Welcome to New Profit’s #InclusiveImpact Resource Guide! As part of our #InclusiveImpact digital dialogue series—a new digital dialogue series from New Profit’s network of social entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and other changemakers committed to driving equity in America—we are crowd-sourcing a list to help guide those who are looking to gain a deeper understanding of the realities of American history and the systems that uphold the inequalities that are saturated throughout it.

Do you have a resource you would like us to include here? Click here to contribute to this ever-growing list.

Non-Fiction

• How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, a National Book Award-winning author, is an essential read for people wanting to go beyond awareness to action
• Just Mercy by public interest lawyer and Equal Justice Initiative Founder and Executive Director Bryan Stevenson on the importance of confronting injustice, which was recently turned into a feature film
• Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation by Rev. angel Kyodo Williams, Lama Rod Owens, and Jasmine Syedullah, PhD. “Igniting a long-overdue dialogue about how the legacy of racial injustice and white supremacy plays out in society at large and Buddhist communities in particular, this urgent call to action outlines a new dharma that takes into account the ways that racism and privilege prevent our collective awakening.”
• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates “offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of ‘race,’ a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?”
• Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by Adrienne Maree Brown 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.”
• The Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James Loewen, which offers an eye-opening critique of how we are taught history in America
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander
• These Truths: A History of the United States by historian Jill Lepore

Fiction

• There There by Tommy Orange is a “wondrous and shattering novel that follows twelve characters from Native communities. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American–grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism.”
• Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi is a young-adult fantasy novel that “follows heroine Zélie Adebola as she attempts to restore magic to the kingdom of Orïsha. The book examines oppression, racism, and slavery, and is inspired by West African mythology and the Yoruba culture and language.”
• Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler is about “fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina who fights to have her voice heard in her California community beset by climate change and economic crises.”

Poetry

• Counting Descent by Clint Smith, is a stark, challenging, and beautiful coming of age story as a young Black man in America
• When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz offers a powerful look into the experience of “a sister who is struggling with her brother’s drug addiction, within a family dynamic steeped in the mythology and cultural history of reservation life.”

Articles

• The 1619 Project, curated by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, on America’s history of systemic racial inequity from the New York Times (also accessible in podcast format)
• The Difference Between First-Degree Racism and Third-Degree Racism by John Rice, Founder and CEO of MLT and a New Profit Board Member
• UnboundEd Bias Toolkit: In order to disrupt inequity, we must interrogate our implicit biases. This begins with having conversations with ourselves and others. This toolkit contains notes, resources, and activities to help guide you in facilitating conversations about bias.

Documentaries

• 13th directed by Ava Duvernay, “explores the history of racial inequality in the United States, focusing on the fact that our nation’s prisons are disproportionately filled with African-Americans”
• Good Trouble is an “intimate account of legendary U.S. Representative John Lewis’ life, legacy, and more than 60 years of extraordinary activism.”
• I Am Not Your Negro, directed by Raoul Peck, “brings to life James Baldwin’s urgent ideas about race in America and uses Baldwin’s insights to illuminate our own contemporary reality.” The documentary received critical acclaim and won numerous awards.
• Ethnic Notions “is Marlon Riggs’ Emmy-winning documentary that takes viewers on a disturbing voyage through American history, tracing for the first time the deep-rooted stereotypes which have fueled anti-black prejudice. Through these images, we can begin to understand the evolution of racial consciousness in America.”
• Reel Injun explores the portrayal of the indigenous population through a century of Hollywood cinema, dissecting how the myth of “the Injun” has influenced the world’s understanding—and misunderstanding—of Native Americans.

Videos

• Author and activist Rachel Cargle’s public address on the realities of the revolutionary moment we are in today

Podcasts

• Intersectionality Matters! is a podcast hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American vicil rights advocate and leading scholar of critical race theory.
• Seeing White a fourteen-part documentary series hosted and produced by John Biewen, along with an array of leading scholars and regular guest Dr. Chenjerai Kumanyika. The series takes a deep look at these important questions: Where did the notion of “whiteness” come from? What does it mean? What is whiteness for?
• The Prison Industrial Complex is a collection of speeches from civil rights activist Angela Davis, which unpacks America’s unjust prison system and the ways in which it must be reformed.
• The Completion of Teaching and Learning is a podcast series by our grantee-partner UnboundEd. The purpose of this series is to provide exposure to historical and current professional realities in education that gracefully prompt bias examination and its role in UnboundEd’s work.

Interested in learning more about the #InclusiveImpact Digital Dialogue series? Click here to read more about the campaign and find ways to engage!