PISAB Foundational Bibliography

After the Undoing Racism® & Community Organizing Workshop, participants often ask us for resources to help further and deepen their understanding of systemic racism and anti-racist organizing. We have been and continue to be influenced and inspired by many powerful books and videos created by the movement. We challenged ourselves to create a list of foundational resources to PISAB’s analysis. Thank you to the anti-racist organizers who contributed their time and energy to creating this list: 

Alexander, Michelle, The New Jim Crow:  Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.  The New Press, 2010.

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the U.S. Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.

Davis, Angela, Women, Race, and Class.  Random House, 1981.

DeGruy, Joy, Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing.  Uptone Press, 1005.

Franklin, John Hope, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Amerians. Vintage Press 1961.

Giddings, Paula, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. W. Morrow, 1984.

Gossett, Thomas, Race: The History of an Idea in America.  Pendulum Press, 1987.

Higgenbotham, Leon A. Jr., In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period.  Oxford, 1980.

Ignatiev, Noel, How the Irish Became White. Routledge, 1995.

Katznelson, Ira, When Affirmative Action Was White.  W.W. Norton, 2005.

Lipsitz, George, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness:  How White People Benefit from Identity Politics.  Temple University Press, 1998.

Lopez, Ian Haney, White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race. NYU Press, 1999.

Lui, Meizhu, et al., The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Wealth Divide. 

New York, New Press, 2006.

Martinez, Elizabeth, De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century.  South End Press, 1998.

Montagu, Ashley, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. Alta Mira Press 1942; reissued 1997.

Takaki, Ronald, A Different Mirror:  A History of Multicultural America. Revised ed.  Hachette Book Group, 2008.

Wilkerson, Isabel, Caste: The Origins of our Discontents. Random House Publishing, 2020.

Woodson, Carter G., The Mis-Education of the Negro.  New World Press, 1933, 1990.

Zinn, Howard, A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present. Harper Perennial Library, 1995.