Select language, opens an overlay
  • Topic Guide
  • Staff-Created List

Documentaries on Racism, White Privilege, Identity, Race, and More.

These documentaries are good starting points if you're looking to learn more about topics such as systemic racism, white privilege, police brutality, and the #blacklivesmatter movement, or also if you're looking to gain a better understanding of the protests currently happening around the world. While the majority of these documentaries focus on American communities, they echo experiences of marginalized communities around the globe, including Canada.

Edmonton Public Library

25 items

  • An Oscar-nominated documentary narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO explores the continued peril America faces from institutionalized racism.
    Web resource
  • Being young is tough, especially if you're Black, Latino, Arab or Asian. In a city like Montreal, you can get targeted and treated as a criminal for no good reason. Zero Tolerance reveals how deep seated prejudice can be. On one side are the city's…
    Web resource
  • For years, Tim Wise's bestselling books and spellbinding lectures have challenged some of our most basic assumptions about race in America. White Like Me is the first film to bring the full range of his work to the screen -- to show how white…
    Web resource
  • This documentary outlines the ways in which race, identity, and hair are all related and offers a compassionate viewpoint on issues that affect African descendants.
    Streaming Video, 2019[United States] : Dreamscape Media, LLC, 2019. — Internet Access
  • Black Feminist is a feature length documentary film surrounding the double edged sword of racial and gender oppression that black women face in America. This documentary is told through interviews from scholars, lecturers, writers, business owners,…
    Web resource
  • Epic in scope, QUEST, is a vivid illumination of race and class in America, and a testament to love, healing and hope.
    Streaming Video, 2017Films We Like, 2017. — Internet Access
  • This documentary pays tribute to a group of Canadians who took racism to court. They are Canada's unsung heroes in the fight for Black civil rights. Focusing on the 1930s to the 1950s, this film documents the struggle of 6 people who refused to…
    Web resource
  • THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE, from award-winning filmmaker Ken Burns, tells the story of the five black and Latino teenagers from Harlem who were wrongly convicted of raping a white woman in New York City's Central Park in 1989. This Peabody Award winning…
    Web resource
  • This acclaimed documentary follows "WeCopwatch", an organization dedicated to filming the police. Its members captured the original videos of the deaths of Eric Garner in Staten Island and Freddie Gray in Baltimore that ignited the entire…
    Streaming Video, 2017Gunpowder & Sky, 2017. — Internet Access
  • This short film depicts Africville, a small black settlement that lay within the city limits of Halifax, Nova Scotia. In the 1960s, the families there were uprooted and their homes demolished in the name of urban renewal and integration. More than…
    Web resource
  • The Brown Bookshelf is honoured to host the KidLit4BlackLives Rally that took place on June 4, 2020. Led by Kwame Alexander, Jacqueline Woodson, and Jason Reynolds, the Rally featured inspiring words, music, and numerous calls to action in support…
    Web resource
  • 2018 Paul Robeson Award winner at the Newark Black Film Festival, this timely documentary knits the stories of mothers of black and Latin youth murdered by the NYPD into a powerful indictment of racial profiling and police brutality, and places them…
    Streaming Video, 2016Women Make Movies, 2016. — Internet Access
  • Another masterful documentary from Ken Burns, East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story gives voice to some of the most marginalized people in our society and raises critical questions about how we have created concentrated poverty and limited…
    Web resource
  • This documentary welcomes dialogue around racial inequality, policing, and the Criminal Justice System by focusing on Eric Garners case. We hope viewers will increase their understanding of issues plaguing Black and Brown Communities by witnessing a…
    Web resource
  • Director Mina Shum makes her foray into feature documentary by reopening the file on a watershed moment in Canadian race relations – the infamous Sir George Williams Riot. Over four decades after a group of Caribbean students accused their professor…
    Web resource
  • The Talk

    Race in America

    This film documents the increasingly common conversation taking place in homes across the country between parents of color and their children, especially sons, about how to behave if they are ever stopped by the police.
    Streaming Video, 2017PBS, 2017. — Internet Access
  • In July 1990, a dispute over a proposed golf course to be built on Kanien’kéhaka (Mohawk) lands in Oka, Quebec, set the stage for a historic confrontation that would grab international headlines and sear itself into the Canadian consciousness.
    Web resource
  • What really happened on August 9th, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri? That afternoon, Officer Darren Wilson killed 18-year-old Michael Brown. 'STRANGER FRUIT' is the unraveling of what took place, told through the eyes of Mike Brown's family.
    Streaming Video, 2018Gravitas, 2018. — Internet Access
  • Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise looks at the last five decades of African American history through the eyes of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., exploring the tremendous gains and persistent challenges of these years. Drawing on eyewitness accounts,…
    Web resource