Anti-Racism Required Reading
To help out friends and clients, and to help people not reach out to black friends for book recommendations at this moment, here are literary and classic books that have shaped my worldview over the past few years.
Even though I’m a person of color, these books remind me that I’m not systemically held back and held down in the same ways as these black writers and their communities have been for centuries.
It’s time to not only affirm that “we” (whoever “we” is) are not racists, but that we’re actively anti-racist.
I often find I’m more likely to read a book that’s recommended to me by a friend rather than some long list online. So, here you go.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley. The evolution of a leader who learned you have to make some noise to get what you want. “Hence I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.”
Black Boy by Richard Wright. Not many books survived my Marie Kondo phase in January 2019, but this one did. “Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness”
How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others In America by Kiese Laymon. This book messed me up for forever. In important ways. It taught me how to be braver, too. “I lie in a bathtub of cold water, still sweating and singing love songs to myself. I put the gun to my head and cock it…I know that easy remedies like eating your way out of sad, or fucking your way out of sad, or lying your way out of sad, or slanging your way out of sad, or robbing your way out of sad, or gambling your way out of sad, or shooting your way out of sad, are just slower, more acceptable ways for desperate folks, and especially paroled black boys in our country, to kill ourselves and others close to us in America.”
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Heartbreak on heartbreak. I don’t think you need me to say much about this one. “Then you must tell 'em dat love ain't somethin' lak uh grindstone dat's de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore.”
Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward. Make no mistake: this is about black men who have died as a direct or indirect result of the injustices in how society functions in the American South. “After I left New York, I found the adage about time healing all wounds to be false: grief doesn't fade. Grief scabs over like scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief. We are never free from the feeling that we have failed. We are never free from self-loathing. We are never free from the feeling that something is wrong with us, not with the world that made this mess.”
My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid. A winding, time-shifting, lyrical elegy for Kincaid’s brother, who died of AIDS. “It's not as if the whole thing has not happened before, it's not as if people have not been dying all along and each person left behind is the first person ever left behind in the world. What to make of it? Why can’t everybody just get used to it?”
Roots by Alex Haley. Includes some of the most beautiful writing I’ve read, period. Consider it an honor to read this book. “Is this how you repay my goodness--with badness?” cried the boy. “Of course,” said the crocodile out of the corner of his mouth. “That is the way of the world.”
Heavy by Kiese Laymon. Reveals the self-destructive inner world that can exist across the boundaries of time, space, and race.“It ain’t about making white folk feel what you feel,” she said. “It’s about not feeling what they want you to feel. Do you hear me? You better know from whence you came and forget about those folk.”
We Cast A Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin. A tragicomic novel about a father who’s obsessed with his son’s growing black birthmark. “I was astonished. My son was brilliant and wily, of course, but only a child. I never imagined him using his intelligence against me, even if only for a second. It was an inversion of our relationship. It was I who was supposed to clobber him at chess or embarrass him with feats of manly strength. It was my job to show him how cruel and uncaring the world could be, so that he would toughen up. Not vice versa.”
I’d love to hear from you. What books have you enjoyed or been jolted by that can I add to my own reading list? Suggestions we’ve received so far:
How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
I’m Still Here by Austin Channing Brown
Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
The Greatest You by Trent Shelton
Everything by Toni Morrison. Some options: The Source of Self-Regard, Beloved, Tar Baby
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Native Son by Richard Wright
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
