Social Justice Initiative Past Readings

2022

  • Amanda Gorman, Call us What We Carry

  • High on the Hog (Netflix mini-series)

  • Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun

  • Kareem Abdul Jabbar essay, “Black Cop’s Kid”

  • Jordan Hirsch, “The Strange Career of Beautiful Crescent”

  • Brooke Park, “Texas Librarians Face Harassment As They Navigate Book Bans,” (May 17 2022 article from The Texas Tribune)

2021

  • Chip Colwell, TED talk: Why Museums are Returning Cultural Treasures, and Tara Houska, TED talk: The Standing Rock Resistance and Our Fight for Indigenous Rights

  • Still Processing podcast, “Asian-Americans Talk About Racism,” part 1 & part 2

  • The 54th in ’22 by Kirsten Greenidge, from Huntington Theatre’s Dream Boston Audio Play series

  • Jericho Brown, “The Tradition” (poetry)

  • Gene Luen Yang,  American Born Chinese (graphic novel)

  • “13th” (documentary on YouTube or Netflix)

  • Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns 

  • Crip Camp: a Disability Revolution (documentary on Netflix)

  • Jim Vrabel, A People’s History of the New Boston

  • Juila Alvarez, Afterlife 

2020

  • Ibram Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

  • Sheila Black, Jennifer Bartlett, and Michael Northen (editors), Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability

  • Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood

  • Paris is Burning (film)

  • I Am Not Your Negro (film)

  • Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

  • Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures

  • Ralph Waldo Ellison, Invisible Man

  • 1619 (Podcast)

  • Uncivil (Podcast)