Book Selections

"Extending Justice: Strategies to Increase Inclusion & Reduce Bias offers expert perspective and actionable tools for interrupting bias. The first book in this series, Enhancing Justice: Reducing Bias, was written to increase awareness of implicit bias and serve as a benchbook for judges. This book goes the next step to be useful to a wider audience with virtually every chapter offering thoughtful context and practical strategies for interrupting unintentional bias. Edited by two proven leaders in the field, with 26 chapters written by fifty highly-diverse authors, the voices here combine to provide wide-ranging and user-friendly science and tools. Perspective comes from authors who are diverse in gender, gender orientation, race and ethnicity, age, ability, education, and profession. Fields covered are also diverse, including law, health, education, artificial intelligence, nonprofits, education, the military, and disability. Thought-provoking essays and interviews on healthcare, extremism, courage, and the silence and invisibility of the Native American community further enrich the work. The chapters are written to stand alone but build on each other for a strong collective whole. Readers will find the book useful in their own disciplines and beyond. Teachers, students, judges, and professionals in all fields can use this work for inspiration and reference as they apply its strategies and thinking to enhance their accomplishments in achieving diversity, equity, and inclusion, individually and systemically"--

The New York Times and USA Today bestseller! This eye-opening book challenges you to do the essential work of unpacking your biases, and helps white people take action and dismantle the privilege within themselves so that you can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on people of color, and in turn, help other white people do better, too. "Layla Saad is one of the most important and valuable teachers we have right now on the subject of white supremacy and racial injustice."--New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert Based on the viral Instagram challenge that captivated participants worldwide, Me and White Supremacy takes readers on a 28-day journey, complete with journal prompts, to do the necessary and vital work that can ultimately lead to improving race relations. Updated and expanded from the original workbook (downloaded by nearly 100,000 people), this critical text helps you take the work deeper by adding more historical and cultural contexts, sharing moving stories and anecdotes, and including expanded definitions, examples, and further resources, giving you the language to understand racism, and to dismantle your own biases, whether you are using the book on your own, with a book club, or looking to start family activism in your own home. This book will walk you step-by-step through the work of examining: Examining your own white privilege What allyship really means Anti-blackness, racial stereotypes, and cultural appropriation Changing the way that you view and respond to race How to continue the work to create social change Awareness leads to action, and action leads to change. For readers of White Fragility, White Rage, So You Want To Talk About Race, The New Jim Crow, How to Be an Anti-Racist and more who are ready to closely examine their own beliefs and biases and do the work it will take to create social change. "Layla Saad moves her readers from their heads into their hearts, and ultimately, into their practice. We won't end white supremacy through an intellectual understanding alone; we must put that understanding into action."--Robin DiAngelo, author of New York Times bestseller White Fragility

Gay Asian American Yale Law School professor Kenji Yoshino fuses legal manifesto and poetic memoir to call for a redefinition of civil rights in our law and culture. Everyone covers. To cover is to downplay a disfavored trait so as to blend into the mainstream. Because all of us possess stigmatized attributes, we all encounter pressure to cover in our daily lives. Given its pervasiveness, we may experience this pressure to be a simple fact of social life. Against conventional understanding, Kenji Yoshino argues that the demand to cover can pose a hidden threat to our civil rights. Though we have come to some consensus against penalizing people for differences based on race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, and disability, we still routinely deny equal treatment to people who refuse to downplay differences along these lines. Racial minorities are pressed to 'act white' by changing their names, languages, or cultural practices. Women are told to 'play like men' at work. Gays are asked not to engage in public displays of same-sex affection. The devout are instructed to minimize expressions of faith, and individuals with disabilities are urged to conceal the paraphernalia that permit them to function. In a wide-ranging analysis, Yoshino demonstrates that American civil rights law has generally ignored the threat posed by these covering demands. With passion and rigor, he shows that the work of civil rights will not be complete until it attends to the harms of coerced conformity.;A legal scholar presents a memoir that documents his experiences and calls for a return to an authenticity which recognizes that the suppression of personal identity causes harm to all society.

