Resources 4 Justice

Educational Equity Consultants (EEC) provides below a list of resources for use with staff and students. There are many, many more resources and more are added continually online. Asking fellow educators and exploring online will lead to many more. They are there for the taking.

Some may be used in a workshop setting. Others would be great used in student or adult book clubs. (Book clubs are a relatively non-threatening way to keep people talking and thinking about issues related to diversity and inclusiveness.) Videos may be used to create a more emotional response to a concept or issue.

Preview everything prior to use. This is essential to ensuring the resource fits the audience and its purpose.

Just Talk! Podcast
Listen and subscribe to the Just Talk! Podcast where we discuss topics in social justice and how it relates to everything in education, hosted by Tony Neal of Educational Equity Consultants.
Educational Books Addressing Equity
  • Because of the Kids: Facing Racial and Cultural Differences in Schools – Jennifer E. Obidah and Karen Manheim Teel
  • Building Academic Vocabulary Teacher’s Manual – Robert J. Marzano and Debra J. Pickering
  • Building Equity: Policies and Practices to Empower AH Learners – Dominique Smith, Nancy Frey, Ian Pumpian, Douglas Fisher
  • Courageous Conversations about Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools – Glenn, E. Singleton and Curtis Linton
  • Creating the Opportunity to Learn: Moving from Research to Practice to Close the Achievement Gap – A. Wade Boykin and Pedro Noguera
  • Debunking the Middle-Class Myth: Why Diverse Schools Are good for All Kids – Eileen Gale Kugler
  • Discipline with Dignity: How to Build Responsibility. Relationships, and Respect in Your Classroom – Richard L. Curwin, Allen N. Mendler, and Brian D. Mendler
  • Disrupting Poverty: Five Powerful Classroom Practices – Kathleen M. Budge and William H. Parrett
  • Do You Know Enough about Me to Teach Me? A Student’s Perspective – Stephen G. Peters
  • Empowering African-American Males to Succeed: A Ten-Step Approach for Parents and Teachers – Michael Wynn
  • Enough: The Phony Leaders. Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure that Are Undermining Black America – and What We Can Do About It – Juan Williams
  • Every Child. Every Day: A Digital Conversion Model for Student Achievement  – Mark A. Edwards
  • Failure Is NOT an Option: Six Principles That Guide Student Achievement in High-Performing Schools – Alan M. Blankstein
  • Fulfilling the Promise of the Differentiated Classroom: Strategies and Tools for Responsive Teaching – Carol Ann Tomlinson
  • Leading for Equity: The Pursuit of Excellence in Montgomery County Public Schools – Stacey Childress, Denis Doyle, David Thomas
  • Mindset – Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D.
  • Motivating Black Males to Achieve in School & In Life – Baruti 1C Kafele
  • Nothing’s Impossible: Leadership Lessons from Inside and Outside the Classroom – Lorraine Monroe
  • A People’s Curriculum for the Earth – Edited By Bill Bigelow, Tim Swinehart
  • Reading, Writing, and Rising Up – Linda Christensen
  • Reinforcing Racism: Color-Blind Curricula in Higher Education – Nolan Cabrera
  • Rethinking Elementary Education – Edited By Linda Christensen, Mark Hansen, Bob Peterson, Elizabeth Schlessman, Dyan Watson
  • Rethinking Sexism, Gender, and Sexuality – Edited By Annika Butler-Wall, Kim Cosier, Rachel Harper, Jeff Sapp, Jody Sokolower, Melissa Bollow Tempel
  • Talking Race in the Classroom – Jane Bolgatz
  • Teach with Your Heart: Lessons I Learned from the Freedom Writers – Erin Gruwell
  • Teaching for Black Lives – Edited By Dyan Watson, Jesse Hagopian, Wayne Au
  • The Biracial and Multiracial Student Experience: A Journey to Racial Literacy – Bonnie M. Davis
  • The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children – Gloria Ladson-Billings
  • The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way – Amanda Ripley
  • The Students Are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract – Theodore R. Sizer and Nancy Faust Sizer
  • Transforming School Culture: How to Overcome Staff Division – Anthony Muhammad
  • Understanding Struggle: The Long Road to an Equal Education in St. Louis – Judge Gerald W. Heaney and Dr. Susan Uchitelle
  • We Can’t Teach What We Don’t Know: White Teachers. Multiracial Schools – Gary R. Howard
  • What It’s Like to be Me. written and illustrated entirely – children with disabilities, edited – Helen Exley
  • Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? – Beverly Daniel Tatum, Ph.D.
  • Young Gifted and Black – Theresa Perry, Calude Steele, and ASA Hillard, HI
Children's Books Addressing Issues of Diversity
  • A Friendship for Today – Patricia C. McKissack
  • A Million Fish… More or Less – Patricia C. McKissack
  • A Wish for Wings that Work – Berkely Breathed
  • Amazing Grace – Mary Hoffman
  • Aunt Flossie’s Hats – Elizabeth Fitzgerald Howard
  • Aunt Martha and the Golden Coin – Anita Rodriquez
  • The Ballot Box Battle – Emily Arnold McCully
  • Boundless Grace – Mary Hoffinan (sequel to Amazing Grace)
  • The Boy and the Ghost – Robert San Souci
  • Charlie The Caterpillar – Dom De Luise
  • Crickwing – Janell Cannon
  • Dancing in the Wings – Debbie Allen
  • The Eagles Who Thought They were Chickens – Mychal Wynn
  • Everybody Bakes Bread – Norah Dooley
  • The Ghost-Eye Tree – Bill Martin Jr.
  • Goin’ Someplace Special – Patricia McKissack
  • Grandmother’s Garden – John Archambault
  • Hana’s Suitcase – Karen Levine
  • Happy Birthday Martin Luther King – Jean Marzollo
  • Hue Boy – Rita Phillips Mitchess
  • I like Being Me – Judy Lalli
  • Just the Two of Us – Will Smith
  • The Magic Moonberry Jump Ropes – Dakari Hru
  • Minty – A Story of Harriet Tubman – Alan Schroeder
  • Miss Rumphius – Barbara Cooney
  • Miss Spider’s Wedding – David Kirk
  • Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters – John Steptoe
  • My Great-Aunt Arizona – Gloria Houston
  • Nettie Jo’s Friends – Patricia C. McKissack
  • Oh, How I Wished I Could Read! – John Gile
  • The Other Side – Jacqueline Woodson
  • Papa Lucky’s Shadow – Niki Daly
  • Peace Begins with You – Katherine Scholes
  • The Rainbow Fish – Marcus Pfister
  • Red Dancing Shoes – Denise Lewis Patrick
  • The Red Racer – Audrey Wood
  • Ruby – Maggie Glen
  • Ruby to the Rescue – Maggie Glen
  • Salt in His Shoes – Deloris Jordan
  • Shades of Black – Sandra Pinkney
  • Someone Special Just Like You – Tricia Brown
  • Starring Mirette and Bellini – Emily Arnold McCully
  • Town Mouse and the Country Mouse – Jan Brett
  • The Undefeated – Kwame Alexander
  • Wilma Unlimited – Kathleen Drull
  • Working Cotton – Sherley Anne Williams
Books for Older Readers and Adults
  • Almost Perfect Am I Blue
  • Amazing Grace – Kozol Ask Me No Questions
  • Becoming a Social Justice Leader: Using Heart, Head, and Hand to Dismantle Oppression – Phil Hunsberger, Billie Mayo, Tony Neal
  • Between the World and Me – Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • Black Boy
  • Boy Alone
  • Brown Girl Dreaming
  • Character Chess – Harlan B. Hodge
  • Emergent Strategy – adrienne maree brown
    Inspired by Octavia Butler’s explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist “spirituality” based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us.
  • Farewell to Manzanar – Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston
  • Ferguson Edition
  • Fire in the Ashes – Kozol
  • Forbidden City – William Bell
  • Forged in the Fiery Furnace: African American Spirituality – Diana L. Hayes
  • Getting Played
  • How Children Succeed – Paul Tough
  • Huckleberry Finn
  • In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care – Ilana Feldman, Miriam Ticktin (Editor)
    Scientists, activists, state officials, NGOs, and others increasingly claim to speak and act on behalf of “humanity.” The remarkable array of circumstances in which humanity is invoked testifies to the category’s universal purchase. Yet what exactly does it mean to govern, fight, and care in the name of humanity?The editors argue that ideas about humanity find concrete expression in the governing work that operationalizes those ideas to produce order, prosperity, and security. As a site of governance, humanity appears as both an object of care and a source of anxiety. Assertions that humanity is being threatened, whether by environmental catastrophe or political upheaval, provide a justification for the elaboration of new governing techniques. At the same time, humanity itself is identified as a threat (to nature, to nation, to global peace) which governance must contain. These apparently contradictory understandings of the relation of threat to the category of humanity coexist and remain in tension, helping to maintain the dynamic co-production of governance and humanity.
  • Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection – Sherman Jackson

