Four Books to Help You Be a Better Ally
Four excellent books to help kickstart or move you further along in your journey of taking action as an ally.
Books are a terrific initial resource for folks to educate themselves when it comes to learning 101 level information about marginalized folks and potential allyship. These are a few especially helpful and accessible books that will help anyone kickstart their journey in learning more and doing better.
The key thing to remember is that these resources are just a starting point. Allyship isn't an identity, rather, allyship requires repeated action, over and over again – and taking action as an ally in one area doesn't absolve you of needing to practice allyship in another or to learn more about the intersection of these identities and experiences. Hopefully these books can help support you in practicing exactly that in your own life.
For more information on practicing allyship, check out my presentation Allyship Requires Action.
Read This to Get Smarter: About Race, Class, Gender, Disability, and More by Blair Imani
Blair Imani is incredibly talented at clearly and concisely conveying information and explaining concepts. Her Smarter In Seconds series well established this, and this book extends that further in a different format. She does an excellent job of providing information, history, and frameworks across several topic areas.
So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
Ijeoma Oluo is a phenomenal writer. I read this book when it first came out in 2018, and have revisited it since then because it's so excellent and accessible. When people ask for resources on learning more about racism, and anti-Blackness especially, this is the first book I recommend.
Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to be an Ally by Emily Ladau
Emily Ladau is extremely skilled at making information across the disability spectrum accessible in this book. Her book hits on key areas around disability to help readers build a basic understanding (or improve on what they think they already know), as well as provide tools to immediately improve allyship to disabled folks.
Trans Allyship Workbook: Building Skills to Support Trans People in Our Lives by Davey Shlasko
Davey Shlasko's talent as an educator shines through in this accessible and amazingly short book. There are a number of excellent books on gender and allyship out now, but this is one of the shortest and most comprehensive that I've come across, which is why I picked this to recommend.
- Buy the book at bookshop.org [here]