Antiracist Pedagogy: Foundational Texts

Author bell hooks discusses how race, class, and gender labels impact marginalized writers who seek to be recognized as writers exploring the human condition.

While this certainly is an extensive and at times dense law article, Crenshaw's essay coined the term "intersectionality," and provides chilling numbers about the justice system's response to violence against women of color in the United States.
(Annotation by member of USC Anti-Racist Pedagogy Committee)

A touchstone of intersectional feminism, this article illustrates with first-person account issues regarding white feminists and the censoring of women of color(s)' oppression.
(Annotation by member of USC Anti Racist Pedagogy Committee)

In this article, DiAngelo introduces the concept of white fragility, “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves.” It’s an in-depth look at a phrase that is often used at a surface level in popular media. This article is probably best used to frame societal or political conversations, as appropriate to course materials, rather than to frame classroom guidelines about discussing race. DiAngelo also offers background on historical and current concepts of race, racism, and Whiteness, and emphasizes that “White racism is ultimately a white problem and the burden for interrupting it belongs to white people.” DiAngelo suggests these interventions are made possible by working through the idea of white fragility to build stamina for conversations about race. This article may also be of use to instructors to reflect on their own and students’ perspectives and reactions to discussions of race.
(Annotation by Elizabeth Galoozis, University of Southern California Libraries)

Fifty-four years ago, American writer and social critic James Baldwin delivered a speech to educators about how to speak with their students during difficult times. Many of the issues from that speech are still relevant today.

Critical race theory shifts the research lens away from a deficit view of Communities of Color and instead focuses on and learns from the array of cultural knowledge, skills, abilities and contacts possessed by socially marginalized groups. Various forms of capital nurtured through cultural wealth include aspirational, navigational, social, linguistic, familial and resistant capital. These forms of capital draw on the knowledges Students of Color bring with them from their homes and communities into the classroom.

In this 2019 New York Times article, Brent Staples examines "the story of how Italian immigrants went from racialized pariah status in the 19th century to white Americans in good standing in the 20th." This story, says Staples, "offers a window onto the alchemy through which race is constructed in the United States, and how racial hierarchies can sometimes change."

This article offers information on the important role of cuisine on consumers in the U.S. It presents the social position of food on consumers. It features the diverse social classes of cuisine in American culture and its consumption levels. Moreover, it features the three food ideologies in the country. (From abstract.)