Looking Inward: The Books That Challenged Our Thinking About Race and Privilege
As White staff and non-Black staff of color at Books Are Magic, we want to show our solidarity and support with the recent Black Lives Matter protests that have once again forced our country to examine how Black lives bare the brunt of the American living legacy of white supremacy. Like many other bookstores and book-related media outlets, we have recommended antiracist books and created pro-BLM content. However, at this moment, we want to model what moral and ethical behavior looks like for White and non-Black people of color who claim to support these protests.
The sense of urgency that led to the proliferation of antiracism reading material should not overcloud or remove attention from the important work of reflection and education that is necessary for unpacking internalized anti-Black racism. This post highlights books that have challenged us to reexamine our societal positions in relation to the oppression of the Black community. It is very easy for us staff members to see ourselves as just or not as bad as the murderers of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many countless others. There are many forms of racism, not all of which are lethal, but assuredly all are destructive. We want our customers to understand anti-Black racism has been given to us as a template for viewing the world around us. This has been done insidiously and without our consent. However, now that we are aware it is our responsibility to continue to rethink our lives and our values. We hope our stories will inspire your introspection and your journey to fighting against white supremacy.
Intro by Danni Green
Emma S.
How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi & The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
I'm primarily a fiction and poetry reader, and there have always been Black authors on my reading stack--Zadie Smith, Colson Whitehead, Tracy K. Smith, ZZ Packer, Jackie Woodson, Hanif Abdurraqib, to name just a few of my favorite authors--but in thinking about this prompt from one of our booksellers, I realized that it wasn't until I read the glorious and massive historical epic The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, which came out in 2011, that I'd read a book of Black American history. How did I make it to age 30 without one? And then, even worse, how did I make it to nearly 40 before reading a book that held my hand gently enough that it made me finally begin the long process of understanding my silent complicity in our country's endless, systemic racism? Ibram Kendi is on the top of every bestseller list in the country in about three different categories, and thank god--his books, for readers of every age, are transformative. There have been a lot of antiracist reading lists (ours included), and lists of lists, and reaction pieces to the endless lists, but I stand behind them--it's true that you need to open these books in order for them to work their magic, and that the magic is internal, and invisible, but I have never believed that books are magic more than I do now. I feel like a scrim has been pulled out from in front of my eyes, and the world is getting clearer in every direction. I know that I'm at the very beginning of a very long reading road, but I feel, as ever, grateful to all the authors, and the thinkers, and the academics, who have been waist-deep and heart-deep in this knowledge for centuries. The best part, of course, about reading books about racism and antiracism is that you (the white person) aren't asking anything of the authors that they haven't already offered. They have done the work, and now it's time for us to do ours.
Serena M.
Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison
This is a book I recommend quite often, it’s slim but immensely impactful in the way it challenged me to think about how whiteness is constructed in our literary and, of course, cultural consciousness. I believe this is required reading for all American writers, but especially all white American writers, because there is no way to read this and not consider how the language we use evokes or enforces white supremacy and the “othering” required to maintain it (I, as a nonBlack POC, am not absolved from this just because I’m not white). In it, Morrison examines the way the “Africanist presence”—or what we might simply call antiblackness in literature and literary criticism—developed in the service of defining and consolidating a hegemonized cultural identity. Further, she illuminates the metaphysical consequences and implications of these antiblack literary constructions, by examining how they manifest in the works of famed, canonical writers. In thinking about Americanness, I believe that no one has been a greater teacher than Toni Morrison.
A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid
This is another slim text that had a huuuge impact on my thinking when I first encountered it as a young reader. And more specifically, as a young reader who wanted to be a writer, who was also native, an islander, and who had never read such an illuminating indictment of the precise neocolonialism that was hurting my people too, and of course, our land (except for me it was in the Pacific, rather than the Carribean). I think I had been searching for language for something I didn’t understand at the time but now know to be the ways colonialism and racism and capitalism exist to fortify each other, that they are but different faces for one body of violence. I believe that to be truly anti-racist is to be anti-colonial and anti-capitalist too (and vice versa), and Jamaica Kincaid was the first writer I read who spoke to that necessity. And beyond that, she gave me permission to be angry about it, and to name it, and in naming it, resist it.
The Black Maria by Aracelis Girmay
Aracelis Girmay is easily one of the best living poets there is. Her poems embody everything Audre Lorde meant when she said poetry is not a luxury. Many people smarter than me have had a lot of precise and articulate things to say in praise of her work, and this collection in particular. But rather than reiterate those people, I’ll point out one thing in particular that made this collection special to me, one thing among many things that changed/challenged my thinking, that perhaps I can offer as a case study: the way she wrote about oceans/seas. Before this collection, I don’t think I had ever given meaningful consideration to the way my positionality as a nonBlack, indigenous person informs my literal and metaphorical relationship to the ocean, in an overwhelmingly positive manner. While I’ve always been wary and fearful of the ocean’s power, ultimately as a whole, it has always represented life itself, existing in my consciousness as a symbol of beauty, serenity, passage, perseverance, the list goes on... I had not considered the historical context for why Black folks in diaspora might have a vastly different notion of the ocean, might view it as a symbol of death or captivity, or a reminder of immeasurable loss. With the exception of certain Pacific Islander groups—who, to be clear, were forced into the slave trade because they were racialized as Black—my people voyaged through oceans voluntarily, and as such, do not have to regard the ocean through a lens of grief or captivity. This is how privilege works. The very nature of privilege is that we get to be unaware of how it informs our thinking. It makes it so that you don’t have to see everything, and certainly don’t have to think about things that are painful and/or implicating.
