How Can I Help

How Can I Help? September 2010

Racial Justice and Diversity Resources

Diversity Resources are back as a regular “How Can I Help?” feature! Each month a different Catholic Volunteer Network staff member will share some of the resources on diversity that will be helpful to the network. This month Executive Director, Jim Lindsay shares his thoughts.

National Public Radio recently broadcast a series on American racial history. Two works we particularly recommend are: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129250977 Martha Sandweiss' book, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, examines why scientist and scholar, Clarence King, chose to live a double life — and how his experience reflects and represents how Americans, both past and present, have thought about race. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129281259

During tense racial times in America, James Baldwin’s book, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, challenged black and white readers alike.

Other works that have recently come to our intention include: http://www.insightcced.org/uploads/CRWG/LiftingAsWeClimb-WomenWealth-Report- InsightCenter-Spring2010.pdf

This study “Lifting as We Climb,” by The Insight Center for Community Economic Development, March 2010, demonstrates how African-American women own significantly less wealth than any other social demographic. Researchers state that government policies keep black women disadvantaged and unable to create and sustain wealth for themselves and their families.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander. Alexander traces the history of slavery and Jim Crow, pointing out the ways systems of racial oppression adapted and evolved in the United States. She then outlines how, in the 1970s, political rhetoric about crime became a racially coded means of consolidating power as civil rights laws took hold. She examines, piece by piece, the interlocking parts of the “new Jim Crow”: the comprehensive system, fueled by the war on drugs, that now locks millions of urban people of color into a permanent undercaste.

If you have any suggestions for resources we should feature in future issues of “How Can I Help?”, please email Katie Mulembe at [email protected].