S1 – Blog 05: Resources to use for Conversations on Race and Rural America

Enjoyed sharing our previous conversation on race and rural America with Dr. Alphonso Simpson from WIU.  You can listen here by visiting this link or through our “Forgottonia Project” podcast.  Wanted to take a moment to share a few resources Dr. Simpson recommended during on discussion.  These are various books, articles, and media he finds very helpful in facilitating healthy conversations about race and also uses in them in various courses he teaches. We recommend you get your hands on the following:

1. “Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority” by Tim Wise
2. “Everything but the Burden: What White People are Taking from Black Culture” by Greg Tate
3. “It’s the Little things: The Everyday Interactions that Get Under the Skin of Blacks and Whites” by Lena Williams
4. Film – “White Man’s Burden” starring John Travolta and Harry Belafonte set in an alternative America where blacks are members of the social elite and whites inhabit inner city “ghettos.” (1995)
5. Film – “Bamboozled” written and directed by Spike Lee starring Damon Wayans and Jada Pinkett Smith.  A frustrated African-American TV writer proposes a blackface minstrel show in protest, but to his chagrin it becomes a hit. (2000)
6. Film – “13th” directed by Ava DuVernay that takes an in-depth look at the prison system in the United States and how it reveals the nation’s history of racial inequality. (2016)
7. Harvard Implicit Bias Tests – Helps gauge attitudes, beliefs, impulses, etc. in how we think about race and other categories of people; designed to help uncover and think about our own hidden biases. 

*What other resources can you think of? Feel free to comment and share.