Racial Justice Resources
Learn More About Juneteenth
- “The Hidden History of Juneteenth” TalkingPointsMemo.com
- Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture
- “Juneteenth: Activists Across US Inherit a Historic Battle for Racial Justice”The Guardian
- “Massachusetts Recognizes Juneteenth as a State Holiday” NBCBoston.com
Understand the Legacy of Slavery
- Watch 13th, Ava DuVernay’s documentary that connects mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex to American structural racism and a loophole in the 13th Amendment.
- Read
- The 1619 Project from The New York Times
- “Slavery By the Numbers” by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in The Root
- “From Juneteenth to the Tulsa massacre: What isn’t taught in classrooms has a profound impact” NBCNews.com
Learn & Act to Support Reparations Locally and Nationally
- Join/ Contribute to Mystic Valley Area Branch of NAACP
- “The Case for Reparations” Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic
- “Confronting Slavery: Local NAACP highlights the push for reparations” NeighborhoodView.org
- “H.R. 40 is Not a Symbolic Act: It’s a Path to Restorative Justice” U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee ACLU.org
- Read From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century William A. Darity Jr. & A. Kirsten Mullen, University of North Carolina Press, 2020.
- Join/ Contribute to Campaign Zero
- Support the work of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, Northeastern University
There are many resources available where individuals can sign up for newsletters, programs, etc.
Some places to sign up for periodic sources inspiration, information, and action:
Center for Antiracist Research.
Research center based at BU, directed by Ibam X. Kendi, founded in 2020. Sign up for newsletter on website.
Sign up for notices of local actions and activities.
Sign up for workshops, videos
Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice.
Sponsors expert, often cutting edge panels. Sign up for their periodic newsletter.
Sponsors Antiracist Organizing in the Suburbs workshops, SURJ Boston (Showing up for Racial Justice), and White People Challenging Racism workshops. Sign up for announcements on the website.
Massachusetts Unitarian Universalist advocacy network. Often serves as a clearing house for racial and climate justice advocacy opportunities. Sponsors the Black Lives Matter working group. Sign up for notices by emailing Patty Shepherd uu-mass-action-certified-working-group-black-lives-matter+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
sponsors interesting faith based racial and cultural explorations. Sign up for announcements at their website.
Sign up for the newsletter at the website. Mystic Valley NAACP. Local chapter for Arlington, Medford, Malden.
sign up for notices of information and advocacy opportunities
The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute
part of The Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument in Birmingham, Alabama. Sign up for their periodic newsletter and preview exhibits on their website.
The US National Park Service American cultures initiative
develops travel and resources documenting US cultural history. Their website is not only aesthetically lovely, but contains an interesting bibliography.
The Smithsonian Museums in Washington DC
Contains the National Museum of African American History and Cultures,
the National Museum of African Art,
and the National Museum of the American Indian.
Each have events, exhibits and a mailing list.
The Museum of African American History in Boston and Nantucket
maintains a nice list of historic resources and places to visit.
sponsors interesting events. Sign up for the newsletter on the website.
Several important local efforts have a Facebook presence:
Arlington Fights Racism,
MaldenCORE,
Black Lives Matter, Cambridge.
AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) Resources:
In the wake of recent anti-Asian hate, we have provided the following resources in solidarity with Asian Americans, Asians, and Asian Pacific Islanders.
The Asian American Resource Workshop (AARW)
Mission Statement: “The Asian American Resource Workshop (AARW) is a political home for pan-Asian communities in Greater Boston. We are a member-led organization committed to building grassroots power through political education, creative expression, and issue-based and neighborhood organizing.”
Red Canary Song
Grassroots collective of Asian and migrant sex workers organized in 2017 after the death of Yang Song, a massage worker killed in a police raid in Flushing, NY.
Asian Americans Advancing Justice
Mission Statement: “Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta is the first and only nonprofit legal advocacy organization dedicated to protecting the civil rights of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (AANHPI) in Georgia and the Southeast.
Through our work, we envision a social movement in which communities of color are fully empowered, active in civic life, and working together to promote equity, fair treatment, and self determination for all.”
Learning and Acting
Red Canary Song Response to 8 Lives Lost in Atlanta.
“In the wake of the deaths of multiple Asian women massage workers in Georgia, we are sending radical love, care, and healing to all of our community members. We acknowledge the ongoing pain and grief from continued violent assaults on our Asian and Asian American, APIA community, which has been compounded by the alienation, isolation, and violence brought on by racist rhetoric and governmental neglect in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. We are concerned that many of those calling for action in this moment have and will continue to endorse violence towards Asian sex workers, massage workers, and survivors…”
Resources from Barnard Center for Research on Women
“We defend the dignity, safety, and freedom of Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander communities, women, queer, trans, and nonbinary folks, sex workers, service workers, street vendors, people unhoused, people in prisons, immigrants, the undocumented, refugees, and all who are targeted by this racist violence. With heartbreak, rage, and committed solidarity, we share these resources for all of us to take action, support mutual aid projects, train in self-defense and bystander intervention, and build our political education.”
Reading Suggestions:
“What this Wave of Anti-Asian Violence Reveals About America”
Anne Anlin Cheng, The New York Times, February 21, 2021
“Why This Wave of Anti-Asian Racism Feels Different”
Morgan Ome’s interview with Cathy Park Hong for The Atlantic, March 17, 2021
“The cruel plot twist in the Asian American story”
Charles Yu, Los Angeles Times, March 21, 2021
Reappropriate Blog
“One of the web’s oldest AAPI feminist and race activist blogs.”
Intersectionality
“The Atlanta Shootings Can’t Be Divorced from Racism and Misogyny”
Li Zhou, Vox, March 18, 2021
“The Urgency of Intersectionality”
2016 TEDTalk by Kimberlé Crenshaw, law professor, activist, and Co-Founder and Executive Director of the African American Policy Form, explaining how she first coined the term intersectionality in 1989.
African American Policy Forum Response to Murders in Atlanta
Intersectionality Matters with Kimberlé Crenshaw Podcast
Note: This section of the website is still evolving. Please watch this space as we identify more resources in the near future.
RJCC would love to hear from you with ideas, suggestions, and questions. Email us at: racialjustice@firstparish.info