7 Powerful Books on Diversity & Inclusion
/Need new stuff to read? Enjoy The Producer’s picks on 7 beautiful, powerful books regarding Diversity & Inclusion. Not only an interesting read but a powerful impact on how we perceive society and take action in our micro-cosmos. If you’ve read one of the books: let us know how you liked it & share with friends.
1. Building for Everyone:
Expand Your Market with Design Practices from Google’s Product Inclusion Team
By Annie Jean-Baptiste
This book gives a behind-the-scenes look into how tech Giant Google creates award-winning and inclusive products.
This book makes publicly available for the first time the same inclusive design process used at Google to create user-centric award-winning and profitable products. Author and Head of Product Inclusion Annie Jean-Baptiste outlines what those practices look like in industries beyond tech with fascinating case studies. Readers will learn the key strategies and step-by-step processes for inclusive product design that limits risk and increases profitability.
2. Allies and Advocates: Creating an Inclusive and Equitable Culture
By Amber Cabral
This book offers a framework for creating more inclusive work and home environments for those who are ready and willing to do the work. With topics like how to make space for allyship, share a historical overview of “how we got here” from a race relations perspective, and concrete ways to use one’s privilege (we all have it) to be more inclusive of others. If you’re looking for a place to start or want to know what you can actively do to be an ally or an advocate, this is it.
3. More Than Enough: Claiming Space for Who You Are (No Matter What They Say)
By Elaine Welteroth
Throughout her life, Elaine Welteroth has climbed the ranks of media and fashion, shattering ceilings along the way. In this riveting and timely memoir, the groundbreaking journalist unpacks lessons on race, identity, and success through her own journey, from navigating her way as the unstoppable child of an unlikely interracial marriage in small-town California to finding herself on the front lines of a modern movement for the next generation of change makers.
4. Lead From Outside: How to Build Your Future and Make Real Change
By Stacey Abrams
Stacey Abrams captured so many of our hearts and minds in the last few years as we’ve watched her bid for the Georgia governor’s seat and witnessed her galvanize Georgians during the 2020 presidential election. What we get from her book is more on her personal background along with her strategic long-term thinking mindset. For people who feel disempowered, this book will show you how to win with what you have.
Leadership is hard. Convincing others—and yourself—that you are capable of taking charge and achieving more requires insight and courage. Lead from the Outside is the handbook for outsiders, written with an eye toward the challenges that hinder women, people of color, the working class, members of the LGBTQ community, and millennials ready to make change. Stacey uses her hard-won insights to break down how ambition, fear, money, and failure function in leadership, and she includes practical exercises to help you realize your own ambition and hone your skills.
5. Glory: Magical Visions of Black Vision
By Kahran Bethencourt
From the dynamite husband and wife duo behind CreativeSoul Photography comes GLORY, a photography book that shatters the conventional standards of beauty for Black children.
With stunning images of natural hair and gorgeous, inventive visual storytelling, GLORY puts Black beauty front and center with more than 100 breathtaking photographs and a collection of powerful essays about the children. At its heart, it is a recognition and celebration of the versatility and innate beauty of black hair, and black beauty. The glorious coffee-table book pays homage to the story of our royal past, celebrates the glory of the here and now, and even dares to forecast the future.
6. I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness
By Austin Channing Brown
For anyone who still doesn’t understand the inherent advantages of white privilege, this book details the relentless nature of racism in this country.
Austin Channing Brown’s first encounter with a racialized America came at age seven, when she discovered her parents named her Austin to deceive future employers into thinking she was a white man. Growing up in majority-white schools and churches, Austin writes, “I had to learn what it means to love blackness,” a journey that led to a lifetime spent navigating America’s racial divide as a writer, speaker, and expert helping organizations practice genuine inclusion.
7. Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own
By Eddie Glaude Jr.
This powerful book gives the Civil Rights era writer’s work a new life. Sadly, many of the same political themes Baldwin covered in books like The Fire Next Time are just as timely today as they were fifty years ago. This book connects the two eras and offers some learnings on how not to repeat history.
The struggles of Black Lives Matter and the attempt to achieve a new America have been challenged by the presidency of Donald Trump, a president whose time in the White House represents the latest failure of America to face the lies it tells itself about race.
For James Baldwin, a similar attempt to force a confrontation with the truth of America's racism came in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, and was answered with the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. In the years from the publication of The Fire Next Time in 1963 to that of No Name in the Street in 1972, Baldwin - the great creative artist, often referred to as 'the poet of the revolution' - became a more overtly political writer, a change that came at great professional and personal cost. But from that journey, Baldwin emerged with a sense of renewed purpose about the necessity of pushing forward in the face of disillusionment and despair.