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First published in 1997, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race addresses race and racism in the United States from a psychologist's perspective. Beverly Daniel Tatum is a clinical psychologist with extensive experience in researching racial identity development. We need to learn how to have productive dialogues about race and racism, and to do that we need to understand how our racial identities form and how they affect our lives.This guide is based on the updated edition released in 2017, which includes updates to the text as well as a new Prologue and Epilogue covering developments over the 20 years since the book was originally published. This guide also mirrors many of Tatum's choices with regard to language, including the capitalization of all racial and ethnic terms (including "White" and "Black"), the preference for the gender-neutral term "Latinx" over "Latino" or "Latina," and the variable use of terms referring to the same group (e.g. "Native American," "Native people," and "American Indian").

We Were the Mulvaneys is a novel by American writer Joyce Carol Oates, originally published in the US in 1996. Set largely in the rural Northeastern United States in the 1970s, this story deals with the myth of the ideal American family and the ruinous effects it can have when real-life events threaten the appearance of familial unity. After having been featured as an Oprah Book Club selection in January 2001, the novel became a Number 1 Bestseller, and a New York Times Notable Book. It also became an Emmy-nominated Lifetime Television movie in 2002.Joyce Carol Oates (1938- ) is one of the pre-eminent American writers, adept at prose, poetry, drama, and nonfiction. Since 1963 she has published more than 65 novels, as well as numerous short story collections, known for experimentation in style and content, controversial subject matters and technical mastery. She has won numerous awards, including a National Book Award, two O. Henry Awards (for short fiction), a National Humanities Medal, and the Pen/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story. She has been shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize five times, nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and is widely translated.The edition of the novel used for this study guide is by Harper Perennial, published in the UK in 2008...

Sharon Draper's Out of My Mind, based on her own experiences parenting a disabled child, is a New York Times Bestselling novel told from the first-person perspective of 10-year-old Melody Brooks. Melody is a fifth-grade girl who, due to cerebral palsy, is unable to communicate verbally and is wheelchair-bound. The struggles and prejudice that Melody encounters provide a more intimate and personal view of the lives of people with physical disabilities. Atheneum Books for Young Readers published the novel in 2010.

Ibram Kendi's comprehensive history of racial thought in the US, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, was published in 2016. Organized around the lifespans of five of the most influential or representative individuals in racial thought across American history, the text spans centuries, offering an overview of the enduring and evolving forms of racist ideology in America.Kendi's book incorporates conversations in science, literature, visual and musical arts, politics, and media. A few of these conversations reach across the work to connect movements: discussions between segregationists, assimilationists, and antiracists; vacillations between polygenesis and monogenesis approaches to understanding race; and tropes of black masculinity and femininity all carry through myriad political movements and developments.A deep awareness of political events, court cases, and Congressional debates shapes Kendi's text. Rather than claiming racial progress or racial regress at any point in time, Kendi's approach works to address the multiple motions of different groups throughout history. For example, Kendi works to nuance the interrelation of racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism across American history in order to withhold explicit praise of one ideal figure...

What the Eyes Don't See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City (2018) is pediatrician, scientist, and public health advocate Mona Hanna-Attisha's (Dr. Mona) debut book that provides an in-depth look at the government's poisoning of Flint residents and subsequent coverup. This story, according to Dr. Mona, is also about much deeper crises that the broader American society is currently facing: a breakdown in local democracy; misguided austerity policies; environmental injustices that disproportionately affect low-income and minority communities; and indifference to the plight of other human beings. At the center of this story is Dr. Mona herself-an Iraqi-American whose family's history of resistance against Saddam Hussein and other corrupt government officials inspired her pursuit of justice for Flint kids.Dr. Mona uses a combination of personal stories and cited research to draw the reader into the Flint water crisis story. The story begins with Dr. Mona telling a patient that it is safe to use Flint water for mixing baby formula. To her horror, her friend Elin tells her at a barbeque that the water is not safe for consumption according to a former EPA colleague. This colleague, Miguel Del Toral, leaked a memo that provides evidence the city was not using corrosion control when it switched the city's water source from Detroit water systems to the Flint river, which resulted in lead leaching into the water. These realizations sent Dr. Mona on the path to exposing the Flint water crisis. The spirit of her grandfather who taught her to always stand up for injustices buoys her.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is a non-fiction book that tells the story of Lacks and her HeLa cells, or the immortal cell line that doctors retrieved from her cervical cancer cells. Crown Publishing Group published the book in 2010, and it won a National Academies Communication Award the following year. This guide refers to the Crown 2010 first edition.Henrietta Lacks was a black American woman who died of cancer in 1951 at age 31. Before she died, doctors took a sample from her tumor without her knowledge or consent and used the sample for medical research. The cells in Henrietta's tissue sample, known as HeLa cells (pronounced hee-lah), were the first human cells to survive in a culture, where they thrived and multiplied. Consequently, HeLa cells have since been used in scientific research all over the world and have played a fundamental role in numerous medical advances and developments, like the polio vaccine.

Published in 2010, The Warmth of Other Suns is a sweeping ethnography of the Great Migration-the mass exodus of African-Americans from the South to Northern and Western US cities dating from approximately 1914-1970. The book traces the history of racism in the Jim Crow South as well as the reasons, successes, and failures of those African-Americans who left the place of their birth in order to seek better economic and social opportunities elsewhere in the United States.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a nonfiction book published in 2010 by American author and legal scholar Michelle Alexander. The book argues that the War on Drugs and mass incarceration operate as tools of racialized social control and oppression, not unlike the system in place during the Jim Crow era in the American South. The winner of the NAACP Image Award for Nonfiction, The New Jim Crow continues to appear on countless racial justice reading lists and was named one of the most influential books of the past 20 years by the Chronicle of Higher Education. This study guide refers to the 10th anniversary edition published in 2020 by the New Press.

The Vanishing Half, published in June 2020, is the second novel by author Brit Bennett. It became a New York Times bestseller and was selected as a Good Morning America Book Club Pick. The novel explores the themes of female family bonds and the Black experience in America. Bennett covered similar material in her debut novel, The Mothers (2016), which also became a New York Times bestseller. HBO has purchased the film rights to The Vanishing Half with the intention of creating a limited TV series from the material. Page number citations in this guide refer to the Kindle edition.The novel is set in several locations during different time periods. The story begins in the small village of Mallard, Louisiana, in 1968 and then skips to New Orleans, New York, Southern California, and back to Mallard between 1978 and the early 1980s. Just as the time and location shift among numerous places and decades, the limited third-person narrative point of view shifts among multiple people. Since the novel is driven by the perceptions and recollections of its characters, the story does not move in a linear fashion.The plot concerns identical twins Desiree and Stella Vignes, who leave their small Louisiana village at the age of 16 to seek their fortune in New Orleans. Ten years later, their lives have diverged in radically different directions. Desiree has fled an abusive marriage to a Black man and brought her daughter back to Mallard, while Stella is passing for White, is married to a businessman, has a daughter with him, and lives in California...