I discovered many of these authors during quarantine when a swell in the Black Lives Matter movement coincided with copious amounts of time to read. Growing up in a conservative, Southern environment, the visibility of social injustice in 2020 challenged the ideas instilled in me that the battle for civil rights was a fight already won. I wanted to contribute in some way, but I didn’t know how. So I started by ordering a book I had seen trending on social media: Ijeoma Oluo’s “So You Want to Talk About Race.” This book, along with six others, makes up my list of top books that educate and convey the burdens of oppression in the U.S.
- So You Want to Talk About Race? By Ijeoma Uluo
This is a great starting point for building a foundational understanding of the impact of racism today. It’s an easy read with questions for chapter titles and detailed responses. Each chapter teaches how to respectfully hold conversations about race in a way that builds knowledge about current systems of oppression and the things you can do to resist.
- How to Be an Antiracist By Ibram X. Kendi
This one is actually my favorite. In it, Kendi argues that not being racist isn’t enough to challenge the existing institutions that marginalize people of color; one must be actively antiracist. Not being actively antiracist effectively holds up these institutions. Being an antiracist means imagining new institutions that support racial equality rather than inequality, and working to create those.
- The Intersectional Environmentalist Leah Thomas
There are a multitude of ways in which racism, social and systemic, affects the minority populations of America. One of the most impactful ways is how Black people in America are refused the luxury of breathing properly. Thomas argues that environmental injustices limit the clean air and healthy environments of many people of color. The book calls for the much-needed evolution of the environmental community pushing them to fight against all forms of extinction, including the lives of Black Americans.
- The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness By Michelle Alexander
Alexander’s work reveals how slavery has manifested in three major ways since the seventeenth century. First slavery itself, then the Jim Crow era, and now, today’s mass incarceration. This concept provides context to our modern-day iterations of racism and an explanation of racism’s resilience; as society demands an end to injustice, injustice molds itself to new social norms in order to prevail. Slavery reduced Black Americans to property, Jim Crow to second-class citizens when they were no longer allowed to be property, and mass incarceration to prisoners, legal slaves–when they were no longer allowed to be second-class citizens.
- The Fire Next Time By James Baldwin
I will admit, this short novel is not an easy read. But the dense prose is worth exploring, containing heart wrenching writing and a memoir that focuses on the devastating impacts of racism. That’s why I put it on this list. It encompasses an important part of understanding racism; before you can learn how to talk about it or what to do, you have to know what you are working to fight against.
- Between the World and Me By Ta-Nehisi Coates
In addition to “The Fire Next Time,” Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me” allows readers who are not Black to see, for the only time in their life, what it is like to be Black in the U.S. Like the structure of “The Fire Next Time,” the book is a letter to Coates’ son detailing what makes unique Black realities visible throughout someone’s life and what the present needs to look like to fashion an ideal future.
- Me and White Supremacy By Layla F. Saad
This book is an interactive read, challenging white readers over the course of 28 days to evaluate how white privilege and white supremacy play a role in their life. As a white-presenting Latina woman, I benefit from many aspects of white privilege. I completed the 28 days, finding new ways that I benefited from the system of white supremacy that I had never considered. I am now not only better equipped to talk about issues of white privilege with other people, but I am better at critically examining the systems around me as a part of my ongoing social justice education.