Authors: Erin Baldwin and Michael Zarathus-Cook
There’s a tendency to intellectualize the significance of mass protests like the ones currently igniting all over North America, but there’s really nothing exceedingly complicated about the primary statement being made by these activists: black lives matter too. We also have a tendency to distance ourselves from the urgency of activism by burying our heads in the theoretical space that books provide. You can read every letter of every book on the list below, but if you fail to take the real-life opportunities to understand the plight of the black people around you as a matter of personal significance, then this incredible groundswell of activism risks devolving into a passing fad. A fad to be revved up again when another black life is taken by another police officer who operates on the implicit support of the cultural milieu.
If you’re white and reading this, you’re probably doing so out of good intentions in response to the pain being expressed around you. But your good intentions do not expunge your subconscious biases. Take for example the concept of the white gaze—it sounds like something only racists do, a low bar that you cleared years ago with the abundance of a liberal education. But how clearly do you really see the racialized minorities around you?
Do you see them as having every right, were it not for the accident of birth, to the same economic and social benefits that you reap on account of that same accident? Do you care as deeply about their opinion as you do the opinions of your friends that enjoy the benefits of being born white in a Western country? Despite the tremendous spectrum of human intelligence, we’re all pretty much on par when it comes to accurately sensing whether or not someone is seeing you as an equal. If you’re reading this and asking these questions sincerely, then I hope these books are going to be incredibly valuable in educating you towards answers that lie within.
If you find it hard to make the connection between black people feeling as if they’re not being seen for who they are, feeling that their lives—regardless of what they do with it—just don’t weigh the same as their white neighbours, then these books can help with making that connection. The subtle but daily ways we disregard black lives, from what we hear on the local news to when a black woman describes a potentially fatal symptom to her doctor, accumulates only to give the silent and affirmative nod to the brutal and incoherent racists among us. Some of those racists make their living on a promise to serve and protect the very lives they’re taking, and are funded—from murder to acquital—with our tax dollars. You will find in the books below some very complicated explanations of the raw material feeling that most black people feel walking through a middle-class neighbourhood; but again, your actions in response can begin as simply as recognizing the otherness through which you see the black people around you.
So my message to you is that throughout the conversations you’re having at this crucial moment—be it via books or, more importantly, with the people in your community—do not lose sight of the basic principles that these protesters are fighting for, that George Floyd was denied: respect, equality, fairness, justice, recognizing the beautiful humanity of every single person regardless of their race. These are purportedly Western liberal values. Let the words of a dying man, I can’t breathe, be an indictment of the betrayal of these values—that is what should make this a matter of personal significance to you. I hope that when you’re done reading, you’ll put down the book with a genuine belief that the most effective contribution you can make is not education for the sake of it, but how you perceive, treat, and defend the black lives around you.
— Michael Zarathus-Cook
As a white female, I have spent the past week reflecting on myself and my actions: how I benefit from white privilege, how often this goes unnoticed, what I have not done, what I can do. Social media is overflowing with posts declaring white allyship and calling for the end to black oppression, particularly in the form of violence and killings at the hands of police officers. Social media activism and discussions may be something, but it is the tip of the iceberg. There is so much deeper work to do.
Two years ago I read Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race and I found it to be an eye-opening experience. To understand that I am not only complacent but also complicit in a contemporary society saturated with systemic racism is not comfortable. It is challenging, as a white individual, to take a hard look at the world and your place in it because it means looking at yourself and dismantling the identity that many of us supposedly forward-thinking white people grip onto: we are good people because we support social justice causes and vote for leftist policies; we are not blatantly white supremacists; we have a multicultural friend group; we denounce figures like Donald Trump. It means admitting how often we profit off of white privilege when we seldom even notice.
I want to believe that this week has ignited a firestorm across social media that will continue to grow, gain traction and create meaningful change at a structural level in our society. But as I look at images and videos of the protests currently underway in the United States, I find myself continually thinking about the Rodney King riots. Rodney King, a black man, was brutally beaten by four Los Angeles policemen in an attack captured on video. After the police officers were acquitted of all charges, Los Angeles erupted into five days of riots and ignited a conversation about police brutality and racial inequality. This was in 1992. In the almost thirty years since, things have changed but they also have not. As we saw with the murder of George Floyd, violence against black men and women continues.
