I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness, Austin Channing Brown The author's first encounter with a racialized America came at age seven, when her parents told her they named her Austin to deceive future employers into thinking she was a white man. She grew up in majority-white schools, organizations, and churches, and has spent her life navigating America's racial divide as a writer, a speaker, and an expert helping organizations practice genuine inclusion. While so many institutions claim to value diversity in their mission statements, many fall short of matching actions to words. Brown highlights how white middle-class evangelicalism has participated in the rise of racial hostility, and encourages the reader to confront apathy and recognize God's ongoing work in the world.
Apple: Skin to the Core, Eric Gansworth The term Apple is a slur in Native communities across the country. It's for someone supposedly red on the outside, white on the inside. Eric Gansworth is telling his story in Apple (Skin to the Core). The story of his family, of Onondaga among Tuscaroras, of Native folks everywhere. From the horrible legacy of the government boarding schools, to a boy watching his siblings leave and return and leave again, to a young man fighting to be an artist who balances multiple worlds. Eric shatters that slur and reclaims it in verse and prose and imagery that truly lives up to the word heartbreaking.
One Life, Megan Rapinoe In One Life, Rapinoe embarks on a thoughtful and unapologetic discussion of social justice and politics. Raised in a conservative small town in northern California, the youngest of six, Rapinoe was four years old when she kicked her first soccer ball. Her parents encouraged her love for the game, but also urged her to volunteer at homeless shelters and food banks. Her passion for community engagement never wavered through high school or college, all the way up to 2016, when she took a knee during the national anthem in solidarity with former NFL player Colin Kaepernick, to protest racial injustice and police brutality - the first high-profile white athlete to do so. The backlash was immediate, but it couldn't compare to the overwhelming support. Rapinoe became a force of social change, both on and off the field.
This Life is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone, Melissa Coleman Coleman’s searing chronicle tells the true story of her upbringing on communes and sustainable farms along the rugged Maine coastline in the 1970’s, embedded within a moving, personal quest for truth that her experiences produced.(from Powells.com)
Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? Jeanette Winterson The title of this memoir was a sentence her adopted mother delivered to Winterson when finally forced to acknowledge that her daughter was a lesbian. Adopted in order to fulfill her mother's desire to be a child missionary, Winterson writes with humor, pain, and honesty about life in a lower class British family that couldn't accept her This memoir charts the actual events behind Winterson's prize winning first novel, Oranges are not the Only Fruit.
Becoming, Michelle Obama (Student recommendation)
I am Malala, Christina Lamb and Malala Yousafzai (Recommended by Cassie)
Shout, Laurie Halse Anderson (Recommended by Cassie)
When the Game Was Ours, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson with Jackie MacMullan (Student recommendation)
Brother, I'm Dying, Edwidge Danticat When the author was only four years old, her parents emigrated from Haiti to New York in search of a better life, leaving their daughter in the care of her uncle Joseph. A peaceful pastor in Port-au-Prince, Joseph raised Edwidge with the love and devotion of a father, despite facing many hardships in politically turbulent Haiti. It wasn't until she was 12 years old that Edwidge was finally reunited with her parents and forced to confront the inevitably complex emotions.
When They Call You a Terrorist, Patrisse Khan-Cullors (Audio) "A poetic and powerful memoir about what it means to be a Black woman in America—and the co-founding of a movement that demands justice for all in the land of the free." (Overdrive)