Welcome Back! The law library is developing a collection of materials we are calling the Antiracist Collection. The items in this collection include cross-disciplinary resources in addition to books that focus on law. We have pulled all of these items together in one location for easy browsing on the first floor of the library near the soft seating. These books can be checked out for a four week period.
Here are a few items from the collection which can be placed on hold using the corresponding link:
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
Call Number: KF373.S743A3 2015
https://catalog.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/17277273
Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn’t commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship—and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever.
Just Mercy is at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer’s coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice.
Blue Bias: An Ex-Cop Turned Philosopher Examines the Learning and Resolve Necessary to
End Hidden Prejudice in Policing
Call Number: HV7936.P75H39 2020
https://catalog.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/33205638
Keys to improving law enforcement: Applying neuroscience to policing–reducing the excessive use of force–breaking the code of hidden bias.
Blue Bias examines how to dramatically reduce the use of excessive force, prevent officer burnout, rethink fight or flight and improve law enforcement one officer at a time.
Unequal Profession: Race and Gender in Legal Academia
Call Number: KF272.D47 2019
https://catalog.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/25792909
This book is the first formal, empirical investigation into the law faculty experience using a distinctly intersectional lens, examining both the personal and professional lives of law faculty members.
Comparing the professional and personal experiences of women of color professors with white women, white men, and men of color faculty from assistant professor through dean emeritus, Unequal Profession explores how the race and gender of individual legal academics affects not only their individual and collective experience, but also legal education as a whole. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative empirical data, Meera E. Deo reveals how race and gender intersect to create profound implications for women of color law faculty members, presenting unique challenges as well as opportunities to improve educational and professional outcomes in legal education. Deo shares the powerful stories of law faculty who find themselves confronting intersectional discrimination and implicit bias in the form of silencing, mansplaining, and the presumption of incompetence, to name a few. Through hiring, teaching, colleague interaction, and tenure and promotion, Deo brings the experiences of diverse faculty to life and proposes a number of mechanisms to increase diversity within legal academia and to improve the experience of all faculty members.
Overcoming Everyday Racism
Call Number: BF575.P9C68 2019
https://catalog.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/37114427
This enlightening and reflective guide studies the psychological impact of racism and discrimination on BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) people and offers steps to improve wellbeing. It includes definitions of race, racism and other commonly used terms, such as microaggressions, and evaluates the effect of definitions used to describe BAME people.
Each chapter of the book focusses on one category of wellbeing – self-acceptance, personal growth, purpose in life, positive relations with others, environmental mastery, autonomy – and includes case examples, spaces for reflection and practical, creative exercises. For use as a tool within counselling and therapeutic settings as well as a self-help tool by individuals, each category provides a framework for thinking about how to manage everyday racism, live with more resilience, and thrive.
How to Be an Antiracist
Call Number: E184.A1K344 2019
https://catalog.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/25367728
Antiracism is a transformative concept that reorients and reenergizes the conversation about racism—and, even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. At its core, racism is a powerful system that creates false hierarchies of human value; its warped logic extends beyond race, from the way we regard people of different ethnicities or skin colors to the way we treat people of different sexes, gender identities, and body types. Racism intersects with class and culture and geography and even changes the way we see and value ourselves. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of antiracist ideas—from the most basic concepts to visionary possibilities—that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their poisonous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves.
Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science with his own personal story of awakening to antiracism. This is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond the awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a just and equitable society.
The Rule of Law in the United States: An Unfinished Project of Black Liberation
Call Number: KF4757.G659 2021
https://catalog.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/36172698
This book focuses on explicating the ideals of the American rule of law by asking: how do we interpret its history and the goals of its constitutional framers to see the rule of law ambitions its foundational institutions express?
It considers those constitutional institutions as inextricable from the problem of race in the United States and the tensions between the rule of law as a protector of property rights and the rule of law as a restrictor on arbitrary power and a guarantor of legal equality. In that context, it explores the distinctive role of Black liberation movements in developing the American rule of law.