Lastly, without pointing to one specific text, I want to name M. NourbeSe Philip, who comes to mind because she has written critically and creatively on each of the subjects I’ve mentioned for all three of the above writers. My (admittedly limited) exposure to her work did so much to inform my early thinking around race, colonialism, language/power, gender, diaspora, and so forth.
Michael C.
Stamped by Jason Reynolds, Ibram X. Kendi
It took until frustratingly late in my life to realize how pervasive racist ideas are in almost every corner of society. I wish I had read this book when I was a teenager — it brings the past into the context of how it affects the present. Early on in the book, when the authors describe the book’s three central terms (segregationist, assimilationist, antiracist) and how we can embody multiple of these traits over a lifetime or even over a given day, it helped me realize how insidious internalized racist ideas are, and how we can recognize them in ourselves.
Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires
Many of the stories in Heads of the Colored People show how predominantly white spaces box in and stereotype Black people, and how damaging that is, both on psychological and physical levels. In “A Conversation About Bread,” two grad students debate the legitimacy of the narrative one writes about the other as an assignment, trying to escape the white gaze, even as a white woman at an adjacent table is clearly listening and even begins to take notes. As a non-black person of color, I am familiar with spaces like these, and know that it’s not just the white gaze, but that people from NBPOC communities are definitely guilty of complicity as well. I loved the writing in this book, and how Thompson-Spires weaves from one story to the next, highlighting both connections and disconnections.
Abby R.
The Dark Fantastic by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas
As a lifelong lover of fantasy & a current children's bookseller, this book has been absolutely essential for me. It forced me to reckon with the fact that the genre I adore and turn to for comfort and escapism cannot provide the same outlet for Black readers. Thomas writes not just of a lack of diversity, but of a fundamental violence that is inflicted on Black characters in popular media, including Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. She brilliantly analyzes four specific examples and draws direct parallels to how this "representation" mirrors the violence against Black folks in the real world. Then she lays out a path forward: that of fanfiction, of counter-storytelling, of the vivid imaginative worlds made possible by Black women and girls. It's truly an incredible and insightful read.
Pet by Akwaeke Emezi
(content warning: implied child sexual abuse)
On the subject of radical Black fantasy--Emezi's Pet is one of my all-time favorite novels. This slim book packs a hell of a story, envisioning a world in which the revolution has happened--police and prisons have been abolished, and the main character, Jam, is a young Black trans girl whose Blackness and transness are not a death sentence. She's safe. She's happy.
What struck me most acutely about this setting was that this was a world in which a Black trans girl can take her safety for granted. Her parents can take her safety for granted. She can roam the streets of her city alone or with friends and not run the risk of being assaulted or harassed. It is the absence of this violence that drew my attention to its stark counterpart in reality; because this is speculative fiction, and a Black girl is not safe in our real world. A Black girl's safety is not something we can ever take for granted in the world as it is now.
But this utopia that Jam's parents have helped create is not perfect. Jam learns this when she accidentally summons a creature called Pet from one of her mother's paintings, and Pet tells her that it is here to hunt a monster. She's forced to reckon with what she thinks she knows--that there are no monsters in Lucille--and what she is able to see--that one of her friends is in danger, and that danger is close to home. It's a gorgeously written novel. My well-worn copy has been dog-eared and underlined to hell and back, because Emezi's style is so striking and vivid that I want to be able to go back to their words time and again. I haven't been able to stop thinking about PET since I read it well over a year ago, and I believe it will live in the YA canon for a long time to come.
Martiza M.
The books that have helped me unpack my own anti-Black prejudices have been ones that struck me on a gut level or helped me differentiate between the racism I experienced and the anti-Blackness I perpetuated. I am Mexican, and grew up in a small town in a rural and conservative stretch of California, and it took some reckoning to recognize that I benefited from White privilege. I understood it intellectually, but it’s taken (and still takes) deliberate effort to recognize my agency and to fight the instinct to confront both racism and anti-Blackness, instead of keeping my head down.
Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward
I loved Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped for the way she unpacked her grief, as well as the guilt she feels is wrapped up in it. The memoir focuses on her grief for the five Black men in her life who died over the course of four years, against the backdrop of rural Louisiana. Elements of it felt familiar--the awareness of your town knowing some of what you’ve lost, the guilt embedded in losing someone to suicide, the recognition that something systemic is at play--but Ward’s frustration with the ways that outsiders painted and reframed the men’s lives to justify or dismiss their deaths rattled me. I still identified with her frustration, but so much of the reframing was specifically anti-Black, and made me notice ways in which I did the lousy White liberal version of this, where you decide which Black deaths to spotlight based on how “good” they’d been in life. Because the memoir is so personal, that recognition rightfully knocked the wind out of me.
