Racial Equity Resources – Watch

Short length (less than 10 minutes)

Medium length (between 10 and 30 minutes)

  • Segregated by Design – Zinn Education Project Film. Directed by Mark Lopez. Written by Mark Lopez and Richard Rothstein. 2019. 18 minutes. An animated documentary of how the federal, state and local governments unconstitutionally segregated every major metropolitan area in the U.S. through law and policy.
  • How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race, TEDx talk by Jay Smooth that suggests a new way to think about receiving feedback on our racial blind spots. (12 minutes) 
  • What Being Hispanic and Latinx Means in the United States, Fernanda Ponce shares what she’s learning about the misunderstanding and related mistreatment of the incredibly diverse ethnic category people in U.S. call Hispanic. (12 minutes) 
  • Indigenous People React to Indigenous Representation in Film And TV, Conversation with a diverse range of Indigenous people by FBE about  media depictions of Indigenous people, Columbus Day, and Indigenous identity. (15 minutes)  
  • How to deconstruct racism, one headline at a time, TED Talk by Baratunde Thurston that explores patterns revealing our racist framing, language, and behaviors. (10 minutes) 
  • The urgency of intersectionality, TED Talk by  KimberlĂ© Crenshaw that asks us to see the ways Black women have been invisibilized in the law and in media. (19 minutes) 
  • The danger of a single story, TED Talk by Chimamanda Adiche, offers insight to the phenomenon of using small bits of information to imagine who a person is. (18 minutes)
  • How to overcome our biases? Walk boldly toward them, TED Talk by Verna Myers, encourages work vigorously to counter balance bias by connecting with and learning about and from the groups we fear. (19 minutes)
  • Hip hop, grit, and academic success, TEDx Talk by Dr. Bettina Love, explains how students steeped in Hip Hop culture, often seen as deficient, actually bring the very characteristics deemed necessary for 21st century success. (15 minutes)
  • Race in America, by Phil Vischer (18 minutes)
  • Deconstructing White Privilege by Dr. Robin DiAngelo, focuses on the oppressive behavior that is born out of white privilege. Dr. DiAngelo describes the most obvious and explicit aspects of racism and white privilege, while going beyond the surface of racism. (20 minutes)
  • How to Deconstruct Racism, One Headline at a Time by Baratunde Thurston
    Baratunde Thurston explores the phenomenon of white Americans calling the police on black Americans who have committed the crimes of 
 eating, walking or generally “living while black.” (17 minutes)
  • Being Anti-Racist: A Primer by Landon Whitsitt, “Being racist” is not simply a personal behavior thing. It’s about the water we swim in, and if racism is going to be eradicated it’s a lesson people need to learn.” (10 minutes)
  • The Little Problem I Had Renting A House – James A. White, Sr., A powerful story about the lived experience of “everyday racism” — and how it echoes today in the way he’s had to teach his grandchildren to interact with police. (13 minutes)
  • Video about the Confession of Belhar that includes a reading of the Confession. (10 minutes)  The text with helpful contextual introductory words: Confession of Belhar. 
  • What Being Hispanic and Latinx Means in the United States (12 minutes)
  • Racism has a cost for everyone (15 minutes)
  • The Danger of a Single Story (20 minutes)
  • An American Genocide, Professor Benjamin Madley talked about his book, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873. (20 minutes)
  • “Locked in a Box” is an award winning short documentary that follows the stories of individuals held in the U.S. Immigration detention system and those who visit them. This short film – produced by Presbyterian Disaster Assistance – helps strip away the political rhetoric to see the human cost of detention. (24 minutes)
  • To Breathe Free follows the 5-year journey of a Syrian family fleeing the war in Homs to the refugee camps in Jordan and starting a new life in Washington, D.C. where they were embraced by a PCUSA congregation. (17 minutes)

Longer length (over 30 minutes)

  • A Class Divided, Jane Elliot’s Brown Eyes/Blue Eyes Racism Experiment (54 minutes)
  • When they see us, Four-part Netflix series by Ava DuVernay about the wrongful incarceration and ultimate exoneration of the “Central Park Five.” (four 1+ hour episodes)
  • 13th, Netflix documentary by Ava DuVernay about the connection between US Slavery and the present day mass incarceration system. (1 hour 40 minutes)
  • Slavery by Another name, 90 minutes PBS documentary challenges the idea that slavery ended with the emancipation proclamation. (90 minutes) 
  • Unnatural Causes, Seven part documentary by California Newsreel that explores  the impact of racism on health and US healthcare. (4 hours total, episodes have variable lengths)
  • Birth of a White Nation, Keynote speech by legal scholar Jacqueline Battalora, offers a blow-by-blow description of the moment the idea of, and word for, “white” people entered U.S. legal code. (36 minutes)
  • In the White Man’s Image PBS documentary about the Native American boarding school movement designed to “kill the Indian and save the man.” (56 minutes)
  • Race: The Power of an Illusion, Three-part, three-hour film by California Newsreel exploring the biology of skin color, the concept of assimilation, and the history of institutional racism. (three 1 hour episodes)
  • Just Mercy: Race and the Criminal Justice System with Bryan Stevenson,Bryan Stevenson, acclaimed public interest lawyer and founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative delivers a 2016 Lecture on race and the criminal justice system. A roundtable conversation featuring Jennifer Eberhardt, Gary Segura, Robert Weisberg,   Bryan Stevenson, and Katie Couric follows the keynote address. (1 hour, 45 minutes)
  • You’ve Got to Go Through It by the Rev. Aisha Brooks-Lytle. We cannot simply avoid or skirt around the challenges of racism and classism, we have to go through them. (42 minutes)
  • Impact of Environmental Injustice on Low Income and Communities of Color  Webinar from the Presbyterian Hunger Program (57 minutes)
  • Unspoken: America’s Native American Boarding Schools documentary from PBS (57 minutes)
  • John Lewis: Good Trouble documentary (96 minutes)
  • C.T. Vivian Oral History Interview from the Library of Congress (246 minutes)
  • A Conversation with Dr. William Lee on Racism in America and the Aftermath of George Floyd’s Death (70 minutes)
  • Salute documentary  2008 Australian sports documentary film (2 hours)  directed, produced and written by Matt Norman. It tells the role of Peter Norman, Norman’s uncle, in a defining moment of the American civil rights movement: the 1968 Olympics Black Power salute.
  • Four Little Girls Documentary (1 hour, 42 minutes) On Sunday, September 15, 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed by four members of a Ku Klux Klan-affiliated racist group. Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, four African-American girls between the ages of 11 and 14 who had been attending the church’s Sunday school, were killed in the blast. Director Spike Lee’s somber 1997 documentary tells the story through new interviews and archival footage.
  • Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise In his new four-hour series, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. embarks on a deeply personal journey through the last fifty years of African American history. Joined by leading scholars, celebrities, and a dynamic cast of people who shaped these years, Gates travels from the victories of the civil rights movement up to today, asking profound questions about the state.
  • A Conversation with Dr. William Lee on Racism in America and the Aftermath of George Floyd’s Death Second Presbyterian Church Roanoke, Join us as Senior Pastor Dr. George C. Anderson meets with Dr. William L. Lee, retired Senior Pastor of Loudon Avenue Christian Church of Roanoke, for a socially distanced discussion on racism in America and the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. Given both recent and longstanding history, how oppression, racism and police brutality impacts Black and Brown American communities is something we all must understand. As Christians who work for justice, we offer this opportunity to listen, learn and challenge our perspectives. (1 hour, 9 minutes)