    Sherman Jackson offers a trenchant examination of the career of Islam among the blacks of America. Jackson notes that no one has offered a convincing explanation of why Islam spread among Blackamericans (a coinage he explains and defends) but not among white Americans or Hispanics. The assumption has been that there is an African connection. In fact, Jackson shows, none of the distinctive features of African Islam appear in the proto-Islamic, black nationalist movements of the early 20th century. Instead, he argues, Islam owes its momentum to the distinctively American phenomenon of “Black Religion,” a God-centered holy protest against anti-black racism.

    Jackson argues that Muslim tradition itself contains the resources to reconcile blackness, American-ness, and adherence to Islam. It is essential, he contends, to preserve within Islam the legitimate aspects of Black Religion, in order to avoid what Stephen Carter calls the domestication of religion, whereby religion is rendered incapable of resisting the state and the dominant culture. At the same time, Jackson says, it is essential for Blackamerican Muslims to reject an exclusive focus on the public square and the secular goal of subverting white supremacy (and Arab/immigrant supremacy) and to develop a tradition of personal piety and spirituality attuned to distinctive Blackamerican needs and idiosyncrasies.

  • Just Mercy – Bryan Stevenson
  • The Mis-Education of the Negro – Carter Godwin Woodson
  • Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility – Hagar Kotef
    We live within political systems that increasingly seek to control movement, organized around both the desire and ability to determine who is permitted to enter what sorts of spaces, from gated communities to nation-states. In Movement and the Ordering of Freedom, Hagar Kotef examines the roles of mobility and immobility in the history of political thought and the structuring of political spaces. Ranging from the writings of Locke, Hobbes, and Mill to the sophisticated technologies of control that circumscribe the lives of Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank, this book shows how concepts of freedom, security, and violence take form and find justification via “regimes of movement.” Kotef traces contemporary structures of global (im)mobility and resistance to the schism in liberal political theory, which embodied the idea of “liberty” in movement while simultaneously regulating mobility according to a racial, classed, and gendered matrix of exclusions.
  • More Mirrors in the Classroom – Jane Fleming
  • My Grandmother’s Hands – Resmaa Manakem

    The body is where our instincts reside and where we fight, flee, or freeze, and it endures the trauma inflicted by the ills that plague society. In this groundbreaking work, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of body-centered psychology. He argues this destruction will continue until Americans learn to heal the generational anguish of white supremacy, which is deeply embedded in all our bodies. Our collective agony doesn’t just affect African Americans. White Americans suffer their own secondary trauma as well. So do blue Americans—our police.

    My Grandmother’s Hands is a call to action for all of us to recognize that racism is not about the head, but about the body, and introduces an alternative view of what we can do to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide.

  • Mystic Heart of Justice: Restoring Wholeness in a Broken World – Denise Breton, Stephen Lehman
    Denise Breton is one of the finest philosophers writing today, able to present difficult subjects in engaging ways to the public. Now, with her co-author (her former editor at Hazelden), she has produced a definitive critique of our present socialization system, with its inaction in the face of suffering and its instilling of fear and guilt society-wide. To this “counterfeit” justice, they pose the alternative of rediscovering our souls, that powerful inner uniqueness that is the basis for true community.
  • The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness – Michelle Alexander
    In this incisive critique, former litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander provocatively argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. Alexander shows that, by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness. The New Jim Crow challenges the civil rights community–and all of us–to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America.
  • No is Not Enough – Naomi Klein

    Donald Trump’s takeover of the White House is a dangerous escalation in a world of cascading crises. His reckless agenda—including a corporate coup in government, aggressive scapegoating and warmongering, and sweeping aside climate science to set off a fossil fuel frenzy—will generate waves of disasters and shocks to the economy, national security, and the environment.