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
On the fiction side, I’m going with another choice that features hurtful behavior that mirrored my own. Zadie Smith’s novels are comforts for me, and On Beauty is my favorite. This retelling of Howard’s End focuses on two sparring academics and their families, and when I first read it I identified with Howard’s daughter, Zora, whose pleasures, habits, and reactions to microaggressions felt familiar. However, Smith knows her characters intimately, and Zora’s sometimes subconscious anti-Black prejudices--her desire for both respectability and her measured rebellion--and the way they impacted her Black peers and family struck a chord, and made me see how my own preoccupation with respectability was harmful. It of course is not fun to recognize yourself in a character's flaw (we love quirks! but an actual flaw that has impact and causes others pain? it feels bad), but the novel itself is fun and satisfying.
Nika J.
Two Trains Running by August Wilson
I first encountered the play Two Trains Running, written by August Wilson, in high school, where it was an assigned text that we were to read before going to see the play live. Spending time with it in two mediums, or maybe the explicit distance of theatre, created a critical space in which I had to re-evaluate the relationship between myself as a white person in the US and art by Black creators. More specifically, I realized the need to cultivate an ethics of engagement for approaching work by Black artists with respect and acknowledgement of my positionality in relation to that work, especially if it addressed a Black American experience of pain or struggle. White cultural consumption of these parts of the work of Black artists, or their co-option as pedagogical tools to ‘teach’ white people, were not things I had language to articulate. In the space between reading Two Trains Running and seeing it, though, I understood that I had to reconsider my own complicity in structures of oppression and racism, and that this had to be a constant process.
Survival Math by Mitchell S. Jackson
One of the first facts I learned in Mitchell S. Jackson’s Survival Math was that the state of Oregon had exclusion laws from the moment settler colonialists formed their government. I had never been interested in mainstream American history, so focused on property and conquest and reeking of mythology, although the bulk of my interest in global politics stemmed from the violence and harm the US has caused in so many parts of the world. I think that I was aware that my need to know and understand that aspect of the country required that I return to US history and to its foundational violences, but I avoided it for years. These essays challenged me in a lot of ways, but the main way relevant here is that avoiding historical knowledge is nearly as bad as the argument that history doesn’t matter now because the speaker didn’t personally do any of it–worse, even, for someone like me who purports to believe the opposite. Reading this book forced me to face that contradiction, examine my hesitation and avoidance, and come to the conclusion that, just as silence = death, flinching away is sometimes the most serious kind of participation.
Colleen C.
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing is such an amazing book. I was blown away by the writing when I first read it years ago and it hasn’t left my mind since. Besides its incredible depth of character and literary craft, this book did so much for me in terms of illuminating the Black American experience, especially in terms of generational trauma and the replication of systemic racism. Through the multiple generations of descendants of two step siblings from Ghana, one captured and sold into the transatlantic slave trade, the other forced into a royal marriage in Africa, Gyasi deftly illustrates the devastating affects of intergenerational trauma for Black Americans; how their oppression has been compounded, not lessened, with each successive generation. In doing so, she also highlights how the systems that govern and make up our society keep racism intact and have evolved over the centuries to insidiously and proficiently continue to disenfranchise Black people and people of color, just under more socially acceptable terms. It really opened my eyes to how this pain can wreak havoc on individuals and families and communities in so many ways and how important it is for us to not only understand just how deep this trauma goes, but how critical it is for us to prioritize healing at every level. It’s a gift to learn from Gyasi through this sweeping novel, and I recommend it to nearly everyone who comes into the bookstore.
Women, Race and Class by Angela Davis
We owe so much to Angela Davis, she is a scholar, activist and true revolutionary leader of our time. One of the first texts I read that truly challenged my ideas of feminism and the racist history of the feminist movement was Women, Race, and Class. This book was my primer on intersectionality. From abolition through the 1980s, this is the history of the women’s liberation movement, and how racism and sexism has plagued the movement and prevented it from achieving true justice. Davis explains the double edged sword of oppression Black women face, from both the racism of white and non-Black women, and the misogyny of men (of all backgrounds). As we are seeing with sickening clarity today, these are still deeply ingrained issues in our society and we can see the devastating effects play out in everything from wage compensation, to infant and mother mortality, to incarceration rates, to food and housing insecurity, education inequalities, sexual assault statistics, and so, so much more. Black women and femmes are at the zenith of these injustices and need to be centered and protected in any movement for liberation. Angela Davis has a wonderful body of work that elucidates many intersecting issues along social and racial justice issues, and this is a foundational text for white and non-Black people who see themselves as feminists and intend to further their allyship by investigating which parts of these systems we perpetuate and allow to continue unchecked.
