Anti-Racism Resources: Classroom Resources

This guide, a joint effort of the USC Libraries and the Anti-Racist Pedagogy Organizing Committee, provides resources for developing anti-racist pedagogical strategies and syllabi.

Compares programs based on underlying theories of change, training methods, service, and outcomes.

This site offers tools, research, tips, curricula and ideas for people who want to increase their own understanding and to help those working toward justice at every level – in systems, organizations, communities and the culture at large.

Includes links to readings, syllabi, and resources on a variety of topics and communities related to race and other subjects.

Before it was published in The Saturday Review, the talk was delivered on October 16, 1963, as “The Negro Child – His Self-Image.” As the annotation, I am providing a quote from lint Smith’s article in the New Yorker. “A teacher, Baldwin believed, should push students to understand that the world was molded by people who came before, and that it can be remolded into something new.”
(Annotation by Zofia Lesinska)

Part of a popular podcast series called On Being, this interview addresses the complex relationships among history, writing, and teaching. The Q&A is particularly interesting, as Ta Nahisi Coates acknowledges his inability to answer questions on topics with which he has not personally grappled, or struggled. In a question about how to maintain hope in the classroom setting, Coates draws on personal experience and claims that he wanted “enlightenment,” not hope, from his teachers. He wanted to be given the tools for understanding and critiquing racial inequality and violence.

This interview would be helpful to teachers who would like to discuss the importance of Antiracist Pedagogy. It could also be helpful in general education and writing courses that address the importance of double-checking authors’ expertise, supporting your arguments, and writing from one’s own experience and knowledge.
(Annotation by Lacey Schauwecker)

Clint recommends James Baldwin’s “A Talk to Teacher” as philosophical statement worth rereading every semester. This is the paragraph that summarizes Clint’s teaching philosophy:
After reading “A Talk to Teachers,” I altered my approach, placing less emphasis on the standardized tests and using literature to help my students examine their world. I realized that rigorous lessons were not mutually exclusive from culturally and politically relevant ones. Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” did not have to be sacrificed in order to make room for a discussion on community violence. Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” did not have to be abandoned in order to tackle immigration. “A Talk to Teachers” showed me that a teacher’s work should reject the false pretense of being apolitical, and, instead, confront the problems that shape our students’ lives.
(Annotation by Zofia Lesinska)

This interview includes Smith’s remarks connecting current political struggles in the world, white privilege, color blindness, environmental degradations, gender and James Baldwin’s teaching philosophy.
(Annotation by Zofia Lesinska)

DuVernay's searing documentary details the collapse of Reconstruction, the establishment of Jim Crow laws, and the current crisis of our carceral state.

"We're a team of journalists fascinated by the overlapping themes of race, ethnicity and culture, how they play out in our lives and communities, and how all of this is shifting."

CNN describes the project this way: "In "The Souls of Black Folk," W.E.B. Du Bois talks about the first time he realized his skin color made him different. We asked celebrities, CNN anchors and reporters, and others to tell us when they first realized that being black affected how people treated them."

"An audio series on how slavery has transformed America, connecting past and present through the oldest form of storytelling."

"Where did the notion of “whiteness” come from? What does it mean? What is whiteness for? Scene on Radio host and producer John Biewen took a deep dive into these questions, along with an array of leading scholars and regular guest Dr. Chenjerai Kumanyika, in this fourteen-part documentary series, released between February and August 2017."

"In an engaging and personal talk -- with cameo appearances from his grandmother and Rosa Parks -- human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson shares some hard truths about America's justice system, starting with a massive imbalance along racial lines: a third of the country's black male population has been incarcerated at some point in their lives. These issues, which are wrapped up in America's unexamined history, are rarely talked about with this level of candor, insight and persuasiveness."