Alongside focusing on police brutality itself, attention must also be paid to the sociocultural underpinnings behind racism. Where does racism come from? What is the benefit that comes with being racist? Racism exists because it offers something valuable: it offers white individuals the ability to situate themselves as better than; to throw their anxieties, frustrations and fears onto a scapegoat and retain a sense of power and stability; to get ahead in an education system or workforce simply by being white. An oppressed and vulnerable black population has also, since the institution of slavery, served as free and later cheap labour, a crucial aspect of the capitalist economy particularly in the United States. This is far from a justification, but it is an explanation that suggests that police violence is a horrific symptom of a much deeper wound. Unless we address widespread economic inequality, the precariousness of the working class and the fundamental need in capitalist society of an exploitable labour force, I fear that things may get better, but they will not truly change.
We decided to create this reading list for those who want to inform themselves and learn more. As a writer and PhD student, I have to believe in the value of words and literature and the value of education. I have to believe that change starts somewhere and if it doesn’t start in talking about racism and sexism and all the -isms, then where does it start? Reading these texts will not produce real change, but it may allow for consideration of these deeper issues. This, in itself, may prove to be a beginning.
— Erin Baldwin
The New Jim Crow — Michelle Alexander
“The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose to commit crimes, and that's why they are locked up or locked out, we are told. This feature makes the politics of responsibility particularly tempting, as it appears the system can be avoided with good behavior. But herein lies the trap. All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.”
Extolling the virtues of colorblindness in regards to race often leads well-meaning people to being completely oblivious to the fact that they are proponents of a certain amount of blindness to the plight of people of colour. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness challenges the self-congratulatory pat on the back that America perpetually gives itself for the election of a black president, despite how little has changed for the majority of black men living in the country’s economically and racially divided cities. Alexander elaborates in detail how the incarceration of black men, by the most dubious and unjust means, is the new and legally sanctioned mechanism of the subordination of black lives.
If Beale Street Could Talk — James Baldwin
“For, you see, he had found his center, his own center, inside him: and it showed. He wasn’t anybody’s nigger. And that’s a crime, in this fucking free country. You’re suppose to be somebody’s nigger. And if you’re nobody’s nigger, you’re a bad nigger: and that’s what the cops decided when Fonny moved downtown.”
For those who like to have more than one book going at once, Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk is a perfect combination with The New Jim Crow. It provides a less theoretical, more tangible, understanding of the human cost of incarceration as a weapon against black people. The story follows the relationship between Tish and Fonny, two black youths on their way to marriage when Fonny is falsely accused of a crime and sent to prison. It’s a love story, one that humanizes what is often depicted statistically and without regard—even by quite sympathetic observers—of the richness and lustre of the lives that America’s legacy of racism has quenched, one generation after another.
Race After Technology — by Ruha Benjamin
“The animating force of the New Jim Code is that tech designers encode judgments into technical systems but claim that the racist results of their designs are entirely exterior to the encoding process. Racism thus becomes doubled – magnified and buried under layers of digital denial.”
If society is flooded with racism at a structural level, is it possible that the technologies being developed are also drenched in prejudice and bias? This is the question explored in Race After Technology by prominent African American Studies scholar Ruha Benjamin. Looking at various technologies from phone apps to complicated algorithms, Benjamin demonstrates how they encode inequality at the level of design and inevitably repeat and reinforce racial hierarchies. Calling it the “New Jim Code”, Benjamin draws attention to the racial bias inherent in technology, one that will only continue to perpetuate the system of racism in contemporary society if it isn’t addressed.
White Fragility — Robin D’Angelo
“White progressives can be the most difficult for people of color because, to the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived. None of our energy will go into what we need to be doing for the rest of our lives: engaging in ongoing self-awareness, continuing education, relationship building, and actual antiracist practice. White progressives do indeed uphold and perpetrate racism, but our defensiveness and certitude make it virtually impossible to explain to us how we do so.”
White Fragility explores the inner-workings of white privilege and fragility: the difficulty that lies in talking about race; the desire to erase race from the equation by claiming colorblindness; how deeply ingrained white supremacy is in our worldview from birth; and the harm that lies in claiming, as a white individual, that you’re just not racist. Instead of acting defensively – a move that leads to silence and the reinstating of the racial equilibrium – Robin D’Angelo suggests we should all admit the inevitability of racial bias in order to produce cross-racial dialogue and facilitate transformation. From her years of experience as an academic, author and consultant on issues of social justice, D’Angelo poignantly demonstrates the danger of white fragility and what we can do about it.
