FICTION Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Protesters take to the streets in Khalil's name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family.

NONFICTION Coates’s book is a profound address to a nation that refuses to prosecute police officers who kill innocent black men and women; that pursues a policy of mass incarceration that disproportionately impacts black communities; and that routinely thinks nothing of it. It is also an intimate confession of the fears of a black American father, fears that whatever positive values he gives his son, however hard he encourages him to work in school and do the right thing, out on the streets his body, the color of his skin, will make him vulnerable to state-sanctioned attack. This is his response to the sense of powerlessness, and fear, that reality evokes in him.

DOCUMENTARY FILM This is a documentary film adapted from Ta-Nehisi Coates' book, it includes documentary footage from the actors' home life, archival footage, and animation to bring the written story to life.

ARTICLE NONFICTION This is an excerpt from the Coate’s Between the World and Me published in the The Atlantic.

PODCAST Code-switching is a term that describes how a speaker alternates between communication styles in different contexts. In this informational text, Eric Deggans discusses his experiences changing how he communicates based on the person he is interacting with and the culture he is navigating.

POEM Jamila Lyiscottt shares her varied dialects of English and how her use of those different dialects impact how others perceive her. She says language is modified all the time and when she uses her “three tongues” in varied contexts–it is no less articulate when she uses her black English vernacular in family conversations, than it is in formal academic settings. People have predisposed-notions of what educated English sounds like, but those ideas are archaic and dismissive of the ever evolving use of language, especially when we consider how common it is to code-switch.

TEDTALK Adichie describes how she grew up in Africa and would write stories of British people, along with their likes and habits because those were the only stories she was reading about growing up. After she learned about African writers telling African stories, her thinking and storytelling ways changed. Adichie’s argument is that a single story is dangerous to our thinking and understanding of the world.

TEDTALK Dena Simmons describes her upbringing in the Bronx–full of crime, gunshots, and, despite a sense of community, danger at every turn. She goes on to describe how her mother whisked her away to a boarding school in New England. Despite feeling safe and sound there from the violence that plagued her home neighborhood, she was up against discrimination and judgement from those at the school, especially teachers who corrected the way she spoke.

POEM Rudy Fransisco describes the frustration of being black and constantly at risk in his poem "Adrenaline Rush.” In the poem, Fransisco recounts the first time an officer pulled him over when he was just 18-years-old. He describes the sensation of fear, risk and danger of his experience with the officer.

POEM Clint Smith discusses the talk most parents have with their black sons when they start resembling black men. In his Ted Talk, How to raise a black son in America, he delivers a very persuasive and powerfully touching poem on the dynamics of race. Smith shares the life lessons instilled in him by his father when he was young about the unsettling and unfair reality of being a young black American Kid and the sacrifices he too will have to make. Smith also addresses the fear black parents have for their black children and the sacrifices they have to make that deny them of the innocence of childhood.

SHORT DOCUMENTARY In this short documentary, parents reveal their struggles with telling their black sons that they may be targets of racial profiling by the police. For generations, parents of black boys across the United States have rehearsed, dreaded and postponed “The Conversation.” But when their boys become teenagers, parents must choose whether or not to expose their sons to what it means to be a black man here. To keep him safe, they may have to tell the child they love that he risks being targeted by the police, simply because of the color of his skin.