Anti-Racism Resources

These resources were suggested and compiled by members of the School of Public Health community. This list will continue to grow over time. Updated June 1, 2021.

Mental Wellness

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Resources and Information from the University

  • Town Hall: Constructive Conversations for Societal Change (video)
    View the recording of the town hall the university hosted on June 5. Panelists discussed combating racism through daily activities, relationships, and challenging conversations.
  • I Am So Tired
    An op-ed from Dr. Robert Sellers, the university’s Vice Provost for Equity and Inclusion & Chief Diversity Officer.
  • Anti-Racism Support and Tools
    A list of support resources to help individuals, teams, and departments fight racism, compiled by the University of Michigan Office for Healthy Equity & Inclusion.
  • Creating Social Change in Your Community
    Michigan Online has compiled a list of nine learning experiences focused on police brutality, social justice, and free speech you can take right now. These will help learners gain a deeper insight into social justice, equity, and how to enact social change.

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Racism Is a Public Health Issue

  • Interview with Dr. Riana Anderson (video)
    Dr. Anderson, SPH assistant professor of health behavior and health education, speaks to Detroit Public TV about the mental health impacts of COVID-19 and violent racist acts on Black communities.
  • Podcast with Dr. Enrique Neblett
    In this episode of the Michigan Minds podcast, Dr. Neblett, SPH professor of health behavior and health education, discusses the negative impact of racism on health.
  • Advancing Racial Equity Webinar Series
    This webinar series from APHA gives an in-depth look at racism as a driving force of the social determinants of health and equity. It explores efforts to address systems, policies, and practices designed to limit and shape opportunities for people of color.
  • The Impact of Racism on the Health and Well-Being of the Nation
    This 2015 webinar series from APHA examines the impact of racism on health and disparities in the United States. These webinars provide a foundation on racism as a public health issue.
  • Tear Gas and Pepper Spray Can Maim, Kill and Spread Coronavirus
    This Forbes article by an infectious disease specialist explains the dangers of police using pepper spray and tear gas on protesters.

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Hate Incidents Targeting Asian Communities

Hate incidents targeting Asian communities have risen since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. This section includes several links and resources to help understand and address this disturbing and unacceptable trend.

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Police Violence

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Understanding Racism and Engaging in Anti-Racism Work

Readings (i.e., Books and Articles)

  • Talking about Race
    A guide from the National Museum of African American History and Culture on how to discuss race. Tools for educators and parents are included.
  • Anti-Racist Resources from the New York Institute of Technology
    This page defines key terms and provides introductory information about racism, as well as links to related books and other media.
  • Educational Resources List
    This link includes research articles, news stories, books, and other media resources to understand race, oppression, discrimination, and racism.
  • Maintaining Professionalism In The Age of Black Death Is….A Lot
    A first person narrative about Black professionals working during this time.
  • 75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice
    This article includes actions white people can take to work toward racial justice and support Black communities.
  • 30+ Ways Asians Perpetuate Anti-Black Racism Everyday
    This op-ed details ways members of the Asian community can perpetuate anti-Black racism, from escalating situations by calling the police, colorism, and forgetting how social justice movements led by and with the Black community significantly benefited the Asian community.
  • 20 Allyship Actions for Asians to Show Up for the Black Community Right Now
    This op-ed explains how the Asian community can actively show up for the Black community by challenging the model minority myth, organizing individual fundraisers, and listening, among other actions.
  • Asian American Racial Justice Toolkit
    This toolkit is module-based and is designed to begin with people’s lived experiences, and to build structural awareness of why those experiences are happening and how they are tied to the oppression of others. By highlighting the role of people’s resistance both past and present, the toolkit also seeks to build hope and a commitment to political struggle.
  • Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram Kendi
    In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history.
  • The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
    In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation.
  • The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
    The New Jim Crow is a stunning account of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status—denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement.

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Books (U-M Library Collection)

