cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/1882413

Hi! I am a member of a race education group in my school (11 to 18) and we are creating a reading list for the library. Our library isn’t very diverse right now (most books are written by white people about the West) and we need books on race education (privilege, discrimination, etc.) and on the history (precolonial, colonial and postcolonial, could be on neocolonialism too) and culture of underrepresented people.

Please keep in mind that these books should be acceptable by the school and approachable by students who would be unlikely to accept or read very progressive material, so themes that strongly (just strongly) contradict Western narratives should be avoided.

For example, a book on the colonisation of Palestine that exposes the oppressive nature of Zionism is mostly fine, but a book presenting Hamas as a liberation group would not be accepted (and actually illegal in my country).

You can reply with books or other reading lists that we could then review and add. I’ll finish this post with some examples of books on the reading list (keep in mind that it was for Black History Month, so all of the examples are on black people):

African Empires by Lyndon, Dan
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation In America by Carmichael, Stokely; Hamilton, Charles V
I Heard What You Said by Boakye, Jeffrey
The Assassination of Lumumba by Witte, Ludo de.
White privilege: the myth of a post-racial society by Bhopal, Kalwant

Thanks in advance!

  • livus@kbin.social
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    10 months ago

    @temp_acc hi! I’ll give you a list of non-fiction books that relate to the colonialism/history side of it:

    Telling The Truth About Aboriginal History by Bain Attwood

    King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild

    Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee by Dee Brown

    Histories of the Hanged by David Andersen

    Britain’s Gulag by Caroline Elkins

    Unthinking Eurocentrism by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam

    Struggle Without End by Ranginui Walker

    Exterminate All The Brutes by Sven Lindqvist

    Most of these are fairly straightforward to read and should be okay for the older students in your group. Unthinking Eurocentrism gets a bit theoretical in places, but I think it’s worth a try because it talks about how white westerners view everyone else from their own perspective. Hit me up if you want fiction recs.

    • temp_acc@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      Many thanks for all the recommendations! Added all of them to the reading list. We are also interested in fiction recommendations, too

      Unthinking Eurocentrism by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam

      I’m especially interested in this book as the history of the world in a postcolonial view. How suitable could this book be for younger readers (11 to 14) in your opinion?

      (Posted from an alt. account because of federation issues.)