    Acclaimed journalist, activist, and bestselling author Naomi Klein has spent two decades studying political shocks, climate change, and “brand bullies.” From this unique perspective, she argues that Trump is not an aberration but a logical extension of the worst, most dangerous trends of the past half-century—the very conditions that have unleashed a rising tide of white nationalism the world over. It is not enough, she tells us, to merely resist, to say “no.”

  • Odd Girl Out
  • Of Beetles & Angels
  • Poems Celebrating Phenomenal Woman – Maya Angelou
  • Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome – Joy DeGruy
  • Sarah’s Key
  • Secret Life of Bees
  • Seedfolks
  • Slavery by Another Name – Douglas A. Blackmon
  • Spare Parts
  • Teaching Tolerance – Sara Bullard
  • Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times – Jaspir Puar
    In this pathbreaking work, Jasbir K. Puar argues that configurations of sexuality, race, gender, nation, class, and ethnicity are realigning in relation to contemporary forces of securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism. She examines how liberal politics incorporate certain queer subjects into the fold of the nation-state, through developments including the legal recognition inherent in the overturning of anti-sodomy laws and the proliferation of more mainstream representation. These incorporations have shifted many queers from their construction as figures of death (via the AIDS epidemic) to subjects tied to ideas of life and productivity (gay marriage and reproductive kinship). Puar contends, however, that this tenuous inclusion of some queer subjects depends on the production of populations of Orientalized terrorist bodies. Heteronormative ideologies that the U.S. nation-state has long relied on are now accompanied by homonormative ideologies that replicate narrow racial, class, gender, and national ideals. These “homonationalisms” are deployed to distinguish upright “properly hetero,” and now “properly homo,” U.S. patriots from perversely sexualized and racialized terrorist look-a-likes—especially Sikhs, Muslims, and Arabs—who are cordoned off for detention and deportation. Puar combines transnational feminist and queer theory, Foucauldian biopolitics, Deleuzian philosophy, and technoscience criticism, and draws from an extraordinary range of sources, including governmental texts, legal decisions, films, television, ethnographic data, queer media, and activist organizing materials and manifestos.
  • The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian
  • The Dark-Thirty – Patricia McKissack
  • The First Part Last
  • The Freedom Writers Diary
  • The Hate U Give – Angle Thomas
  • The Help
  • The Kitchen House
  • The Laramie Project and the Laramie Project: Ten Years Later
  • The Price of Privilege
  • The Things They Carried
  • Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto – Eric Tang

    After surviving the Khmer Rouge genocide, followed by years of confinement to international refugee camps, as many as 10,000 Southeast Asian refugees arrived in the Bronx during the 1980s and ‘90s. Unsettled chronicles the unfinished odyssey of Bronx Cambodians, closely following one woman and her family for several years as they survive yet resist their literal insertion into concentrated Bronx poverty.

    Eric Tang tells the harrowing and inspiring stories of these refugees to make sense of how and why the displaced migrants have been resettled in the “hyperghetto.” He argues that refuge is never found, that rescue discourses mask a more profound urban reality characterized by racialized geographic enclosure, economic displacement and unrelenting poverty, and the criminalization of daily life.

    Unsettled views the hyperghetto as a site of extreme isolation, punishment, and confinement. The refugees remain captives in late-capitalist urban America. Tang ultimately asks: What does it mean for these Cambodians to resettle into this distinct time and space of slavery’s afterlife?

  • Waking Up White – Debbie Irving
  • We Can’t Teach What We Don’t Know – Gary R. Howard
  • White Fragility – Robin Diangelo
  • Witnessing Whiteness: The Need to Talk about Race and How to Do It – Shelly Tochluk
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