  • Killing the Black Body
    Access: Available print only to U-M users
    This book exposes America’s systemic abuse of Black women’s bodies. From slave masters’ economic stake in bonded women’s fertility to government programs that coerced thousands of poor Black women into being sterilized as late as the 1970s, these abuses pointed to the degradation of Black motherhood—and the exclusion of Black women’s reproductive needs in mainstream feminist and civil rights agendas.
  • Fatal Invention
    Access: Available online to UM users
    This groundbreaking book by legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts examines how the myth of race as a biological concept -- revived by purportedly cutting-edge science, race-specific drugs, genetic testing, and DNA databases -- continues to undermine a just society and promote inequality in a supposedly "post-racial" era.
  • Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life
    Access: Print only
    Most people assume that racism grows from a perception of human difference: the fact of race gives rise to the practice of racism. Sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields argue otherwise: the practice of racism produces the illusion of race, through what they call “racecraft.”
  • Medical Apartheid
    Access: online to U-M users  and in print
    Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge—a tradition that continues today within some black populations.
  • The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
    Access: Available online to U-M users
    In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life.
  • Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America
    Access: Available online to U-M users
    In this groundbreaking book, Melissa V. Harris-Perry uses multiple methods of inquiry, including literary analysis, political theory, focus groups, surveys, and experimental research, to understand more deeply Black women's political and emotional responses to pervasive negative race and gender images.
  • Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools
    Access: Available online to U-M users  and in print
    Monique W. Morris chronicles the experiences of Black girls across the country whose intricate lives are misunderstood, highly judged—by teachers, administrators, and the justice system—and degraded by the very institutions charged with helping them flourish.
  • Hands Up, Don’t Shoot: Why the Protests in Ferguson and Baltimore Matter, and How They Changed America
    Access: Print only - for electronic document delivery options, please see https://www.lib.umich.edu/interlibrary-loan
    In Hands Up, Don’t Shoot, Jennifer Cobbina draws on in-depth interviews with nearly two hundred residents of Ferguson and Baltimore, conducted within two months of the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray. She examines how protestors in both cities understood their experiences with the police, how those experiences influenced their perceptions of policing, what galvanized Black Lives Matter as a social movement, and how policing tactics during demonstrations influenced subsequent mobilization decisions among protesters.
  • You Can’t Stop the Revolution: Community Disorder and Social Ties in Post-Ferguson America
    Access: Available online to U-M users
    You Can’t Stop the Revolution is a vivid participant ethnography conducted from inside of Ferguson protests as the Black Lives Matter movement catapulted onto the global stage. Sociologist Andrea S. Boyles offers an everyday montage of protests, social ties, and empowerment that coalesced to safeguard Black lives while igniting unprecedented twenty-first-century resistance.
  • The Black and the Blue : A Cop Reveals the Crimes, Racism, and Injustice in America’s Law Enforcement
    Access: Print only - for electronic document delivery options, please see https://www.lib.umich.edu/interlibrary-loan
    Through gut-wrenching reportage, on-the-ground research, and personal accounts from interviews with police and government officials around the country, author Matthew Horace presents an insider's examination of archaic police tactics.
  • Inequality, Crime, and Health among African American Males Enduring Social Costs of Racial Inequality
    Access: Available online to U-M users
    The authors draw from an array of theoretical and methodological frameworks to illustrate how poor outcomes and sharp disparities among individuals and communities can be linked to the interplay of multiple factors operating at multiple levels, with a particular focus on African American males.
  • Medical Apartheid
    Access: online to U-M users and in print
    Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge—a
    tradition that continues today within some black populations.
  • The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
    Access: Available online to U-M users
    In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life.
  • Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America
    Access: Available online to U-M users
    In this groundbreaking book, Melissa V. Harris-Perry uses multiple methods of inquiry, including literary analysis, political theory, focus groups, surveys, and experimental research, to understand more deeply Black women's political and emotional responses to pervasive negative race and gender images.
  • Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools
    Access: Available online to U-M users and in print
    Monique W. Morris chronicles the experiences of Black girls across the country whose intricate lives are misunderstood, highly judged—by teachers, administrators, and the justice system—and degraded by the very institutions charged with helping them flourish.

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Multimedia (i.e., Webinars, Videos and Movies)

  • Jane Elliott on Her "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Exercise" and Fighting Racism
    Teacher and diversity trainer Jane Elliott talks to Jimmy Fallon about her "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Exercise," the construct of race, and what everyone can do in the fight against racism.
  • Color Blind or Color Brave?
    In this TEDX talk, finance executive Mellody Hobson makes the case that speaking openly about race — and particularly about diversity in hiring — makes for better businesses and a better society.
  • Code Switch
    Code Switch is a multi-racial, multi-generational team of NPR journalists who cover race and identity. This article features a compilation of Code Switch coverage of race and policing, both from the podcast and the blog.
  • PBS Series "Asian Americans"
    Asian Americans is a five-hour film series that delivers a bold, fresh perspective on a history that matters today, more than ever. Told through intimate personal stories, the series will cast a new lens on U.S. history and the ongoing role that Asian Americans have played.
  • 13th
    Filmmaker Ava DuVernay explores the history of racial inequality in the United States, focusing on the fact that the nation's prisons are disproportionately filled with African-Americans. In this thought-provoking documentary, scholars, activists, and politicians analyze the criminalization of African Americans and the U.S. prison boom.
  • Prioritizing Equity Video Series: Police Brutality & COVID-19
    This panel from the American Medical Association features health equity leaders who discuss how physicians and others can address root causes of inequity by naming racism.
  • History of Police in Creating Social Order in the United States
    This NPR segment details the historical role of police in preserving power and social order.
  • Special Report: America in Black and Blue
    The PBS NewsHour weekend special explores the tensions between America’s diverse communities and their local police forces, the efforts in many communities to find healing, and the delicate balance between essential law enforcement and protecting the civil and human rights of all Americans.
  • How to deconstruct racism, one headline at a time
    Baratunde Thurston, author of the New York Times bestselling book How to Be Black, breaks down the numerous headlines of white people calling the police on Black people. He proceeds to explore the different levels of white supremacy while using comedy and challenging the audience to change these narratives and level up.

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Campaigns

  • Justice in June Action Calendar
    This calendar provides a schedule of what to do each day to become more informed and an active ally to the Black community.
  • List of Bail Funds
    A collection of community resources for protestors around the country.
  • Black Scientists Call Out Racism in Their Institutions
    This article explains how Black scientists and students have shared their experiences of being dismissed and discriminated against in academia on Twitter using hashtags such as #BlackEHSmatters and #BlackintheIvory. Many also participated in a June 10th strike meant to shut down STEM industries in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

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Data and Data Visualization

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Infographics