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Diversity and Inclusion Book Club

Diversity and Inclusion Book Club

The Office of Inclusion, Equity, and Diversity hosts a Diversity and Inclusion Book Club throughout the year to stimulate discussions on diversity, equality, and inclusion.  Participation is fluid to account for varying schedules and subject matter interests.  The book club is open to all students, staff, and faculty.

Prior to each discussion, our office holds a random drawing to give away 5 free copies of the upcoming selection; a link will be sent out by email to enter the drawing. You are encouraged to attend even if you do not have the opportunity to finish the book prior to the discussion.

BOOK SUMMARY  REGISTER  WINNERS ANNOUNCED  DISCUSSION DATE

Being Mortal book cover

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummings

American Dirt is a social issues thriller that tells a story about migration into the United States. Lydia lives in Acapulco. She has a son, Luca, the love of her life, and a wonderful husband who is a journalist. And while cracks are beginning to show in Acapulco because of the cartels, Lydia’s life is, by and large, fairly comfortable. But after her husband’s tell-all profile of the newest drug lord is published, none of their lives will ever be the same.

Forced to flee, Lydia and Luca find themselves joining the countless people trying to reach the United States. Lydia soon sees that everyone is running from something. But what exactly are they running to?

August 22nd, 2022 August 25, 2022

October 20, 2022 

Sitting pretty book cover, red background, white female in wheelchair featured

The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee

McGhee embarks on a deeply personal journey across the country from Maine to Mississippi to California, tallying what we lose when we buy into the zero-sum paradigm—the idea that progress for some of us must come at the expense of others. Along the way, she meets white people who confide in her about losing their homes, their dreams, and their shot at better jobs to the toxic mix of American racism and greed. This is the story of how public goods in this country—from parks and pools to functioning schools—have become private luxuries; of how unions collapsed, wages stagnated, and inequality increased; and of how this country, unique among the world’s advanced economies, has thwarted universal healthcare.

October 24, 2022 October 27, 2022 December 8, 2022
 

Caste book cover - black and white background

The Beauty in Breaking by Michele Harper

Michele Harper is a female, African American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. Brought up in Washington, D.C., in a complicated family, she went to Harvard, where she met her husband. They stayed together through medical school until two months before she was scheduled to join the staff of a hospital in central Philadelphia, when he told her he couldn’t move with her. Her marriage at an end, Harper began her new life in a new city, in a new job, as a newly single woman.

In the ensuing years, as Harper learned to become an effective ER physician, bringing insight and empathy to every patient encounter, she came to understand that each of us is broken—physically, emotionally, psychically. How we recognize those breaks, how we try to mend them, and where we go from there are all crucial parts of the healing process.

January 9, 2023 January 12, 2023 February 23, 2023

what we don't talk about when we talk about fat book cover white writing red background

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong

 

Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.

Binding these essays together is Hong’s theory of “minor feelings.” As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these “minor feelings” occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you’re told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they’re dissonant—and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her. 

With sly humor and a poet’s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche—and of a writer’s search to both uncover and speak the truth.

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March 6, 2023 March 9, 2023 April 20, 2023
Jan 12, 2023