"This book explores how scientific evidence on the human mind might help to explain why racial equality is so elusive"--;"Implicit Racial Bias: A Social Science Overview Justin D. Levinson, Danielle M. Young & Laurie A. Rudman A little after 2 a.m. on the first day of 2009, San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit ("BART") Officer Johannes Mehserle arrived at the Fruitvale BART station after receiving reports of a fight on a train. Upon arrival at the station, he was directed by another officer to arrest Oscar Grant, who, along with other fight suspects, was sitting by the wall of the station. As Mehserle, who was joined by other officers, prepared to arrest Grant, Grant began to stand up, and Mehserle forced him to the ground face first. Another officer stood over Grant and uttered, "Bitch-ass n-." As Mehserle prepared to handcuff Grant, some eyewitnesses testified that Grant resisted by keeping his hands under his torso. Although Grant was laying face down and was physically restrained by another police officer at the time of his alleged resistance, Mehserle removed his department issued handgun from its holster and shot Grant in the back from point blank range. Grant died later that morning"--

You don't have to be racist to be biased. Unconscious bias can be at work without our realizing it, and even when we genuinely wish to treat all people equally, ingrained stereotypes can infect our visual perception, attention, memory, and behavior. This has an impact on education, employment, housing, and criminal justice. In Biased, with a perspective that is at once scientific, investigative, and informed by personal experience, Jennifer Eberhardt offers us insights into the dilemma and a path forward. Eberhardt works extensively as a consultant to law enforcement and as a psychologist at the forefront of this new field. Her research takes place in courtrooms and boardrooms, in prisons, on the street, and in classrooms and coffee shops. She shows us the subtle--and sometimes dramatic--daily repercussions of implicit bias in how teachers grade students, or managers deal with customers. It has an enormous impact on the conduct of criminal justice, from the rapid decisions police officers have to make to sentencing practices in court. Eberhardt's work and her book are both influenced by her own life, and the personal stories she shares emphasize the need for change. She has helped companies that include Airbnb and Nextdoor address bias in their business practices and has led anti-bias initiatives for police departments across the country. Here, she offers practical suggestions for reform and new practices that are useful for organizations as well as individuals. Unblinking about the tragic consequences of prejudice, Eberhardt addresses how racial bias is not the fault of nor restricted to a few "bad apples" but is present at all levels of society in media, education, and business. The good news is that we are not hopelessly doomed by our innate prejudices. In Biased, Eberhardt reminds us that racial bias is a human problem--one all people can play a role in solving.

The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality. In this "vital, necessary, and beautiful book" (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and "allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to 'bad people' (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.

A compelling study of a subtle and insidious form of racial inequality in American law and culture. Why does racial equality continue to elude African Americans even after the election of a black president? Liberals blame white racism while conservatives blame black behavior. Both define the race problem in socioeconomic terms, mainly citing jobs, education, and policing. Roy Brooks, a distinguished legal scholar, argues that the reality is more complex. He defines the race problem African Americans face today as a three-headed hydra involving socioeconomic, judicial, and cultural conditions. Focusing on law and culture, Brooks defines the problem largely as racial subordination-"the act of impeding racial progress in pursuit of nonracist interests." Racial subordination is little understood and underacknowledged, yet it produces devastating and even deadly racial consequences that affect both poor and socioeconomically successful African Americans. Brooks addresses a serious problem, in many ways more dangerous than overt racism, and offers a well-reasoned solution that draws upon the strongest virtues America has exhibited to the world.

Taking a performance studies approach to understanding Asian American racial subjectivity, Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson argues that the law influences racial formation by compelling Asian Americans to embody and perform recognizable identities in both popular aesthetic forms (such as theater, opera, or rock music) and in the rituals of everyday life. Tracing the production of Asian American selfhood from the era of Asian Exclusion through the Global War on Terror, A Race So Different explores the legal paradox whereby U.S. law apprehends the Asian American body as simultaneously excluded from and included within the national body politic. Bringing together broadly defined forms of performance, from artistic works such as Madame Butterfly to the Supreme Court's oral arguments in the Cambodian American deportation cases of the twenty-first century, this book invites conversation about how Asian American performance uses the stage to document, interrogate, and complicate the processes of racialization in U.S. law. Through his impressive use of a rich legal and cultural archive, Chambers-Letson articulates a robust understanding of the construction of social and racial realities in the contemporary United States.--Publisher description.