From my list on understanding why DEI in schools is under attack.
Why am I passionate about this?
The children and young people who call the U.S. home are increasingly diverse on almost every imaginable identifier. Over the past decade, educators have grown more committed to meeting the distinct needs and potential of every child. This list of books provides insights into why people are so virulently opposed to Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI).
As educational equity researchers and professors, we believe that understanding the recent attacks on DEI is important because it gives readers insights into the longer tradition of opposition to civil rights, equality, and justice for all people. If we can understand the past, we can be prepared to not repeat it.
Decoteau and Ann's book list on understanding why DEI in schools is under attack
Why Decoteau and Ann loves this book
As much as the current attacks on DEI may feel new or recent, the use of education and schooling to colonize and assimilate goes all the way back to the founding myths of this country and the aims of stealing land from Indigenous peoples and labor from enslaved Black communities.
This book highlights those histories across time as motivated not by personal malice or differences in cultural beliefs but by settler-colonial economic gain. Those moves were rationalized by the notion of European “civilization” as superior and enforced through violence to erase Native people, cultures, and sovereignty.
The final chapter reminds us that “the past is present” in the fights over who gets to tell the histories and what narratives get valorized or erased; the grab for land, resources, and economic power that underlies the current attacks; and in the ongoing resistance and creativity of Indigenous nations and other minoritized communities…
8 authors picked An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
New York Times Bestseller
Now part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul Peck
Recipient of the American Book Award
The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples
Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortizoffers a history…