Anagnorisis — Kyle Dargan
I cannot afford to believe that someday
the State, these states, will stop shooting my cousins,
so let there be another weapon—one that induces
only the small death. Yes, my cousins would come
against their wills, but they would come back,
unlike this big leaving—this spasm without release. “” La Petite Mort
Based in Washington D.C., Dargan’s collection of poetry is inspired and entrenched in the political reality around him, especially the lived experience of two terms served by the nation’s first black president. Citizenship and humanity are interchangeable concepts in these poems, two sides of the same coin that the black experience can’t seem to hold on to in America. Recognizing one’s true character (which Aristotle called Anagnorisis) is the theme holding the collection together. That also means recognizing the true character of the antagonist, the meshwork of exclusion beneath American life and culture. That is what Dargan attempts to achieve, from within and without.
The Skin We’re In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power — Desmond Cole
“It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy—white settlers deny Black communities the necessities of life, then blame us for the social dysfunction that follows.”
It’s easy to see the worst instances of racism as an uniquely American problem—the Prime Minister’s recent 21-second delay in responding to a question about the riots in the States perhaps indicates a sense of distance to a problem that is also a Canadian problem. That’s the issue Desmond Cole’s The Skin We’re In addresses: Canadian police forces, too, have racist tendencies. Cole chronicles the year 2017 as it relates to black and indigenous struggles against anti-immgration policies and the practise of ‘carding’ black people. His analysis looks at systematic discrimination in Canada in general, as well as his experience in Toronto and the consequences he suffered for speaking up in police board meetings demanding that data collected during carding encounters be destroyed. Desmond Cole is a Canadian author and journalist based in Toronto.
Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race — Reni Eddo-Lodge
“When I talk about white privilege, I don’t mean that white people have it easy, that they’ve never struggled, or that they’ve never lived in poverty. But white privilege is the fact that if you’re white, your race will almost certainly positively impact your life’s trajectory in some way. And you probably won’t even notice it.”
Reni Eddo-Lodge is a British journalist and author who focuses her work on feminism and structural racism. Here, Eddo-Lodge takes a hard look at systemic racism in Britain today, how it manifests in contemporary society and shapes black lives and opportunities. This text developed out of Eddo-Lodge’s blog post sharing the identical title, “Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race,” where she discussed her frustrations in talking about race when the vast majority of white listeners were unwilling to accept the existence of structural racism and its symptoms. Eddo-Lodge presents an alternate narrative to the mainstream belief that racism is easy to spot and looks like white extremism. Instead, she demonstrates how structural racism thrives in unexpected spaces, and how, to truly create change, our analysis has to go far deeper.
Bad Feminist — Roxane Gay
“You don't necessarily have to do anything once you acknowledge your privilege. You don't have to apologize for it. You need to understand the extent of your privilege, the consequences of your privilege, and remain aware that people who are different from you move through and experience the world in ways you might never know anything about.”
Combining essays on films like Django Unchained and 12 Years a Slave, popular novels including The Hunger Games and the Sweet Valley High series alongside her own personal experiences with racism, sexual assault and even Scrabble competitions, cultural critic Roxane Gay explores the ideology of feminism and what it means to be a good, or bad, feminist. Gay’s writing is nuanced and exploratory, thoughtfully offering up clever and astute observations on the sociocultural climate and how race and gender is (often problematically) represented in popular culture. Gay comes off as a dear friend: honest, endearing and not afraid to admit her own imperfections. Her belief that it is better to be a bad feminist rather than no feminist at all offers a fresh and inclusive approach to feminism, one that allows any woman, despite her economic status, race or inconsistencies (we all do contain multitudes, after all) to take a part in this movement for gender equality.
Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America — Peniel E. Joseph
“understanding the history behind the iconic Black Power imagery – clenched fists, Black Panthers, racial upheavals, dashiki- and afro-wearing militants – requires plumbing the murky depths of a movement that paralleled, and at times overlapped, the heroic civil rights era. Early Black Power activists were simultaneously inspired and repulsed by the civil rights struggles that served as a violent flashpoint for racial transformation.”
