To confront racism, we must look within, among, and beyond.

The Race Matters team focuses on the personal “within” work as it relates to issues of racial justice, a top priority for Mayflower members.

Statement of Purpose

We will create spaces where we can understand the spiritual and personal costs of racial injustice. We will increase Mayflower’s engagement with multi-cultural/multi-racial experiences in preparation for becoming a more diverse church community and a more effective ally in our racial justice work.

Overview

The Race Matters Team invites you, no matter where you are on this journey, to join us as we all seek to understand ourselves as racial beings and the ways in which we contribute to institutionalized racism and oppression of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC).

These issues ask each of us first to turn our gaze inward and face the biases and prejudices that we have absorbed from our environments. We didn’t create systemic racism or white supremacy, but as many scholars and theologians have noted, it surrounds us like the very air we breathe. This means we must seek to understand how we are positioned within and benefit from these systems before we can attempt to change them.

Below are resources that will help us learn from and listen to the experiences of people who have directly experienced the negative consequences of systemic racism. This is the work that we white people need to do. It is hard work, and it is work that is best engaged in with the help of other white people. Here are a few questions that may help guide our individual and collective journeys:

• How am I experiencing a racial awakening?
• How have people of color worked towards justice?
• How can we redeem and transform our racial endemic?
• How can we relieve the traumas of our souls?
• How can we overcome our deeply broken relationships?
• How can we call up our empathy to effectively communicate on these highly sensitive racial issues

Resources

Introductory Books

• A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota (Sun Yung Shin)
• Dealing with Differences (Chuck Grose)
• A Choice of Weapons (Gordon Parks)
• My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (Resmaa Menakem)
• White Fragility (Robin DiAngelo)

Contemporary Books

• Becoming (Michelle Obama)
• Between the World and Me (Ta Nehisi Coates)
• Dreams from My Father (Barack Obama)
• How to Be an Anti-Racist (Ibram X. Kendi)
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou)
• Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences (Kim Park Nelson)
• Just Mercy (Bryan Stevenson)
• Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption (Jane Jeong Trenka)
• The Cross and the Lynching Tree (James H. Cone)
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (M. Alexander)
• The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (Danny Glover, Grace Lee Boggs, and Scott Kurashige)
• The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child (Anne Fadiman)
• The Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Cherrie Moraga)
• The White Racial Frame (Joe Feagin)
• White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (Robin DiAngelo)
• White Kids: Growing Up in a Racially Divided America (M. Hagerman)
• White Men Challenging Racism (Cooper Thompson)
• Working Towards Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (David Roediger)
• Beloved (Toni Morrison)
• killing rage (bell hooks)
• Begin Again (Eddie Gaude)

Timeless Books

• Stride toward Freedom (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.)
• Autobiography of Malcolm X (Alex Haley)
• Black Feminist Thought (Patricia H. Collins)
• From Slavery to Freedom (John H. Franklin)
• Roots (Alex Haley)
• Sister Outsider (Audre Lorde)
• Song of Solomon (Toni Morrison)
• The Color Purple (Alice Walker)
• The Fire Next Time (James Baldwin)
• The Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison)
• The Souls of Black Folk (W.E.B. DuBois)
• Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora N. Hurston)

Children’s Books

• Amazing Grace (Mary Hoffman)
• Chocolate Me! (Taye Diggs)
• Hair Love (Matthew Cherry)
• It’s Okay to be Different (Todd Parr)
• Little Leaders: Bold Black Women in History (Vashti Harrison)
• She Persisted: 13 Women Who Changed The World (Chelsea Clinton)
• Sulwe (Coretta S. King)
• The Color of Us (Karen Katz)

Youth Books

• Color Me Dark: The Diary of Nellie Lee Love (Patricia McKissack)
• For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf (Ntozake Shange)
• Quiet Strength (Tony Dungy)
• Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (Mildred Taylor)
• The Bond (Sampson Davis)
• The Right King of Heroes (Kevin Horringan)
• Workbook for How to be an Antiracist (Ibram X. Kendi)

Listen/Watch

• Pod For The Cause (from The Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights)
• Pod Save the People (Crooked Media)
• Seeing White podcast
• This interview with journalist, civil rights advocate, lawyer Roger Wilkins, won a Pulitzer Price for JournalismFourth of July – Fredrick Douglas
• Freddie to Floyd
• Code Switch (NPR)
• Intersectionality Matters! hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw
• Momentum: A Race Forward Podcast
• Begin Again. Publisher Haymarket Books. Video of Author Eddie Glaude,Jr. with Cornel West 

Films and TV Series:

• PBS Minnesota Originals
• When They See Us – (Ava DuVernay)
• 13th (Ava DuVernay)
• American Son (Kenny Leon)
• Dear White People (Justin Simien)
• I Am Not Your Negro (James Baldwin doc)
• Just Mercy (Destin Daniel Cretton)
• The Hate U Give (George Tillman Jr.)

Follow

•  Antiracism Center: Twitter
• Audre Lorde Project: Twitter | Instagram | Facebook
• Black Women’s Blueprint: Twitter | Instagram | Facebook
• Color Of Change: Twitter | Instagram | Facebook
• Muslim Girl: Twitter | Instagram | Facebook
• NAACP: Twitter | Instagram | Facebook

Black-owned Businesses and Organizations

• List of local Black-owned businesses by MSP Mag
• List of local Black-owned music and arts organizations by the Local Current blog
• List of local Black-owned restaurants by City Pages

Share

If you have something you would like to recommend, please email Lisa Cargill-Romsaas.

Join
If you have passion for this ministry, please reach out to Kate Andrews van Horne.