We’ve been here: Selections from 6+ years of anti-racist internet reading

Jess Brooks
On Race — isms
5 min readJun 19, 2020

Recognizing and responding to racism is a journey. If you find yourself in a dramatically different place from where you were in 2014, or 2016, or 2 months ago — ready now to grapple with more ideas and activisms — you might have missed some of the best writing on race and racism.

(By “Best” I mean, subjectively, writing that was meaningful to me. Writing that taught me things I needed to know, or helped me understand what I already knew, or was real Art in the sense of communicating reality by bringing me to a new emotional place).

I did this once before, in November of 2014:

I considered editing that original list, updating it for its 11th half birthday, but I kind of think it deserves to be experienced in situ. So, as a friend pointed out in exasperation, I have posted a list in a list.

I’m highlighting this essay from the 2014 list. I kind of buried it at the end back then, but it’s one of several pieces by this author that felt essential, and that I still think about.

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Jess Brooks
On Race — isms

A collection blog of all the things I am reading and thinking about; OR, my attempt to answer my internal FAQs.