Waiting‘ Til the Midnight Hour undermines the assumption that the Black Power Movement lies in opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. Instead, Peniel E. Joseph offers a compelling history that shows how the two are intertwined, beginning in 1950s Harlem and focusing on numerous activists including Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. up until 1975. While the two men are often juxtaposed, Joseph examines the distinct strategies that were used to confront the same core issues: the structure of American democracy and its treatment of race. In doing so, Joseph reimagines the Black Power Movement and rewrites our commonly held narrative of black history in the United States.
How to Be Anti-Racist — Ibram Kendi
“One of racism’s harms is the way it falls on the unexceptional Black person who is asked to be extraordinary just to survive—and, even worse, the Black screwup who faces the abyss after one error, while the White screwup is handed second chances and empathy.”
Drawing from historical, scientific, legal and philosophical literature, Kendi’s memoir makes the assertion that “the opposite of racist isn’t not racist”. How To Be Anti-Racist is as much a psychological investigation, of the author’s own mind as well and the Western mind, of the origin of racial identity and the often unexamined implications that we take for granted. Kendi takes one step further than simply saying racism is a white people problem. Instead he asks us to examine our perception of our own identity and how much of that is based on racial biases. Aside from being a New York Times best-selling author, a professor of History and International Relations, Kendi is also the director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University.
Passing — Nella Larson
“She wished to find out about this hazardous business of “passing,” this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one’s chance in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly.”
A prominent novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, Nella Larsen has been reclaimed in recent years as a central figure in the field of American Modernism and praised for her depiction of complex sexual and racial identities. Born to a mixed-race father and a white mother, Larsen was simultaneously both/neither, an experience she showcases in her novel Passing against the backdrop of the Harlem neighbourhood during the interwar period. Particularly through the mixed-race character of Claire, who marries and passes as white, Larsen destabilizes the dichotomy of whiteness and blackness while exploring how race is performed rather than simply inherent. Both Claire and Irene, who also passes at times, don’t conform to a stereotypical racial identity and instead fluidly cross both class and racial boundaries. Through her characters, Larsen questions commonly held beliefs on race and blurs the line between sharp racial divisions.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches — Audre Lorde
“Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.”
Audre Lorde is frequently cited in discussions of race relations and for good reason: Lorde was an internationally recognized black, lesbian, feminist writer who devoted herself to activism and the struggle to liberate oppressed peoples. At a time when feminism was largely a movement of white women, Lorde confronted issues of racism in white feminist thought and called for intersectionality to be introduced into feminist discourse. Lorde believed that diversity, difference and inclusion were necessary to feminism and ignoring these issues could only be detrimental. In this collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde discusses sexism, racism, class and homophobia, situating racial injustice and the struggle for equality alongside the possibility of hope.
Policing Black Lives — Robyn Maynard
“Blackness, like all racial categories, is not a biological fact but has been historically and socially constructed”
Taking a more historical perspective than Desmond Cole, Maynard’s subject of analysis is the untold history of anti-black racism in Canada over the past four hundred years. Her approach is also more systematic and political than personal. It looks at the legacy of racism through the prison system, the education system, immigration, and child services as they pertain to the black experience.
This Bridge Called My Back — edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua
“We are challenging white feminists to be accountable for their racism because at the base we still want to believe that they really want freedom for all of us.”
First published in 1981, this feminist anthology, alongside the work of Audre Lorde, challenged feminists to bring discussions of race into what was at that point a relatively white discourse. Today, This Bridge is considered a seminal work in what we call intersectional feminism. Featuring writers of colour who explore their diverse personal experiences alongside issues of race, class, gender and politics, Moraga and Anzaldua assemble a collection that reframes and expands the boundaries of feminism. Poems, interviews and letters are situated beside personal essays and criticism, written both by black and non-black people of colour. It is a collection that can be flipped through at random, read from cover to cover and re-examined again and again as feminism continues to evolve in the present day.
The Bluest Eyes — Toni Morisson
“All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us--all who knew her--felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used--to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength. And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.”
Toni Morisson’s breakout novel tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, an eleven year old black girl from Ohio. Pecola’s fervent prayer—for her eyes to turn as blue as the white girls on advertisements—is Morisson’s metaphorical investigation of what the dominance of white culture, and the beauty standards upholding it, does to the black psyche. An attempt to look inwards in order to understand the external forces of oppression.
