Hey, White People: Please Read This (And These)

Posted July 17, 2020

Over the past couple of months, I’ve seen numerous posts and op-eds entreating white people to stop asking black people to explain their painful experiences while we lay the burden of overcoming white supremacy at their feet. Too often, we ask them, “How can we help?” and “How does it feel?” without making the effort to do the research or seek understanding for ourselves. The burden of our ignorance should not be theirs; they already carry burdens of blackness that white people can only imagine, although trying to imagine is exactly what we need to do. The resources already exist: articles, books, films, podcasts, etc., and the message is clear: it must be up to white people to find and use those resources, and to turn what we learn into effective allyship.

When the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and others reignited efforts to bring justice and equity to BIPOC, I began to see more and more lists of nonfiction book recommendations for topics relating to black history, systemic racism, and how to be an ally. While it is true that exposition can help us comprehend our violent national history and gain knowledge omitted from or diluted by our K-12 educations, facts don’t compel us to act in the way that emotions do. Instead, it’s from individual stories of suffering and marginalization that we begin to contemplate experiences that are different from our own. These sorts of narratives can certainly be nonfictional, as in a memoir, but they’re often emotionally confessional, meaning the author shares their inner self willingly. We don’t have to employ our empathy to understand what’s going on in their mind. Literary fiction, though, requires readers to think critically about what a character might be thinking or feeling. So, when we read literature written from the black perspective, we are invited to set aside our lens of whiteness and consider how it feels to experience the world through a lens of blackness instead.

I’ve been reflecting on why some people feel the need to answer, “Black lives matter” with “All lives matter.” It seems to me that the latter statement is glaringly obvious and unnecessary, a given, while the former statement is necessary because it is not a given at all. When I hear, “All lives matter,” I see an inability, or worse, a refusal to imagine what it’s like to be a black person. I see a lack of belief in the experiences of others because we haven’t experienced the same. “That’s never happened to me, so it probably doesn’t happen” or “I’ve never seen that happen, so it must not be true.” At the root of that sort of thinking is a basic failure to empathize, and that’s why we all need to be reading black fiction.

As an English Literature major, I was assigned Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children, and the novellas within are still with me years later. Reading it was transformative, for it was one thing to know that slavery and the Jim Crow era that followed was devastating for Black Americans, but it was another to feel the despair and subjugation conveyed in Wright’s collection. It helped me better understand the deeply painful generational trauma Black Americans carry with them in a way that history books did not. The truth is that although I have always been a voracious reader, it’s likely that if it wasn’t required reading, Uncle Tom’s Children, along with several other works of black literary fiction I read as an undergrad, would never have landed on my TBR list. Now, though, I have become intentional in my efforts to read fictional narratives that offer insight into blackness, and I believe that in order to eradicate systemic racism and heal our country, my fellow white people must be just as intentional.

So, I share here a short list of literary fiction, along with a handful of YA, middle reader, and early reader/picture book recommendations, all written by black authors from the black perspective.

Uncle Tom’s Children – Richard Wright
Americanah – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Sula – Toni Morrison
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
NW – Zadie Smith
Kindred – Octavia E. Butler
Cane – Jean Toomer
The Hate U Give – Angie Thomas
Long Way Down – Jason Reynolds
The Skin I’m In – Sharon G. Flake
The Crossover – Kwame Alexander
Max & the Tag-Along Moon – Floyd Cooper
Peeny Butter Fudge – Toni Morrison & Slade Morrison
Tar Beach – Faith Ringgold – 1996

Happy Reading!

Blog written by Amanda Jo Pomeroy

Infographic created by Michelle Keller