We are angry. We are devastated. We are skeptical. And yet, we are hopeful.
We in the Residential College stand in solidarity with all members of our community who have been victims of anti-black racism and violence, and we condemn police brutality in all forms. We also stand with members of our community who are joining in the nationwide protests taking place, and hope that you take precautions to stay safe.
We renew our commitment to understand and support one another and to dismantle racist structures, thinking, and speech.
Black history is U.S. history, Michigan history, and U of M history. Black history is RC history.
Black students, faculty, and staff have made critical contributions to the Residential College. Click here to explore one part of our history. Dr. Harvey Slaughter (RC ‘72), entered U-M as the only black male in his class, in the same year that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. got assassinated. Harvey speaks on the RC Podcast about his and the RC’s involvement with the Black Action Movement, and the student activism that led to the creation of the Abeng Minority Student Lounge-- the first Multicultural Lounge at U of M.
Here are some resources and readings we recommend:
- Radical Self Care for Black People
- How to Protest Safely in a Pandemic
- “Sooo Many White Guys” podcast hosted by Phoebe Robinson
- “Same Same Different” podcast hosted by Bryce Huffman
- “Birding While Black” by J. Drew Lanham
- "Destructive Power of Despair" by Charles Blow
- How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
- A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature by Jacqueline Goldsby
- The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
- So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
- Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah
- White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo
- Biased by Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt
- Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum
- “A Small Needful Fact” by Ross Gay
- Race on Campus: Debunking Myths with Data by Julie J Park
- Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry by Camille T. Dungy
- Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do by Claude Steele
Here are some resources by RC faculty, students, and alumni:
- Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement and Blackness in Opera by Naomi André
- Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Now?: Multicultural Conservatism in America, by Angela Dillard
- In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs by Stephen Ward and Pages From a Black Radical's Notebook: A James Boggs Reader, edited by Stephen Ward
- “While We Were Away” Podcast by the Prison Creative Arts Project
- For Black Girls Like Me by Mariama Lockington
- The Willies by Adam Falkner (poetry by RC Alum)
- Fractured: Race Relations in 'Post-Racial' American Life, by RC faculty emerita Helen Fox
- Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy and Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City by Heather Thompson
- The New York Kidnapping Club: Wall Street and Slavery before the Civil War and Blind no More: African American Resistance, Free Soil Politics, and the Coming of the Civil War by Jon Wells
- Humanize the Numbers project by Isaac Wingfield
If you have another resource to recommend, please submit it via our suggestion form.
