Spotlight on: Our Community

Biased: uncovering the hidden prejudices that shape our lives by Eberhardt, Jennifer L

We might think that we treat all people equally, but we don’t. Every day, unconscious biases affect our visual perception, attention, memory, and behaviour in ways that are subtle and very difficult to recognise without in-depth scientific studies.

Unconscious biases can be small and insignificant, but they affect every sector of society, leading to enormous disparities, from the classroom to the courtroom to the boardroom. But unconscious bias is not a sin to be cured, but a universal human condition, and one that can be overcome.

Pioneering social psychologist Professor Jennifer Eberhardt explains how.

Natives: race and class in the ruins of empire by Akala

From the first time he was stopped and searched as a child, to the day he realised his mum was white, to his first encounters with racist teachers – race and class have shaped Akala’s life and outlook.

In this book he takes his own experiences and widens them out to look at the social, historical, and political factors that have left us where we are today. Covering everything from the police, education, and identity to politics, sexual objectification and the far right, ‘Natives’ will speak directly to British denial and squeamishness when it comes to confronting issues of race and class that are at the heart of the legacy of Britain’s racialized empire.

They Can’t Kill Us All: the story of Black Lives Matter by Lowery, Wesley

In over a year of on-the-ground reportage, ‘Washington Post’ writer Wesley Lowery travelled across the US to uncover life inside the most heavily policed, if otherwise neglected, corners of America today.

In an effort to grasp the scale of the response to Michael Brown’s death and understand the magnitude of the problem police violence represents, Lowery conducted interviews with the families of victims of police brutality, as well as with local activists working to stop it. Lowery investigates the effect of decades of racially biased policing in segregated neighbourhoods with failing schools, constant discrimination, crumbling infrastructure and too few jobs.

Offering a historically informed look at the standoff between the police and those they are sworn to protect, ‘They Can’t Kill Us All’ demonstrates that civil unrest is just one tool of resistance in the broader struggle for justice.

Becoming by Michelle Obama

In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era.

As First Lady of the United States of America – the first African-American to serve in that role – she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, while also establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the U.S. and around the world, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, and standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments.

Along the way, she showed us a few dance moves, crushed Carpool Karaoke, and raised two down-to-earth daughters under an unforgiving media glare. In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerising storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world.

My Name Is Why: a memoir by Sissay, Lemn

At the age of 17, after a childhood in a fostered family followed by six years in care homes, Norman Greenwood was given his birth certificate. He learned that his real name was not Norman. It was Lemn Sissay. He was British and Ethiopian. And he learned that his mother had been pleading for his safe return to her since his birth.

This is Lemn’s story; a story of neglect and determination, misfortune and hope, cruelty and triumph. Sissay reflects on a childhood in care, self-expression and Britishness, and in doing so explores the institutional care system, race, family and the meaning of home.

Written with all the lyricism and power you would expect from one of the nation’s best-loved poets, this moving, frank and timely memoir is the result of a life spent asking questions, and a celebration of the redemptive power of creativity

Homecoming: voices of the Windrush generation by Grant, Colin

When Colin Grant was growing up in Luton in the 1960s, he learned not to ask his Jamaican parents why they had emigrated to Britain. ‘We’re here because we’re here’, his father would say, ‘You have some place else to go?’.

But now, seventy years after the arrival of ships such as the Windrush, this generation of pioneers are ready to tell their stories.

‘Homecoming’ draws on over a hundred first-hand interviews, archival recordings and memoirs by the women and men who came to Britain from the West Indies between the late 1940s and the early 1960s.