Welcome! These titles have been recommended by Divinity Faculty as reading to supplement our community's journey toward healing and justice. To ground your thinking and reading, start with these passages from the Bible:
Additional resources are linked below to help us begin thinking about racism and racist policies in our own local context of Duke University and Durham, NC, and to continue thinking about racism in the context of Christian faith and history. For still more resources, see Duke University Library's larger research guide on Anti-racism and Black Liberation, or the Duke Law Library's Race, Oppression, and Social Change Resource Guide.
As a general note: Many of the books on this guide have limited library access and long wait-lists. If you would like to purchase any of these books instead of waiting for the library's copy to become available, please see this site for a list of independent, black-owned book stores from whom you might order online.
Healing Racial Trauma by 
Katie's Canon by 
Meant for Good by 
After Whiteness by 
Desegregating Private Higher Education in the South by 
Racism Without Racists : color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in America by 
Hope Draped in Black : race, melancholy, and the agony of progress by 
Out of the House of Bondage : the transformation of the plantation household by 
The Best of Enemies [book] by 
In 2019, Durham, North Carolina will celebrate the 150th anniversary of its founding. Much has changed in the 150 years since the city’s beginnings as a depot on the railroad between Raleigh and Hillsborough. Today, Durham is a midsize southern city on the rise. “Uneven Ground” presents major historical themes in the story of housing and land in Durham, underscoring the role of both race and class, from the time of colonial settlers through the 1960s.
Proud Shoes by 
Jane Crow : the life of Pauli Murray by 
Threatening Property : race, class, and campaigns to legislate Jim Crow neighborhoods by Katie's Canon by 
A Theology of Race and Place : liberation and reconciliation in the works of Jennings and Carter by 
Divided by Faith : evangelical religion and the problem of race in America by 
A Body Broken, a Body Betrayed : race, memory, and eucharist in white-dominant churches by
The word and its nominal equivalent, “anti-racist,” suggests something of a vanity project, where the goal is no longer to learn more about race, power, and capital, but to spring closer to the enlightened order of the antiracist. And yet, were one to actually read many of these books, one might reach the conclusion that there is no anti-racist stasis within reach of a lifetime.
-- Lauren Michele Jackson, What is an Anti-Racist Reading List for? (June 4, 2020)
The list below is based on Ibram X. Kendi's 2019 article for The Atlantic, "The Anti-Racist Reading List." All links for electronic books are to Duke Libraries copies; Duke community members will need to log in with their Duke NetID and password to view them. Some notes on the readings give instructions for how to access the text; others are taken from Dr. Kendi's article and attributed. For more on Dr. Kendi's work particularly, check out the June 3, 2020, Unlocking Us podcast episode for a conversation between Kendi and Brené Brown.
Preliminaries: Definitions and Feelings
Fatal Invention by 
How to be an Antiracist by 
White Fragility by 
Locking up Our Own by Memoirs
Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Essays
The Fire Next Time by 
Sister Outsider by 
Between the World and Me by Monographs
Reconstruction by 
The Color of Law by 
Too Heavy a Load by 
Are Prisons Obsolete? by 
Medical Apartheid by 
Give Us the Ballot by 
