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Racial Justice (Law): Recommended Reading

Curated resources for working for racial justice.

Works focusing on structural racism and police brutality

  • Sugrue, Thomas J. (1996). The Origins of the Urban Crisis Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press
  • Jackson, Kenneth T. (1985), Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, New York: Oxford University Press
  • Massey, Douglas S. and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
  • Royster, Dierdre. Race and The Invisible Hand: How Networks Exclude Black Men from Blue Collar Jobs. University of California Press. 2003.
  • Cashin, Sheryll. The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream. Public Affairs. 2205.
  • Raj Chetty’s work, described here. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2020/06/09/872402262/what-a-1968-report-tells-us-about-the-persistence-of-racial-inequality
  • Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: an Intergenerational Perspectivehttps://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353
  • Taylor, Keeanga-Yamhatta. Race For Profit. How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Homeownership. UNC Press, 2019.
  • Oliver, Melvin L. & Thomas M. Shapiro. Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality. New York: Routledge, 2006.
  • Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.
  • Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, Temple Press, 2018.
  • Katznelson, Ira. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005
  • Ford, Richard Thompson. The Boundaries of Race: Political Geography in Legal Analysis, 107 Harvard Law Review 449 (1995).
  • Pastor, Manuel. Equity, Growth and Community. What the Nation Can Learn from America's Metro Areas. UC Press, 2015.
  • Shapiro, Thomas M. The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality. Oxford University Press, 2004.
  • Sampson, Robert. Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. University of Chicago Press. 2012.
  • Butler, Paul. Chokehold: Policing Black Men. New Press. 2018.
  • Vitale, Alex. The End of Policing. Verso. 2017.
  • Baradaran, Mehrsa. The Color of Money, Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap. HU Press. 2018.
  • Roithmayr, Daria. Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock In White Advantage. New York: N.Y.U. Press 2014.
  • Wilkerson, Isabel.  Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Random House, 2020.

Law Librarian

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Mohamed Nasralla
Contact:
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Subjects: Law