BREAA is committed to creating racial equity and justice in our real estate community and beyond, in part through providing equity-fluent professional development and conversation.

Some may not feel that they know enough, or have the right vocabulary or insights, to participate in discussions around racial issues. Unfortunately, far too many of us simply do not know as much as we should about our shared history of structural racial inequity and discrimination, particularly in areas that impact our professional roles in real estate - from discriminatory and racist urban planning history and land use policies to lending practices.  Educating ourselves is one small but critical step that we must all take in ensuring that the built environment is a place that enables all people to not just survive but thrive.

We have compiled a short list of resources so we can all listen, read, and learn about the social, political, and financial dynamics that have contributed to unequal cities and discrimination within the built environment and beyond.  We hope you will commit to digesting these materials and sharing them with others. 

We welcome all feedback on these resources and will recommend additional items as we learn of them.

Start here:

• LA Times OpEd written by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Don't Understand the Protests? What You're Seeing is People Pushed to the Edge.

• 11 Terms You Should Know to Better Understand Structural Racism (The Aspen Institute) 

Read (Consider purchasing from Black-owned bookstores): 

• The Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein 

• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander  

• Evicted, by Mathew Desmond 

• The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson  

• A Terrible Thing To Waste: Environmental Racism And Its Assault On The American Mind, by Harriet Washington 

• The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap, by Mehrsa Baradaran

• From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, by Elizabeth Hinton

• The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, by Thomas Sugrue

• Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, by Jennifer Eberhardt 

• Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America, by Conor Dougherty 

• How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890–1960 (Columbia Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism)

Watch: ​

• The Pruitt-Igoe Myth 

• 13th

• LA 92

Listen:​

• The 1619 Project (New York Times Podcast) 

• Show About Race

• Code Switch (NPR)

• Floodlines 

• Scene on Radio (Seeing White Podcast)

• Throughline (NPR)

Get Involved:​

• Register in the Volunteer Database for Oakland Black Business Damage Relief Fund

Other Resources: 

Many organizations have assembled collections of information on ways to learn, understand, and help right now.  Here are some that have been widely circulated: 

• Talking About Race  (National Museum of African American History & Culture) 

• Anguish and Action  (Obama.org) 

• The Anti-Racist Reading List (The Atlantic, 38 Books for those open to changing themselves, and their world)

• Black Liberation Resources - Founded by Bay Area local Dominque Meija, the website aggregates resources for protesters, businesses, and the broader public in support of the effort to fight racial injustice everywhere, with many Bay Area focused resources.

• Berkeley Haas Race Inclusion Initiative Resource Library