Books about race knocking typical summer reads off shelf
I’m here to admit that I know nothing. As a privileged white person, I may have thought I understood the pain and tragedy of being black in America. But I didn’t. Despite the marches I’ve participated in, the donations I’ve made, the nonwhite friends I have, I’ve been clueless.
The horror of George Floyd’s death and the worldwide reaction has made one thing very evident to me: It’s time for people like me to stop talking and listen. It’s also time for people of my generation to step aside and let the young people lead. We blew it. We need a complete overhaul of law enforcement in this country.
The best way I learn is by reading. One piece of good news coming out of this horror show is that there are now lots of other people hungry to educate themselves. This past week, almost all the topselling books on Amazon and Barnes & Noble have been about race and antiracism. Indie bookstores say the same. Ditto five out of 15 on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list.
Wow. They’re blowing the traditional summer reads off the shelf — not that this is a summer like any we’ve ever experienced.
There’s so much great material out there to educate us. Many of us came of age with black authors such as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright. Go back and read them again. They still have a great deal to tell us.
There’s a whole new generation of writers talking about race in America. Jesmyn Ward, whose novels include “Salvage the Bones” and “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” has a 2013 memoir titled “Men We Reaped” which, in the prologue, she calls a response to the “silence … of our substantial rage, our collective grief.”
Ward takes the title of her memoir from a quote by abolitionist Harriet Tubman, who was recalling an 1863 battle she witnessed between an allblack Northern regiment and Confederate forces at Fort Wagner in Charleston, S.C.
“We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns,” Tubman had said, “and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.”
In Ward’s heartbreaking, stunningly personal book, she traces the violent deaths of five young men: her adored brother, cousins and close friends. Her story takes place in coastal Mississippi where she grew up and in New Orleans. The Southern setting is an intrinsic part of the story.
She writes of “the degradations that come from a life of poverty exacerbated by maleness and Blackness and fatherlessness in the South …” concluding, with tragic resignation, “By the numbers, by all the official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing.”
This is a book that brings home, to any of us who have become desensitized, that every killing of a young black man represents a human being with a mother, a father, siblings, friends and aspirations that will never be realized. This is crucial knowledge.
Ibram X. Kendi, whose latest book is “How to Be an Antiracist,” is one of our leading scholars of race and discriminatory policy. His 2016 book, “Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” takes us on a historical tour of our country’s racist ideas with five guides: New England scholar Cotton Mather, President Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, sociologist W.E.B. DuBois and activist/author Angela Davis. These five, argues Kendi, “have sat at the apex of debates between assimilationists and segregationists, or between racists and antiracists, and this provides a window to those debates.”
He started writing the book in the middle of Barack Obama’s presidency and “between the heartbreaks of Trayvon Martin, Rekia Boyd, Michael Brown, Freddy Gray, the Charleston 9 and Sandra Bland.” He says that, despite widespread shock and disbelief, the election of Donald Trump was consistent with American history.
With Obama’s victory, he explains, “the Trumps of the nation did not retire to their sunny estates in Florida. They created and sometimes succeeded in putting new and more sophisticated barriers in place, like the great grandchildren of Jim Crow voting laws, the new age voter ID laws that are disenfranchising black Americans in the twentyfirst century.”
Dedicated “to the lives they said didn’t matter,” “Stamped From the Beginning” exposes the depth and extent of racist ideas throughout the course of America’s existence.
Clearly reading is not enough. What we learn must translate into action, how we live, what we demand from our legislators, how we vote. But the first step is listening and admitting we have a lot to learn.