Here Are Some Books You Should Read
In the last edition of this newsletter, I encouraged you to read Austin Channing Brown’s I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness. It combines her personal experience of racism as a Black woman in America with broader cultural analysis, and it’s extremely powerful. Brown also has a Substack newsletter, and I’d encourage you to read her recent short essay, “Trouble the Narrative.”
“History. Scripture. Social Revolutions. Black Struggle. None of these can be boiled down into one convenient sentence. It’s condescending, lazy, and uneducated. It’s thoughtless. And thoughtless isn’t what we need right now.
Trouble the narratives of white supremacy and anti-blackness. Or else we will keep repeating this cycle.”
One way to trouble the narrative that white supremacy imposes upon our daily lives is to go beyond simply declaring your opposition to racism and becoming an active antiracist. You should read Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, another combination of memoir and cultural analysis, to learn more about how you can set about doing that. In some ways, I think it might be useful to compare it to what other writers have called “decolonizing your mind,” and in that context I’d like to point you toward Kaitlin Curtice’s Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God. Curtice writes within an explicitly Christian framework, as well as within her own Native experience, but frankly it’s almost impossible to talk about how and why American culture is the way it is without discussing how and why mainstream Christian culture has become the way that it is, so even if it’s not your religious tradition, you’re going to get something useful out of reading her.
That’s also why I would encourage you to read Lenny Duncan’s Dear Church, even if you’re not a Lutheran—I’m not, either—because the legacy of prejudice Rev. Duncan identifies within his own congregation is one we all have to confront.
I don’t have anything particularly insightful to tell you about writing just now. All I can do is point to these writers, who have done the work of grappling with their most profound concerns in order, as Thomas Jefferson says in that pivotal scene from 1776, “to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent.”
Whatever you’re writing, that ought to be your goal, too—and by reading these four books, you’ll not only see four ways to achieve that goal, you’ll learn to look at this world in a different way—and, I hope, join these four writers in striving to make it a better world.
You can also do some reading about the specific crisis of a systemically racist police state. There are actually two free ebooks available this week:Who Do You Serve? Who Do You Protect? from Haymarket Books and The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence from the University of Chicago Press.