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)