young people set out on a perilous journey out of the Jim Crow South to the North and West in search of what the novelist Richard Wright called “the warmth of other suns.”
   

• NICE RACISM: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm (Robin DiAngelo)
  Writing candidly about her own missteps and struggles, DiAngelo models a path forward, encouraging white readers to continually face their complicity and embrace courage, lifelong commitment, and accountability
   

• THE COLOR OF LAW: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
  (Richard Rothstein) This book details how federal housing policies in the 1940s and '50s mandated segregation and undermined the ability of black families to own homes and build wealth.
   

• THE FIRE NEXT TIME (James Baldwin) At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, this book is an intensely personal and provocative document.
   

• THE WHITE RACIAL FRAME: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing (Joe R. Feagin)
  The white racial frame encompasses the visual images, emotions, sounds of accented language, interlinking interpretations and narratives, and inclinations to discriminate that are central to its everyday operations.
   

• THE POSSESSIVE INVESTMENT IN WHITENESS: How White People Profit From Identity Politics (George Lipsitz) This classic book argues that public policy and private prejudice work together to create a possessive investment in whiteness that is responsible for the racialized hierarchies of our society.