Here are some great books for 2024 to add to your reading list that inspire you to turn us and them into WE in places where you live, work, serve, and socialize.
A More Just Future by Dolly Chug
The subtile of this book is a perfect summary of its message: Psychological Tools for Recocking with Our Past and Driving Social Change. The author, a professor of social psychology, tells her journey of racial awakening after the murder of George Floyd and masterfully combines psychological principles with recommendations on how to deal with current day dynamics of racial differences.: See the Problem; Dress for the Weather; Embrace the Paradox of American History; Connect the Dots Between the Past and the Present; Reject False Obscuring Facts; Take Responsibilty; and Build Grit. There are so many post-it notes in my copy of this book! I plan to go back to the pages again and again with the work we are doing to enhance gender solidarity to achieve racial equity. For those who have read Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, this book has a much, much better developed thesis with solid contemporary reasearch to back its recommendatons. In Getting To We language, it calls people in rather than calls people out. Worth the read.
The First Ladies by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray
I wrote about the very real friendship of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and civil rights advocate (dubbed First Lady of the Struggles), Mary McLeod Bethune, in my book on cross-racial friendships. This book, as historical fiction, uses historical facts heavily reasearched by the authors and extrapolates from these facts information to fill in how they would have related to each other in their friendship and how they would have managed the fight for racial equity in their lived experiences. Alternating chapters in the voice of Eleanor and Mary, the reader gets both points of view on what is was like to fight for racial equity from 1927-1945. This book is a great read for Getting To We’s Women’s Social Trust Movement and demonstrates the challenges and opportunies present in enhancing gender solidarity to achieve racial equity. Clearly, Eleanor and Mary could have participated in one of our Bridging and Bonding Women’s Social Trust Retreats and would have been featured in our documentary Trust in Black and White!
Why Does Everything Have To Be About Race? by Keith Boykin
This is a great title and the book is even better as Boykin clearly answers the book title’s question with each chapter of the book conveniently laid out to address subsequent questions about erasing Black history, centering White victimhood, denying Black oppression, myths of Black inferiority, and rebranding racism. In our current zeitgeist where ignorance about American history is prized as a political tool to manipulate the less informed, this book is a must read. It is a great go-to book to have new conversations about the old topic of race.
Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America by Michael Harriot
The title of this book also says it all. Journalist, Michael Harriot weaves in his life experiences and a lot of wit to present little known and consciously hidden facts in American history. There’s a lot to learn and unlearn with this book. However, reader beware— he does paint Whites with a sweeping brush to make his point of telling an un-whitewashed version; so, I would recommend reading this book along with Dolly Chug’s A More Just Future to map out how we create a society that works for everyone and just doesn’t flip the script.
Better Humans Better Performance by Peter Rea, James K. Stoller and Alan Kolp
I listened to this book on Audible and then had my husband pick me up a copy so that I could highlight sentences (old school I know, can’t figure out the highlighting book mark function with audio books!). I admit, I was a bit skeptical about this recommendation from a colleague as it can appear that using the classical virtues (what were those?) to amplify to work performance might be a way to undercut and dismiss DEIB principles. However, I was happily surprised that there is a little more than a nod to DEIB in the book—at least DEIB is treated in a way that invites questions and encourages dialogue about contemporary work competencies for achieving results. The authors demonstrate how fostering character through the seven classic virtures—trust, compassion, courage, justice, wisdom, temperance, hope—can lead to better performance in organizations, i.e. the title Better Humans, Better Performance. I really liked how the chapters are laid out with lots of research backed by examples and key takeaways clearly outlined in each chapter. This book is also clearly aligned with Getting To We’s goal of becoming better humans for other humans and makes a strong case that in the workplace it leads to furthering an organization’s mission and achieveing business objectives. A win/win!