Black Light Speaker Series & Resources

The Black Light Speaker Series is a multi-part series deriving its name from the special purpose of a black light: to illuminate things that are hidden. The goal of the Black Light Speaker Series is to showcase Black alumni of Loyola University Chicago and how they’ve carried Loyola’s mission and principles into their communities, work, professional lives, and causes.

February 2025 Series: Black Light Speaker Series: A Conversation with Taryn Randle - Chicago Urban Farmer Changing Lives One Seed at a Time

August 2024 Series: Black Light Speaker Series: From Chicago to Hollywood

May 2024 Series: Black Light Speaker Series: Lyd on tha Go: Taking Control of Your Life through Self-Discovery

March 2023 Series: Black Light Speaker Series: Storytelling for Change

May 2022 Series: Black Light Speaker Series: (Re)Imagining Black Boyhood in Schools and Society

January 2022 Series: Black Light Speaker Series feat. Dr. M. Gerald Hood

October 2021 Series:  A Fireside Chat and Book Signing with Alumnus Jarrett Adams (JD '15)

August 2021 Series: White Supremacy Culture in the Workplace and How to Combat it—featuring Alyscia Raines (MEd '16)

June 2021 Series: Detoxing from the Poison of Systemic Racism--featuring Dr. Cory Mitchell, D.Bioethics '17, MA '18

April 2021 Series: From Challenges to Champions: The Trials of Black Entrepreneurship - featuring Genesis Emery, Damien McSwine, and Darrion Williams, Jr. 

February 2021 Series: UNMASKED The Dehumanization of Black People in Mental Health Therapy - featuring Dr. Bryon Waller, PhD

October 2020 Series: Dismantling Anti-Blackness in the Justice System - featuring Andre Grant (BA '87) and Chlece Neal (JD '13)

September 2020 Series: Eradicating Racism through Theater Arts - featuring Jackie Taylor (BA '73)

August 2020 Series: Diversity and Inclusion- Moving the Workplace to Equity - featuring Tanjia M. Coleman, Ph. d (MS '05)

Diversity Resources

Suggested Books

• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Coates’ 2015 book discusses what it is like to inhabit a Black body and find a way to live within it–and how we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden.
• Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad
• Saad takes readers on a 28-day journey of how to dismantle the privilege within themselves so that they can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on people of color, and in turn, help other white people do better, too.
• How to be Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
• Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it.
• A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
• Zinn explores the history of the American people from the point of view of those whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories.
• The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
• Alexander argues that we have not ended racial caste in America. Rather, we have simply redesigned it. By targeting Black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness.
• The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride
• McBride touches readers of all colors, sharing a vivid portrait of growing up, a haunting meditation on race and identity, and a lyrical valentine to a mother from her son.
• Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
• This collection of fifteen essays and speeches explores and illuminates concerns about ways of increasing empowerment among minority women writers and the absolute necessity to explicate the concept of difference—difference according to sex, race, and economic status.
• How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide by Crystal M. Fleming
• An essential guide to breaking through the half-truths and misconceptions that have corrupted the way race is represented in the classroom, pop culture, media, and politics, How to Be Less Stupid About Race represents a sobering and urgently needed call to action for everyone who wants to challenge white supremacy and intersectional oppression.
• Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love, and So Much More by Janet Mock
• With unflinching honesty and moving prose, Mock relays her experiences of growing up young, multiracial, poor, and trans in America. Mock offers readers accessible language while imparting vital insight about the unique challenges and vulnerabilities of a marginalized and misunderstood population.

Suggested Articles

• “Black Lives Matter and COVID-19 – An Activist Roundtable”
  • Antiracist activists and organizers from around the country describe what Black Lives Matter means in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
• “Maintaining Professionalism In The Age of Black Death Is …. A Lot” by Shenequa Golding
  • Golding describes her experience as a Black woman experiencing the events of today while still maintaining focus on her full-time job. The best snippet from the article to sum it up is: “I don’t know who decided that being professional was loosely defined as being divorced of total humanity, but whoever did they’ve aided, unintentionally maybe, in a unique form of suffocation.”
• “A Timeline of Events That Led to the 2020 'Fed Up'-rising” by Michael Harriot 
  • The Root has created a timeline of some of the events that led up to Black people across the country collectively saying “Enough” in 2020. The article attempts to contextualize the anger and frustration of protestors.
• “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true” by Nikole Hannah-Jones
  • Hannah-Jones’ personal account of growing up Black in America and how the country continually fails to accept Black people as Americans, no matter how much they believe in American ideals.
• “Why Are Black Students Punished So Often? Minnesota Confronts a National Quandary” by Erica L. Green, NYT
  • Green discusses how there's a link between how Black kids are perceived in schools, how Black women are perceived when pregnant, and how Black men are perceived by all of society.
• “‘We lived like we were Wall Street’” by DeNeen L. Brown
  • Before the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, Greenwood was one of the wealthiest Black communities in the country.

Suggested Podcasts

• How to Build an Antiracist World 
• In this vital conversation, Ibram X. Kendi defines the transformative concept of antiracism to help us more clearly recognize, take responsibility for, and reject prejudices in our public policies, workplaces, and personal beliefs.
• Ruth Wilson Gilmore Makes the Case for Abolition Part 1 and Part 2
• In this discussion, Gilmore offers a sweeping and detailed analysis of the relentless expansion and funding of police and prisons, and how locking people in cages has become central to the American project. Gilmore offers a comprehensive road map for understanding how we have arrived at the present political moment of brutality and rebellion, and she lays out the need for prison abolition and defunding police forces.
• 1619
• Hosted by Nikole Hannah-Jones, this New York Times audio series examines the long shadow of American slavery.
• This American Life: Harper High School (Part One, Part Two) 
• This American Life spent five months at Harper High School in Chicago, where last year alone 29 current and recent students were shot. The two-part series gives a real sense of what it means to live in the midst of gun violence and how teens and adults navigate a world of funerals and homecoming dances.
• Intersectionality Matters!
• A podcast from The African American Policy Forum hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American civil rights advocate and a leading scholar on critical race theory. Intersectionality Matters! explores a variety of topics through an intersectional lens and features on-the-ground interviews with some of the world’s most innovating activists, artists, and scholars. 
• Code Switch
• This NPR podcast, hosted by journalists of color, tackles the subject of race head on, examining how race impacts every part of society–from politics and pop culture to history, sports, and everything in between.