Race, class, gender, sexuality and ability are part of social, cultural, political and economic life. The resources below reflect this complexity. You will also find different formats to support varied learning styles. Feel free to contact us if you have a recommendation for something we should read, listen to, watch or explore.
Read
Book Suggestions
The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee.
Thick and Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom
From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.
Race For Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.
Black Privilege: Modern Middle-Class Blacks with Credentials and Cash to Spend by Cassi Pittman Claytor.
The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide by Meizhu Lui, Bárbara Robles, Besty Leondar-Wright, Rose Brewer, Rebecca Adamson and United for a Fair Economy.
Evicted by sociologist Matthew Desmond shows “what incarceration is to Black men, eviction is to Black women.”
Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert (this is a related short(er) article also titled “Empire of Cotton.”
Missing Class: Strengthening Social Movement Groups by Seeing Class Cultures by Betsy Leondar-Wright
Articles and Book Chapters
Inequality.org publishes reports and blog posts about inequality on a weekly basis, including recent features: Taxes on the Rich: One-Sixth of What They Used to Be and Billionaire Wealth vs. Community Health which focuses on essential workers during the pandemic.
How Do We Change America? by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and many more on her website.
The 1619 Project in the New York Times Magazine
Economics for the 99 Percent is a clear, user-friendly publication by The Center for Popular Economics that explains everything from the history of capitalism to solidarity economy models.
What We Get Wrong About Closing the Racial Wealth Gap, a report by William Darity Jr., Darrick Hamilton, Mark Paul, Alan Aja, Anne Price, Antonio Moore, and Caterina Chiopris at the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity and Insight Center for Community Economic Development, April 2018.
Sociologist Matthew Desmond writes about eviction in this article “Forced Out: For many poor Americans, eviction never ends”.
The Economic Policy Institute generates easy-to-share graphs and charts along with short reports like CEO compensation surged 14% in 2019 to $21.3 million: CEOs now earn 320 times as much as a typical worker.
Listen
The 1619 Project podcast
Beyond Capitalism: A Multiracial Labor Movement is a conversation between Dr. Ibram X. Kendi and Historian Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley
Multiple interview recordings about reparations with economist William Darity Jr.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is interviewed on the podcast The Dig about her book Race For Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership.
Death, Sex & Money produced a series of episodes about social class called Opportunity Costs: Money and Class in America.
The podcast BackStory produced an episode called Hard Times: A History of Unemployment that uncovers the history of unemployment in the United States.
On The Media and WNYC present a series of five episodes titled: Busted: America’s Poverty Myths.
The Giant Pool of Money from This American Life explores the housing crisis of 2008.
The Hidden Brain podcast episode Too Little, Too Much: How Poverty and Wealth Affect Our Minds.
Watch
The Fire This Time: The New Uprising Against Racism And Police Violence, a conversation between Marc Lamont Hill and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor organized by Haymarket Books.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor gives a talk titled From Black Lives Matter to the White Power Presidency: Race and Class in the Trump Era at the Barnard Center for Research on Women.
The 1619 Project details the legacy of slavery in America. Reporter and project lead Nikole Hannah Jones is featured in this interview on PBS NewsHour where she shares an overview and central ideas of the project.
An interview with William Darity Jr. and Kristen Mullen about their book From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century.
In this recorded interview on C-SPAN, Richard Rothstein talked about his book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, in which he argues that local, state, and federal legislation has been responsible for America’s segregated cities. He spoke with author Ta-Nehisi Coates.