So You Want to Talk About Race — Ijeoma Oluo
“This promise - that you will get more because they exist to get less - is woven throughout our entire society. Our politics, our education system, our infrastructure - anywhere there is a finite amount of power, influence, visibility, wealth, or opportunity. Anywhere in which someone might miss out. There the lure of that promise sustains racism. White Supremacy is this nation's oldest pyramid scheme. Even those who have lost everything to the scheme are still hanging in there, waiting for their turn to cash out.”
Taking an all-encompassing theoretical approach, Oluo looks at the full spectrum of the racialized existence of black people in America, from police brutality to micro-aggression. Her observations are nuanced but incisive, for example “Being privileged,” she says “doesn't mean that you are always wrong and people without privilege are always right. It means that there is a good chance you are missing a few very important pieces of the puzzle”. Her ability to call out subtleties of racism in popular culture without burning bridges of communication is perfectly aligned with an ability to speak forcefully and stab an indicating finger when needed: “To refuse to listen to someone’s cries for justice and equality until the request comes in a language you feel comfortable with is a way of asserting your dominance over them in the situation”. Oluo is a writer and activist based out of Seattle.
Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century — Dorothy Roberts
“Thinking on this issue tends to fall into two camps: either race is a social category that has nothing to do with the biological causes of disease, or race is a biological category that causes differences in disease. Both approaches fail to grasp the way in which race as a social grouping can affect health—because of different life experiences based on race, not because of race-based genetic difference.
In Fatal Invention, law professor and acclaimed scholar Dorothy Roberts tells the story of an evolving biopolitics that uses science and biotechnologies to reformulate conceptions of race as a biological category on a genetic level. Exploring wide-ranging topics, including how pain medication is prescribed differently to white, black and Hispanic patients, the historical divisions of race in the U.S. Census, and research projects claiming to show links between genetic (read: racial) differences and disease prevalence, Roberts undermines the accuracy of such biopolitics as she demonstrates its catastrophic, and often fatal, consequences. A complex read that examines the intersections of race, gender and the law, Fatal Invention showcases how racism continues to permeate the fields of medicine and science on a very systemic level.
Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition — Cedric J. Robinson
“Marxism is a Western construction—a conceptualization of human affairs and historical development that is emergent from the historical experiences of European peoples mediated, in turn, through their civilization, their social orders, and their cultures.”
Published in 1983, Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism asserts that the understanding of the black resistance against racism through the lens of Marxist theory does not adequately address racism in America. His main argument is that the historical perspective through which black people and activists are understood often presuppose a Western frame of perception wherein the black experience is undermined, relegated to the other, and dismissed as ineffective.
Me and My White Supremacy — Layla Saad
“Building the racial stamina required to challenge the racist status quo is thus a critical part of our work as white people. Rushing ahead to solutions—especially when we have barely begun to think critically about the problem—bypasses the necessary personal work and reflection and distances us from understanding our own complicity.”
Me and My White Supremacy was motivated by an online challenge Layla Saad started in 2018 with the hashtag #meandmywhitesupremacy. An educator who speaks on topics of race, identity and leadership, Saad asked people possessing white privilege to reflect on their conscious and unconscious racist thoughts and think about how these thoughts contributed to the upholding of white supremacy. Here, Saad confronts oppressive structures of patriarchy and white supremacy through a 28-day challenge that takes readers on a journey of understanding white privilege and their participation in structural racism.
The Underground Railroad — Colson Whitehead
“And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes--believes with all its heart--that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn't exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.”
Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel on the atrocities of slavery, the resilience of black individuals and the need to continually remember the legacy of discrimination and violence that continues to inform contemporary race relations in the present day. The Underground Railroad follows a young female slave named Cora as she decides to escape the plantation and run for freedom in the North. Re-imagining the underground railroad as a true railway system complete with tunnels and heavy machinery, Whitehead showcases Cora’s bravery, tenacity and capacity for hope despite the worst circumstances.
This list was compiled from our own readings and engaging with various sources. These include: Ibram X. Kendi’s “An Antiracist Reading List” (NYTimes), Roxane Gay on Twitter (@rgay), Kara Jillian Brown’s “12 Books, Movies, and Podcasts You Should Consume to Become a Better Ally to the Black Community,”