Cross-Cultural Competence Guide: Home

The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.

Annual Reviews journals are highly respected sources of reviews on discriminatory policing of minorities, on bias in the criminal justice system, on inequalities in healthcare, and on other relevant issues. To draw wider attention to these resources, we have curated a collection of articles that focus on understanding discrimination and its impact, and what must be done to end it. These articles are freely available to download.

Expertly selected primary source documents including historical newspaper articles, pamphlets, diaries, correspondence and more from specific time periods in history marked by the opposition African Americans have faced on the road to freedom. This resource is made freely available by ProQuest.

A 2014 cover story from The Atlantic arguing in favor of reparations for slavery

An Atlantic article from May 2020 argues that the pandemic has exposed the bitter terms of our racial contract, which deems certain lives of greater value than others.

A JSTOR collection of articles on institutionalized racism, with paywalls dropped for access to the underlying scholarship

A collection of poetry from Literary Hub

Reference articles from Gale Ebooks relating to racial profiling

Selected essays Literary Hub has published over the last five years—historical, personal, political—that explore what it means to be Black in a country founded in white supremacy and racial injustice.

Action teaching is a high-impact style of instruction that contributes to peace, social justice, and sustainable living at the same time that it educates students. Lesson plans from elementary through graduate school.

Hand-picked videos and articles drawing from Khan Academy’s resources on Black history, politics, and culture.

Interdisciplinary survey of people of African descent that draws on the overlapping approaches of history, literature, anthropology, legal studies, media studies, performance, linguistics, and creative writing. CC BY-NC-SA from MIT Open Courseware

Open Educational Resources (OERs) for college courses focusing on equity and oppression from an intersectional feminist perspective

Tools for reflection and introspection from teacher & diversity trainer Jane Elliott, who developed the Brown Eyes/Blue Eyes exercise.

Syllabus for a two-credit course at Georgetown University designed to examine and first-generation college students' experiences and support them in developing skills and cultural capital necessary for navigating college.

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures attitudes and beliefs that people may be unwilling or unable to report. The IAT may be especially interesting if it shows that you have an implicit attitude that you did not know about. For example, you may believe that women and men should be equally associated with science, but your automatic associations could show that you (like many others) associate men with science more than you associate women with science.

Teaching for Change provides teachers and parents with the tools to create schools where students learn to read, write and change the world.

Teaching Tolerance provides free resources to educators—teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioners—who work with children from kindergarten through high school. Educators use our materials to supplement the curriculum, to inform their practices, and to create civil and inclusive school communities where children are respected, valued and welcome participants.

The Zinn Education Project promotes and supports the teaching of people’s history in middle and high school classrooms across the country. Based on the lens of history highlighted in Howard Zinn’s best-selling book A People’s History of the United States, the website offers free, downloadable lessons and articles organized by theme, time period, and reading level.

A peer-reviewed chronological survey of the LGBTQ fight for equal rights from the turn of the 20th century to the early 21st century

Antiracism Inc. traces the ways people along the political spectrum appropriate, incorporate, and neutralize antiracist discourses to perpetuate injustice. It also examines the ways organizers continue to struggle for racial justice in the context of such appropriations. Antiracism Inc. reveals how antiracist claims can be used to propagate racism, and what we can do about it.

From the silent era through the 1950s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture was the preeminent government filmmaking organization. In the United States, USDA films were shown in movie theaters, public and private schools at all educational levels, churches, libraries and even in open fields. For many Americans in the early 1900s, the USDA films were the first motion pictures they watched. The films chronicle over half a century of American farm life and agricultural work and, in so doing, also chronicle the social, cultural, and political changes in the United States at a crucial time in its development into a global superpower. Focusing specifically on four key films, Winn explicates the representation of African Americans in these films within the socio-political context of their times.

An anthology of fresh, compelling essays written by students at Lehman College in the Bronx. The writers are immigrants or the children of immigrants and/or POC. They grew up hearing gunshots and sirens at night, played fire escape basketball and still celebrate Thanksgiving by dancing. The stories reveal the writers' intense longing to belong in America and their passion to succeed in this country, while dealing with myriad challenges. They bear witness, in riveting, artful narratives that will be revelatory to Americans who fear and resent immigrants or people of color.

A comprehensive and up-to-date account of African Americans’ cultural and political history, economic development, artistic expressiveness, and religious and philosophical worldviews in a critical framework.

This book explains how the idea of race became so important in the USA, generating conceptual confusion that can now be clarified. Developing an international approach, it reviews references to “race,” “racism,” and “ethnicity” in sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and comparative politics and identifies promising lines of research that may make it possible to supersede misleading notions of race in the social sciences.

An advanced ELL resource focused on identity and equity