Prophets of the Hood

by Imani Perry (2004). How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America is indebted to at least six books. Perry’s survey of hip-hop gave me critical language to talk about Black art and the profits taken by the culture cradling, and often crucifying, Black art. Her riffs on the profane, the sacred, and the “reunion” of the two are the bricks of HSKY, especially HSKY’s pieces about music and power.

by James Baldwin (1955). This will always be the O.G. essay collection. It is the standard I will always unsuccessfully try to meet with my own essay books. Some of the essays in Baldwin’s book aren’t great; they’re more like useful exposition to get us to the next monument. And the great ones are some of the greatest essays ever written. The book blows my mind.

Notes of a Native Son

edited by Danille K. Taylor-Guthrie (1994). This collection of interviews informed HSKY’s way of addressing itself to a village. The good thing about not having an editor for the original version of my first book was that I wrote the essays directly to

Conversations With Toni Morrison

the people the essays are about. Toni Morrison made that desire possible.

by Toni Morrison (1987). Morrison’s great novel inspired me to embrace multiple interpretations of what it means to die.

Beloved

by Bell Hooks (1999). A deeply underrated book, All About Love gave me permission to ask scary questions of myself before asking scary questions of other folks.

All About Love

by Jesmyn Ward (2013). My cousin’s memoir is really a tutorial on the overwhelming love among Black Southerners and an indictment of the state-sanctioned destruction of our bodies. We’re all dying, but in Mississippi, it seems like some of us can’t afford to believe in tomorrow. Re-reading Men We Reaped made me know I needed to buy back the rights to my first book so that I could leave my people a version that we owned and shaped completely. Men We Reaped helped me love myself enough to take back what should never have been shared with folks who didn’t love us. That, sometimes, feels like everything.

Men We Reaped

in The Wall Street Journal. As a veritable highlight reel of the Met’s 2 million–piece collection, “the exhibition serves as a ringing endorsement of two essential concepts: the encyclopedic museum, an Enlightenment notion aimed at celebrating the diversity of world cultures, and the idea of a democratic culture, in which private generosity makes great artworks accessible to citizens of every stripe.” Rodin, van Gogh, and Marilyn Monroe (in a 1957 Richard Avedon photograph) comingle in the very first gallery, and as you proceed, “the sweep and quality are even more head-spinning”: drawings by Michelangelo, textiles from the Andes, an enormous contemporary wall hanging by Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui. (A taste of the show can be had at metmuseum.org or ArtsandCulture .google.com.) “Unfortunately, no exhibition today is complete without its share of woke labeling,” and so we’re reminded that the Altmans, the Havemeyers, and other key donors built fortunes that required worker exploitation. “Prospective Met benefactors, take note.”

The making of a museum as ambitious as the Met couldn’t help but be messy, said Jonathon Keats in Forbes.com. The museum has always been different things to different people: a tourist destination, a teaching tool, a repository of gold-standard design that inspires creative professionals, and, yes, a place that benefited from colonialist plunder and allowed art-loving plutocrats to burnish their reputations. But the world is messy, and an encyclopedic museum aspires to present the world in microcosm, so messiness need not be debilitating. That’s why the Met staff should be applauded for mixing a celebration with a reckoning. “To appreciate the Met is to recognize what many communities stand to lose if their museums close. To scrutinize the Met is to assess what needs to change as museums reopen.”