Read, Watch, Listen, and Learn: A curated collection on combating racism and advancing equality

Recently, we wrote to affirm the Yale Alumni Association’s support for the Black community and everyone who stands up against racism, hatred, intolerance, and injustice, and to state unequivocally that black lives matter. In response to this message, many of you have reached out to learn what we have done in this regard and to know what steps we are taking to advance these imperatives.

Because Yale alumni are overwhelmingly enthusiastic about lifelong learning, we begin by sharing this curated collection of articles, books, podcasts, reports, videos, and more to facilitate greater understanding of the Black experience in the U.S. While hardly exhaustive, this list includes YAA initiatives and highlights Yale alumni and faculty whose expertise and actions further the ideals of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice.

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Read (articles):

Battle for the Constitution: The First Step is Figuring Out What Police Are For, by Tracey L. Meares, Walton Hale Hamilton Professor of Law at Yale Law School; and Tom R. Tyler, Macklin Fleming Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology; founders of The Justice Collaboratory
From “War on Crime” to War on the Black Community, by Elizabeth Hinton, Professor of History, Law and African American Studies
How to Start Making Real Change in Your Organization, Yale Insights interview with Heidi Brooks, Yale SOM leadership expert
How White Managers Can Respond to Anti-Black Violence, by Michael W. Kraus, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior, Yale School of Management
I Cannot Sell You This Painting, by Titus Kaphar ’06 MFA
It's Never Too Early to Talk to Children About Race, featuring Yarrow Dunham, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Yale and Director of the Social Cognitive Development Lab; Dr. Wanjiku Njoroge, Adjunct Professor at Yale and Program Director, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia; and Dr. Amalia Londono Tobon, Clinical Fellow of the Yale Child Study Center
Racism Is Terrible. Blackness Is Not, by Imani Perry ’94
‘Spy In The House Of Race’: A Daughter Of Black, Chinese, and Jewish Parents on Belonging Everywhere and Nowhere, by Lili Nadja Barsha ’88
The Difference Between First-Degree Racism and Third-Degree Racism, by John Rice '88
The Trayvon Generation, by Elizabeth Alexander ’84
Unequal Impact: The Deep Links Between Racism and Climate Change, by Beth Gardiner, for YaleEnvironment360 (E360)
What’s Going On?, by David Blight, Sterling Professor of History at Yale; Director, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition

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Read (reports)

Changing the Law to Change Policing, Barry Friedman, Policing Project at New York University School of Law; Brandon L. Garrett, Center for Justice and Science at Duke University School of Law; Rachel Harmon, Center for Criminal Justice at the University of Virginia School of Law; Christy E. Lopez, Innovative Policing Program at Georgetown Law School; Tracey L. Meares, Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School; Maria Ponomarenko, Policing Project at NYU School of Law; Christopher Slobogin, Criminal Justice Program, Vanderbilt University; Tom R. Tyler, Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School
Movement and Space: Creating Dialogue on Systemic Racism from the Modern Civil Rights Movement to the Present, a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, written by Camille Jackson '94 and Jeff Sapp
Leadership in the Face of Change, a report from the Yale Alumni Task Force on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Summaries of YAA Reports, by the Yale Alumni Association Executive Director’s DEI Working Groups and the Yale Alumni Task Force on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

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Read (books):

America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s, by Elizabeth Hinton, Professor of History, Law and African American Studies
Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ’08 MA, 2019 Class Day speaker
Chokehold: Policing Black Men, by Paul Butler ’82
Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine, Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale in the departments of African American Studies and English
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, by David Blight, Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition
Let Them See You: The Guide for Leveraging Your Diversity at Work, by Jopwell founder Porter Braswell ’11
Locking Up Our Own, by James Forman, J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School
Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, by Henry Louis Gates Jr. ’73
The Black Russian, by Vladimir Alexandrov, B. E. Bensinger Professor Emeritus, Slavic Languages and Literatures
The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life, by Elijah Anderson, Sterling Professor of Sociology and of African American Studies
The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper, by Heather McGhee '01
Travel and Movement in Clinical Psychology: The World Outside the Clinic, by Miraj Desai, Instructor, Program for Recovery and Community Health of the Yale University School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry

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Watch:

Creating Story Through Sound with Composer JB Bontemps, by Yale Black Alumni Association and YAA Shared Interest Groups
Dean Kerwin K. Charles discusses scholarship and the fight for racial justice, by Poets and Quants
Diversity in Tech: A Conversation with Gary Stewart, CEO & Co-Founder of The Nest, by Accelerate Yale, the Yale Black Alumni Association, and YAA Shared Interest Groups
In Conversation: Black Women, Beauty, and Perception, by YAA Shared Interest Groups
In Conversation: Ibram X. Kendi and Yale Professor Matthew Frye Jacobson, by the YAA and Belonging at Yale
LGBTQ+ Diversity in a Box with Joe English, by Yale Alumni Educators
My Name is Pauli Murray, on Pauli Murray '65 JSD; score by JB Bontemps '96
The People v. The Clan, by CNN, Cornell Brooks '90 JD, executive producer
We Are Yale, by Hugo Perez ’93
YAA DEI Impact Conference keynote address, by Cornell Brooks ’90 JD

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Listen:

How We Keep Our Communities Safe, from WNYC’s On the Media, interview with Elizabeth Hinton, Professor of History, African-American Studies, and Law
The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning, by Claudia Rankine, Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale in the departments of African American Studies and English
Yale Experts on the Parallel Crises of COVID-19 and Systemic Racism, with President Peter Salovey '86 PhD; Elijah Anderson, Sterling Professor of Sociology and of African American Studies; and Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, associate professor of medicine and of epidemiology

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Learn:

African American History: From Emancipation to the Present, by Jonathan Holloway ’95 PhD, former Professor of History, African American Studies, and American Studies at Yale, and Dean of Yale College
Music and Social Action, by Sebastian Ruth, Visiting Lecturer in Community Engagement, Yale School of Music
The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877, by David Blight, Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition

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