Research Guides: NYU Reads: Where to Begin

Where to Begin

"The racial terrorism of lynching in many ways created the modern death penalty. America's embrace of speedy executions was, in part, an attempt to redirect the violent energies of lynching while assuring white southerners that black men would still pay the ultimate price." Just Mercy, Chapter 19

Just Mercy speaks of some of the effects of historical violence on our current society and systems. In order to unpack Stevenson work, readers must understand some of the historical roots and perpetuation of anti-Black racism and discrimination in the United States and the struggle for justice. These resources help to contextualize the historic power imbalances and help us understand how that history lends to current systems of crime and punishment.

Essays & Articles

The Legacy of Lynching, on Death Row
New Yorker piece by Jeffrey Toobin
It’s Time for Reparations
New York Times Magazine piece by Nikole Hannah-Jones
The 1619 Project
New York Times project by Nikole Hannah-Jones

eBooks

"We, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.” - James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Publication Date: 1995
Baldwin warns citizens to examine the actual state of America, the role of blacks, and race relations after a century of Emancipation.
Is Everyone Really Equal?: an Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education by Ozlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo
Publication Date: 2017
Based on the authors’ extensive experience in a range of settings in the United States and Canada, the book addresses the most common stumbling blocks to understanding social justice. This comprehensive resource includes features such as a chapter on intersectionality and classism; discussion of contemporary activism (Black Lives Matter, Occupy, and Idle No More); material on White Settler societies and colonialism; and pedagogical supports related to “common social patterns” and “vocabulary to practice using”.
How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
Publication Date: 2019
An approach to understanding and uprooting racism and inequality in our society--and in ourselves, 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.
People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn; Kathy Emery; Ellen Reeves
Publication Date: 2003
Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States has turned history on its head for an entire generation of readers, telling the nation's story from the viewpoints of ordinary people-the slaves, workers, immigrants, women, and Native Americans who made their own history but whose voices are typically omitted from the historical record.
From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime by Elizabeth Hinton
Publication Date: 2016
In the United States today, one in every thirty-one adults is under some form of penal control, including one in eleven African American men. How did the "land of the free" become the home of the world's largest prison system? Challenging the belief that America's prison problem originated with the Reagan administration's War on Drugs, Elizabeth Hinton traces the rise of mass incarceration to an ironic source: the social welfare programs of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society at the height of the civil rights era. By the 1980s, crime control and incarceration dominated national responses to poverty and inequality. The initiatives of that decade were less a sharp departure than the full realization of the punitive transformation of urban policy.

Videos

Slavery to Mass Incarceration
by the Equal Justice Initiative (YouTube video, 5 minutes 50 seconds) - The myth of racial difference created to sustain American slavery persists today. Slavery did not end in 1865, it evolved
The Danger of a Single Story
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (TedTalk video, 18 minutes 34 seconds) - Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice - and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

NYU Reads

Where to Begin

Essays & Articles

eBooks

Videos

Further Reading