Faculty Summer Reading Selections-Focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

This year's faculty summer reading focuses on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.  Many thanks to the Professional Development Committee for their thoughtful selections!

Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi (A remix of the National Book Award-winning Stamped From The Beginning, by Ibram X. Kendi) (Young Adult)

This is NOT a history book. This is a book about the here and now. A book to help us better understand why we are where we are. A book about race.

The construct of race has always been used to gain and keep power, to create dynamics that separate and silence. This remarkable reimagining of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi's National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning reveals the history of racist ideas in America, and inspires hope for an antiracist future. It takes you on a race journey from then to now, shows you why we feel how we feel, and why the poison of racism lingers. It also proves that while racist ideas have always been easy to fabricate and distribute, they can also be discredited. 

Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, by Ibram X. Kendi

In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. He uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to drive this history: Puritan minister Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and legendary activist Angela Davis.

Here For It, by R. Eric Thomas

R. Eric Thomas didn’t know he was different until the world told him so. Everywhere he went - whether it was his rich, mostly white, suburban high school, his conservative black church, or his Ivy League college in a big city - he found himself on the outside looking in.

In essays both hysterical and heartfelt, Thomas reexamines what it means to be an "other" through the lens of his own life experience. He explores the two worlds of his childhood: the barren urban landscape where his parents’ house was an anomalous bright spot, and the Eden-like school they sent him to in white suburbia. He writes about struggling to reconcile his Christian identity with his sexuality, the exhaustion of code-switching in college, accidentally getting famous on the internet (for the wrong reason), and the surreal experience of covering the 2016 election for Elle online, and the seismic changes that came thereafter. Thomas is a Park School graduate. 

So You Want To Talk About Race, by Ijeoma Oluo 

In So You Want to Talk About Race Ijeoma Oluo offers a contemporary, accessible take on the racial landscape in America, addressing head-on such issues as privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the "N" word. Perfectly positioned to bridge the gap between people of color and white Americans struggling with race complexities, Oluo answers the questions listeners don't dare ask, and explains the concepts that continue to elude everyday Americans.  

Me and White Supremacy, by Layla F. Saad 

When Layla Saad began an Instagram challenge called #meandwhitesupremacy, she never predicted it would spread as widely as it did. She encouraged people to own up and share their racist behaviors, big and small. She was looking for truth, and she got it. Thousands of people participated in the challenge, and nearly 100,000 people downloaded the Me and White Supremacy Workbook.

Updated and expanded from the original workbook, Me and White Supremacy takes the work deeper by adding more historical and cultural contexts, sharing moving stories and anecdotes, and including expanded definitions, examples, and further resources.

The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

“Whatever your identity, background, or political ideology,” the authors advise young people, “you will be happier, healthier, stronger, and more likely to succeed in pursuing your own goals” if you do three things:

1. Seek out challenges “rather than eliminating or avoiding everything that ‘feels unsafe.’”
2. Free yourself from cognitive distortions “rather than always trusting your initial feelings.”
3. Take a generous view of other people, and look for nuance, “rather than assuming the worst about people within a simplistic us-versus-them morality.”

“Lukianoff and Haidt notice something unprecedented and frightening… The consequences of a generation unable or disinclined to engage with ideas that make them uncomfortable are dire for society, and open the door – accessible from both the left and the right – to various forms of authoritarianism.” —  Thomas Chatterton Williams, The New York Times Book Review

The Person You Mean to Be, by Dolly ChughMany of us believe in equality, diversity, and inclusion. But how do we stand up for those values in our turbulent world? The Person You Mean to Be is the smart, "semi-bold" person’s guide to fighting for what you believe in.

We Want To Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom, by Bettina L. Love

Drawing on her life’s work of teaching and researching in urban schools, Bettina Love persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. She argues that the U.S. educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color. Instead of trying to repair a flawed system, educational reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education, which Love calls the educational survival complex.

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, by Bryan Stevenson 

Unfairness in the justice system is a major theme of our age. . . . This book brings new life to the story by placing it in two affecting contexts: Stevenson’s life work and the deep strain of racial injustice in American life. . . . You don’t have to read too long to start cheering for this man. Against tremendous odds, Stevenson has worked to free scores of people from wrongful or excessive punishment, arguing five times before the Supreme Court. . . . The message of the book, hammered home by dramatic examples of one man’s refusal to sit quietly and countenance horror, is that evil can be overcome, a difference can be made.—Ted Conover, The New York Times Book Review

999: The Extraordinary Young Women of The First Official Jewish Transport to Auschwitz, by Heather Dune Macadam

“A staggering narrative about the forgotten women of the Holocaust.  In a profound work of scholarship, Heather Dune Macadam reveals how young women helped each other survive one of the most egregious events in human history. Her book also offers insight into the passage of these women into adulthood, and their children, as ‘secondhand survivors.’”

—Gail Sheehy

The Island of Sea Women, by Lisa See (2020 One Maryland, One Book)

Mi-ja and Young-sook, two girls living on the Korean island of Jeju, are best friends who come from very different backgrounds. When they are old enough, they begin working in the sea with their village’s all-female diving collective, led by Young-sook’s mother. As the girls take up their positions as baby divers, they know they are beginning a life of excitement and responsibility—but also danger.

Despite their love for each other, Mi-ja and Young-sook find it impossible to ignore their differences. The Island of Sea Women takes place over many decades, beginning during a period of Japanese colonialism in the 1930s and 1940s, followed by World War II, the Korean War, through the era of cell phones and wet suits for the women divers.