RSVP for the first Teach Truth Book Club night! Edward Bruce Bynum reveals how our collective unconscious is African. Drawing on archaeology, DNA research, depth psychology, and the biological and spiritual roots of religion and science, he demonstrates how all modern human beings, regardless of ethnic or racial categorizations, share a common deeper identity, both psychically and genetically--a primordial African unconscious.

The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873

The first full account of state sanctioned genocide of Indigenous Californians that took place around the founding of the state. A harrowing and incisive look at the extent that quests for power and wealth can destroy. This book makes an irrefutable case for calling the acts of the late 19th century what they were - an American Genocide.

This is the must-read guide to Napa Valley. Forget the winery guides and grab this exploration of our water ways.

How has California’s landscape changed? What did now-familiar places look like during prior centuries? What can the past teach us about designing future landscapes? The Napa Valley Historical Ecology Atlas explores these questions by taking readers on a dazzling visual tour of Napa Valley from the early 1800s onward—a forgotten land of brilliant wildflower fields, lush wetlands, and grand oak savannas.

Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks--those that are honest about the past and those that are not--that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves.

"Citizen is an anatomy of American racism in the new millennium, a slender, musical book that arrives with the force of a thunderclap. . . . This work is careful, loving, restorative witness is itself an act of resistance, a proof of endurance." --Bookforum

A Native American language formerly spoken in hundreds of communities in the interior of California, Patwin (also known as Wintun Tʼewe) is now spoken by a small but growing number of language revitalizationists and their students. A Grammar of Patwin brings together two hundred years of word lists, notebooks, audio recordings, and manuscripts from archives across the United States and synthesizes this scattered collection into the first published description of the Patwin language. This book shines a light on the knowledge of past speakers and researchers with a clear and well-organized description supported by ample archival evidence.

Napa Valley is known for its wine and winemakers, but just beneath the fertile soil lies another, more complex version of its history. By Alexandria Brown - MUST READ!

How can we possibly face the future without listening to different perspectives on our beginnings? 1619 is one re-telling, not the only. Indigenous groups cultivated the soil of this land for more than 10,000 years. They prospered in trade, agriculture, arts long before Europeans settled. In that there are many stories of our origins. Ignoring any of these histories buries hatchets of hatred to bloom into choking vines of ignorance. So let’s reckon with this collection of works that is the 1619 project. Read it, share it, celebrate it. Let it grow into a project of your own.

Ranging from Ta-Nehisi Coates's case for reparations to Toni Morrison's revolutionary humanism to D'Angelo's simmering blend of R&B and racial justice, Jesse McCarthy's bracing essays investigate with virtuosic intensity the art, music, literature, and political stances that have defined the twenty-first century. Even as our world has suffered through successive upheavals, McCarthy contends, "something was happening in the world of culture: a surging and unprecedented visibility at every level of black art making." Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? reckons with this resurgence, arguing for the central role of art and intellectual culture in an age of widening inequality and moral crisis.

In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.

This story is necessary. This story is important. --Kirkus (starred review) Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed.

Co-editor of Racial Ecologies, Kim D. Hester Williams, is a founding member of Teach Truth. Most of the books on our first list on the website come from her 20 for 2020 books for racial justice. The voices and stories in Racial Ecologies offer examples of strength and leadership across societies by people of color and gives hope to the reader for a positively changed world.

From the Flint water crisis to the Dakota Access Pipeline controversy, environmental threats and degradation disproportionately affect communities of color, with often dire consequences for people’s lives and health. Racial Ecologies explores activist strategies and creative responses, such as those of Mexican migrant women, New Zealand Maori, and African American farmers in urban Detroit, demonstrating that people of color have always been and continue to be leaders in the fight for a more equitable and ecologically just world.