An essential #BlackLivesMatter reading list
Listening is as important as speaking, now more than ever
At times of injustice – and we are in a time of great injustice – listening is as important as speaking. We must speak out against injustice, of course, but we must know too to which voices we must listen, and which voices we must amplify. #BlackLivesMatter is no more than a slogan without work put into understanding where injustice springs from and how best to help. A few years ago, the songwriter and storyteller Courtney Ariel wrote a terrific piece on the website of Sojourners, a Washington D.C.-based social justice movement. “For our white friends desiring to be allies” is powerful piece about what she calls the holy work of justice: “Keep showing up,” she writes. “Be compassionate. Lead with empathy, always. Keep learning and growing.”
A reading list can be part of walking that path: here, in alphabetical order, are a few suggestions.
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“The only reason you say that race is not an issue is because you wish it was not,” says Ifemelu, the protagonist of Adichie’s 2013 novel, an engrossing story and sharp-eyed look at the non-American black experience in the United States, in Adichie’s native Nigeria, and beyond.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness By Michelle Alexander
Alexander is an American civil rights lawyer and legal scholar; in her ground-breaking book she analyses the rebirth of a race-based caste in the United States: millions of Americans are locked behind bars and relegated to second-class citizenship by the criminal justice system. Devastating.
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
First published in 1963, Baldwin’s book was a bestseller in its day and is just as necessary now – alas. Taking the form of two essays, one a letter to his then 14-year-old nephew, Baldwin’s voice is as powerful and influential as it ever was in looking at systemic racism in the United States.
Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge
Gal-Dem called this debut “the black British bible”. It began with a 2014 blog post addressed to those who refused to recognise the structural racism of British society, to those who “truly believe that the experiences of their life as a result of their skin colour can and should be universal.” It’s a dramatic recognition of what she calls “white denial”
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
Winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, Evaristo’s novel follows the lives of a dozen British people, predominantly female, predominantly black. The different storylines of the characters – who range in age from 19 to 93 – are engrossing and empathetic, portraits of struggle, imagination and perseverance.
Brit(ish) by Afua Hirsch
Hirsch is the daughter of a black Ghanaian woman and a white English man; her book is part memoir, part history, part polemic, an interrogation of her own identity and an examination of the roots of prejudice, taking to task those progressives who claim they “don’t see colour”.
Barracoon: The Story of the ‘Last Black Cargo’ by Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston is best known for her novel Their Eyes were Watching God, first published in 1937. She was an anthropologist as well as a novelist: Barracoon is the fruit of Hurston’s interviews with Cudjo Lewis, née Oluale Kossola, the last survivor of the Atlantic slave trade. Hurston couldn’t get it published in her lifetime; it first appeared in print in 2018.
Citizen by Claudia Rankine
“Part documentary, part lyric procedural,” wrote Dan Chiasson in the New Yorker of this book-length poem which won the 2014 National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Poetry. Haunting, personal, closely-observed, Rankine brings contemporary American racial politics into tight focus. “Because white men can’t/ police their imagination/ black men are dying."
The Good Immigrant ed. Nikesh Shukla
These 21 essays by black, Asian and minority ethnic writers comprise “a document of what it means to be a person of colour” in Britain today, writes Shukla. Published by Unbound, the crowdfunded website, the book received a huge boost with a £5,000 donation by J. K. Rowling; a companion volume for American writers was published to great acclaim last year. There is a terrific diversity of voices and experiences in both.
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