This year, I’ve dedicated my reading, webinar trainings (so much is available on YouTube) and professional development activities to equity. With each new experience, I’m peeling back layers of white privilege and renewing my core value that we are all interconnected and long for justice and  a sense of  and belonging in the spirit of Dr. King’s vision of the Beloved Community. 

As a corrective to my biased education in U.S. history, I read Stamped From the Beginning: The History of Racist Thought In America–book, Ibram X. Kendi and A People’s History of the United States–book, Howard Zinn. Ibram X. Kendi narrates his own book if you prefer audio books like I do.

Seeking to learn more about the experience of my neighbors and how I participate in – and have benefited from – biased systems, I’ve read I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown and So You Want to Talk About Race. by Ijeoma Oluo.

As a white person, I’ve been learning more about whiteness and the privileges I enjoy.  I commend the podcast Scene on Radio:  Seeing White.  I also read and “worked” Me and My White Supremacy Workbook by Layla F. Saad with a group of white nonprofit executives striving toward anti-racism.  How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X Kendi strengthened my commitment to anti-racism.

In The Opposite of Hate: A Field Guide for Repairing Our Humanity, Sally Kohn offers a hopeful vision that, while hate is learned and even hard-wired into human nature, through intentional work and connection to one another, we can repair a broken humanity and ourselves at the same time.

Braiding Sweetgrass:  Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants Robin Wall Kimmerer beautifully writes about the interconnectedness of human being and nature.  She listens for different ways of knowing and understands the longing we share to belong to something greater than ourselves. 

Let me know what you are reading so I can further my equity understanding.