On Equity & Inclusion

If you are entirely new to this work, then it may help to get a fresh perspective on history.  Some books to start with are Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and Isabella Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns.

If you identify as white, then I recommend starting with a book like Me & White Supremacy by Layla Saad or White Fragility by Robin DeAngelo.  These are both good albeit challenging books that look at how racism is woven into everyday life— even for those who identify as the most progressive of white liberals.  If you have already been engaging in this work, then you may want to look at A Race Is a Nice Thing to Have by Janet Helms.  As an academic model of white identity development, it’s sophisticated but also brief and readable.  Readers may find it useful for thinking about where they are in their own process of working through internalized racism.

If you identify as black, there is a wealth of literature from black writers about resisting racism and decolonizing one’s own mind, starting all the way back with Fredrick Douglas to the present.  There are fewer books about black experiences in or with therapy, which has often been a “white space” to the collective chagrin of the field (or so I believe).  One suggestion in this vein is Black Imagination, edited by Natasha Marin.  While not specifically about therapy, it offers a collection of black voices on how they approach their healing and survival.

(In the section on parenting, I mentioned books about parenting white and black kids.)

If you hope to understand more about how men are socialized into the patriarchy, then two books worth reading are Real Boys by William Pollack and Guyland, by Michel Kimmel.  The first talks about younger boys, the latter about adolescent boys.

Issues of equality and inclusion shape fundamental questions about identity.  If you’re starting to look at the power of identity, two places to start are Far From the Tree, by Andrew Solomon; and In the Name of Identity by Amin Maaloof.  Solomon’s book describes in rich detail how different strands of difference (e.g., autism, gender identity, deafness) often challenge families to be more accepting.  Maalouf’s book, written before 9/11, remains a clear-eyed take on identity and ethnocentrism as told by a Christian Arab who straddles the Western and Middle Eastern worlds.

Lastly, if you are looking for a place to ground your thinking about change and liberation, it’s hard to do better than the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and his classic, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.