Finally, it considers the extent to which the American rule of law is compromised at its frontiers, and the extent that those compromises undermine legal protections Americans enjoy in the interior. It asks how America reflects the legal contradictions of capitalism and empire outside its borders, and the impact of those contradictions on its external goals.
One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
Call Number: JK1924.A54 2018
https://catalog.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/22610217
From the award-winning, NYT bestselling author of White Rage, the startling–and timely–history of voter suppression in America, with a foreword by Senator Dick Durbin, now with a new afterword by the author.
In her New York Times bestseller White Rage, Carol Anderson laid bare an insidious history of policies that have systematically impeded black progress in America, from 1865 to our combustible present. With One Person, No Vote, she chronicles a related history: the rollbacks to African American participation in the vote since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Known as the Shelby ruling, this decision effectively allowed districts with a demonstrated history of racial discrimination to change voting requirements without approval from the Department of Justice.
Focusing on the aftermath of Shelby, Anderson follows the astonishing story of government-dictated racial discrimination unfolding before our very eyes as more and more states adopt voter suppression laws. In gripping, enlightening detail she explains how voter suppression works, from photo ID requirements to gerrymandering to poll closures. In a powerful new afterword, she examines the repercussions of the 2018 midterm elections. And with vivid characters, she explores the resistance: the organizing, activism, and court battles to restore the basic right to vote to all Americans.
Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality
Call Number: KF373.M68B76 2022
https://catalog.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/36489312
Born to an aspirational blue-collar family during the Great Depression, Constance Baker Motley was expected to find herself a good career as a hair dresser. Instead, she became the first black woman to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, the first of ten she would eventually argue. The only black woman member in the legal team at the NAACP’s Inc. Fund at the time, she defended Martin Luther King in Birmingham, helped to argue in Brown vs. The Board of Education, and played a critical role in vanquishing Jim Crow laws throughout the South. She was the first black woman elected to the state Senate in New York, the first woman elected Manhattan Borough President, and the first black woman appointed to the federal judiciary.
Civil Rights Queen captures the story of a remarkable American life, a figure who remade law and inspired the imaginations of African Americans across the country. Burnished with an extraordinary wealth of research, award-winning, esteemed Civil Rights and legal historian and dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Tomiko Brown-Nagin brings Motley to life in these pages. Brown-Nagin compels us to ponder some of our most timeless and urgent questions–how do the historically marginalized access the corridors of power? What is the price of the ticket? How does access to power shape individuals committed to social justice? In Civil Rights Queen, she dramatically fills out the picture of some of the most profound judicial and societal change made in twentieth-century America.
The Racial Healing Handbook: Practical Activities to Help You Challenge Privilege, Confront
Systemic Racism, and Engage in Collective Healing
Call Number: HT1561.S54 2019
https://catalog.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/28914365
Healing from racism is a journey that often involves reliving trauma and experiencing feelings of shame, guilt, and anxiety. This journey can be a bumpy ride, and before we begin healing, we need to gain an understanding of the role history plays in racial/ethnic myths and stereotypes. In so many ways, to heal from racism, you must re-educate yourself and unlearn the processes of racism. This book can help guide you.
The Racial Healing Handbook offers practical tools to help you navigate daily and past experiences of racism, challenge internalized negative messages and privileges, and handle feelings of stress and shame. You’ll also learn to develop a profound racial consciousness and conscientiousness, and heal from grief and trauma. Most importantly, you’ll discover the building blocks to creating a community of healing in a world still filled with racial microaggressions and discrimination.
This book is not just about ending racial harm—it is about racial liberation. This journey is one that we must take together. It promises the possibility of moving through this pain and grief to experience the hope, resilience, and freedom that helps you not only self-actualize, but also makes the world a better place.
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Call Number: HT725.U6W55 2020
https://catalog.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/31179695
In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.
Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their outcasting of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.