Beyond White Awake: Further Racial Justice Resources

You’ve finished reading White Awake, and you want to learn more about race in America. Below is a list of resources, divided by topic, to help you on your inward journey and prepare you for the outward journey of working towards racial justice. This isn’t a checklist, though! Pick the resources that you think will best help you go deeper and learn more in your journey into justice.

Racism in the Church

  • The Color of Compromise, by Jemar Tisby: this is book (and video series available through Amazon Prime) details the way the church in America has been complicit with racism throughout its history.

  • Faith & Prejudice, “Race and the Church” (video; watch through 38:09): this provides a good overview of the way pastors and leaders of color have been excluded in the not-so-distant past.

Understanding Whiteness

  • Be the Bridge, by Latasha Morrison: this book, the accompanying curriculum for groups, and the podcast, helps orient Christians towards justice and restoration.

  • The History of White People, by Nell Irvin Painter: a deep dive into the construction of “whiteness” from early modern Europe to the present.

Mass Incarceration

  • Thirteenth (Netflix documentary): a wrenching history of how the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution allowed a loophole for slavery to continue.

  • Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice That Restores, by Dominique DuBois Gilliard: this book looks at the church’s involvement with mass incarceration and offers ways that the church can participate in the reformation of our justice system.

  • Two articles that offer statistics about racism and policing, from NBC News and the Washington Post.

Race and Education

  • CodeSwitch (NPR podcast): “Audie and the Not-So-Magic School Bus” (audio): this short podcast episode looks at school segregation and busing through Audie Cornish’s experience in a busing program in Boston in the late 1980s.

  • Nice White Parents podcast series: a 5-part podcast that examines the power of white parents in America’s school systems.

Race and Housing

  • The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, by Richard Rothstein: this book examines the history of redlining, the practice of segregating neighborhoods.

  • This article on a recent case of redlining.

Hearing Minority Voices: Memoir and Fiction

  • I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness, Austin Channing Brown (memoir)

  • An American Marriage, Tayari Jones (novel) — this book does contain strong language

  • The Means that Makes Us Stranger, Christine Kindberg (young adult novel)

Theology

  • Reading While Black, Esau McCaulley