Box of delight

But even if we can’t keep up, reading lists are still essential educational tools, especially for kids, young adults, and their parents and teachers. As we celebrate the centenary of the 19th Amendment (which fell on August 18th) and talk about its many shortcomings, it may be more important than ever to understand the U.S. history that brought us to the current moment.

What do you think of when you hear the word “black”? Do you think of a colour? A race? A culture? A movement? There are many different ways of interpreting “blackness”, prompting the question: is it a concept worth studying?

But racism isn't new; the current conflict has been on its way for a very long time. How long? Anti-racist scholar and activist Ibram X. Kendi, author of the National Book Award-Winning Stamped from the Beginning, would say from the country’s earliest settlement and enslavement of African people. “For nearly six centuries,” he writes, “antiracist ideas have been pitted against two kinds of racist ideas: segregationist and assimilationist,” Kendi wrote during the protests in Ferguson and other U.S. cities.

We are a group of individuals who teach, study and work in psychology and are trying to move the discipline away from its overwhelmingly White, Western bias (see how its biased here). We are directly influenced by the Why Is My Curriculum White movement.

We work at Leeds Beckett University and received a small grant (£,2,500) from our Centre for Learning and Teaching to highlight this Western*, White bias in our BSc and MSc Psychology courses in September 2016 (and again in September 2017). We know this bias is not exclusive to Leeds Beckett or even the UK, however. Therefore we have set up this website with the aim of signposting BME psychological and anti-racism work to begin to challenge this bias. We try to be mindful of the breadth and depth of racism in higher education and of the overwhelming need to do justice to BME psychological work.We know this website can only be one small step towards this.