Danielle's Antiracist Reading List

To me, becoming an anti-racist begins with grounding yourself in the history of American racism as an idea.

• Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Ibram X. Kendi)

  • Several historical avatars (including WEB Du Bois, Angela Davis; go read them too!)

  • If you’re moved by ideas like the abolition of prison, check out the work of local activism (closetheworkhouse.org)

Next, I think it’s really important to acknowledge how the practice of racism is a) an action that b) produces race as an experience of inequality. (If this is confusing, that’s ok!)

• Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (Karen & Barbara Fields)

  • Racism created race, not the other way around

There is no single black author you can read to make you an anti-racist. There are simply too many varieties of black experience; here are some examples:

• Sister Outsider (Audre Lorde), foremother of womanist thought (black feminism, but explicitly queer-inclusive)

• The Fire Next Time (James Baldwin), anxieties of black (queer) masculinity; complex relationship of blackness to the Christian faith

• Negroland (Margo Jefferson), well-to-do blackness; racism gets reproduced in American meritocracy and our myths of exceptionalism

• They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Hanif Abdurraqib), a poet’s way of noticing the world recorded as prose — especially as it pertains to being black in largely white spaces (a nearly-universal feature of black experience)

The idea is to make it a practice to de-center white experiences, and to instead center black ones. This is definitely possible, no matter what you’re into:

• Fiction (classic)

  • Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston)

  • Sula (Toni Morrison)

  • Kindred (Octavia Butler)

  • Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Audre Lorde)

  • Brown Girl Dreaming (Jacqueline Woodson)

    • Complex, diverse, deeply moving portraits of black womanhood

  • Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison), existential treatise on social invisibility and black manhood

• Modern poetry 

  • Citizen: An American Lyric (Claudia Rankine) multimedia poetry interrogating violence against black bodies

  • Electric Arches (Eve Ewing, Afro-futurist)

  • I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (Tiana Clark)

  • Homie (Danez Smith)

  • Hoodwitch (Faylita Hicks)

• Other fiction

  • Bingo Love (Tee Franklin), a second-chance black queer romance that spans 60 years

  • The Gilda Stories (Jewelle Gomez) the black lesbian vampire origin story?

  • The Broken Earth Trilogy: The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky (NK Jemisin) world-building that will upend (and reveal the absurdity of) racial presumptions

• Mystery

  • Bluebird Bluebird (Attica Locke)

  • Trouble Is What I Do (Walter Mosely)

• Absurdist fiction

  • The Sellout (Paul Beatty)

  • Pym (Mat Johnson)

  • Lovecraft Country (Matt Ruff)

    • Soon to be an HBO show!

• Like video games? 

  • Mafia 3 never lets you forget that, when you’re a black man, the cops are never not watching you.

• Into prestige TV shows?

  • Watchmen (2019, HBO) is a tremendous season of television that situates itself in Tulsa, OK, and ties both story and characters to the 1921 burning of Black Wall Street.

    • For more, check out The Burning (Tim Madigan).

• Prefer podcasts?

  • Take a listen to NPR’s Code Switch, Scene on Radio’s Season 2: Seeing White, Season 4: The Land That Never Has Been Yet, and Uncivil.

So, find a starting point. And accept that no one ever stops learning:

1. Find a list. Find a few lists. Pick an author you like. Follow them on social media. Read their recommendations.

   1. Left Bank - Antiracist Resources

   2. Left Bank - Kids Antiracist Resources

   3. Ibram Kendi put together a list for the New York Times back in May.

   4. An excellent podcast (that I also recommend!), NPR’s Code Switch, put together a list of books, films, and podcasts

   5. Eve Ewing, Roxane Gay, & Saeed Jones are authors who are voracious readers and are constant resources for great reads on this topic; this has long been true for all three of them, so check out their Twitter timelines and Instagram posts for past suggestions!

2. Accept that America is “the land that has never been yet” (Langston Hughes); this is a major hurdle.

3. Never stop. We don’t finish learning. People have been doing the work longer than any of us, so consume that work, and don’t think you’re finished when you get to the end of a reading list.

-Danielle King