Your Black Friends Need You To Read What’s on This List
Don’t bug your black friends right now. Do not ask your black friends to “explain” anything to you right now. Don’t email them and ask them for advice on how to “fix” your racial bias issues. Don’t call them unless the only words that are about to come out of your mouth are: “Are you okay?” or “I love you”. Then, and this is very important, shut the fuck up and let them talk.
Don’t ask them to sit with you while you download your failings as a white ally. Don’t ask them if you ARE a white ally (if you have to ask, don’t worry…you’re not).
Don’t tag them in posts of you at a protest. Don’t show-and-tell them to other people like “See not racist! I HAVE A BLACK FRIEND.”
If any of this sounds like you and you’re working on your shit (we all are, friend, we all are) and you need guidance then now is the time to STFU and start reading.
Racism Reading 101
- White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
“In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’ (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.”
Buy it here or at your local bookstore. Fuck Amazon.
2. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
“As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as “black rage,” historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable op-ed in The Washington Post suggesting that this was, instead, “white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames,” she argued, “everyone had ignored the kindling.”
Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow; the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House, and then the election of America’s first black President, led to the expression of white rage that has been as relentless as it has been brutal.
Carefully linking these and other historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition, Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage. Compelling and dramatic in the unimpeachable history it relates, White Rage will add an important new dimension to the national conversation about race in America.”
Buy it here. Or at a local bookseller of your choosing. Amazon has given all of $10M to “black organizations” (and they’re all fucking braggy about it) and they’re a trillion dollar fucking company so fuck them.
3. Race and Racisms: A Critical Approach
“Race and Racisms: A Critical Approach, Second Edition, engages students in significant — and timely — questions related to racial dynamics in the U.S. and around the world. Written in accessible, straightforward language, the book discusses and critically analyzes cutting-edge scholarship in the field. Organized into topics and concepts rather than discrete racial groups, the text addresses:
* How and when the idea of race was created and developed
* How structural racism has worked historically to reproduce inequality
* How we have a society rampant with racial inequality, even though most people do not consider themselves to be racist
* How race, class, and gender work together to create inequality and identities
* How immigration policy in the United States has been racialized
* How racial justice could be imagined and realized.”
Special order it here.
5. Racism Without Racists
“Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s acclaimed Racism without Racists documents how, beneath our contemporary conversation about race, there lies a full-blown arsenal of arguments, phrases, and stories that whites use to account for-and ultimately justify-racial inequalities. The fifth edition of this provocative book makes clear that color blind racism is as insidious now as ever. It features new material on our current racial climate, including the Black Lives Matter movement; a significantly revised chapter that examines the Obama presidency, the 2016 election, and Trump’s presidency; and a new chapter addressing what readers can do to confront racism-both personally and on a larger structural level.”
Buy it here.
6. Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations
“his third edition of Joe R. Feagin’s Racist America is significantly revised and updated, with an eye toward racism issues arising regularly in our contemporary era. This edition incorporates more than two hundred recent research studies and reports on U.S. racial issues that update and enhance all the last edition’s chapters. It expands the discussion and data on concepts such as the white racial frame and systemic racism from research studies by Feagin and his colleagues. The author has further polished the book to make it yet more readable for undergraduates, including eliminating repetitive materials, adding headings and more cross-referencing, and adding new examples, anecdotes, and narratives about contemporary racism.”
Call for a special order here.
7. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
From Left Bank Books:
“Staff Reviews
What an eye-opening book! Alexander has written a powerful book that makes the undeniable connections between race, “race-blind” legislation and criminal enforcement, and the rise in mass incarceration. She argues that post-Jim Crow legislation and enforcement pattern led to a different type of racial caste system. This one is not written in black & white, like Jim Crow, but the effects are just the same — the isolation and oppression of minorities. Powerful, moving argument delivered with honesty. — Wintaye’s Pick”
Thanks, Wintaye! Buy it here.
8. So You Want to Talk About Race
“Widespread reporting on aspects of white supremacy — from police brutality to the mass incarceration of Black Americans — has put a media spotlight on racism in our society. Still, it is a difficult subject to talk about. How do you tell your roommate her jokes are racist? Why did your sister-in-law take umbrage when you asked to touch her hair — and how do you make it right? How do you explain white privilege to your white, privileged friend?
In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo guides readers of all races through subjects ranging from intersectionality and affirmative action to “model minorities” in an attempt to make the seemingly impossible possible: honest conversations about race and racism, and how they infect almost every aspect of American life.”
In closing
I took a screenshot of this and sent it to my best friend several weeks ago, when the world was closing down and essential mostly black workers were delivering everything to mostly indifferent white people. (She and I often opine about the abuse of black imagery in advertising; that’s what this is, make no mistake about it. It’s fucking abuse.). This is galling. It’s unforgivable. It’s beyond tone deaf. It’s fucked.
Consider that this is what Amazon’s team splashed on the Prime app within seconds of the country shutting down. (This was just days before it fired one of its New York workers for organizing a strike.) If you can’t decode the obvious racism in this image, if this doesn’t actually make you foam at the mouth as both human beings and COVID-19 rage outside from wherever the fuck you are sheltering in place: you’re not just part of the problem. You are THE problem. Fix your shit.
Bonus homework (Buzzfeed): New York City’s Coronavirus Essential Workers Are Overwhelmingly People Of Color
