BLACK LIVES MATTER | A READING LIST AND SOME DISCUSSION

As you all know, protests are taking place in cities throughout the USA and Canada – and in several other countries around the world. The death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man who was murdered by a police officer who knelt on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, was a flashpoint in a time of crisis. And, of course, it is far from being the only incident like this to take place. It seems like, finally, everyone around the world is talking about the injustice of Black deaths at the hands of police in the US – and by extension all the other forms of racism and oppression suffered by people of colour throughout history and all over the globe. More importantly, people are listening. We are looking to find out more about how to support the Black Lives Matter movement through educating ourselves, becoming aware of how racism exists in our communities and supporting local organizations working towards equality – or, even better, equity.

I am writing this to A) publicly state my support of the Black Lives Matter movement, B) use any reach I have to further that cause, and C) try to amplify Black voices in doing so. I’m not going to go into all my insecurities. Assume that the disclaimer every white person is making at the beginning of this discussion applies to me too. I’m also scared of saying something wrong, despite best intentions. But I’m more afraid of not saying anything. I will say something wrong or in the wrong way – probably in this post. But if I do, I hope I’ll either figure it out through research I’m doing to better educate myself so I can come back and fix it, or that someone will call me out and give me a chance to learn so I can do better. That’s the only way to evolve.

One of the things I keep coming up against while writing this post is the feeling that nothing I do can do as much as I want it to. I know no one person can fix racism, but I can’t even join in protests or stand up to racism because I can’t leave my house. It’s hard to find a place to start with such a huge problem. There might not be a lot I can actually do, but choosing to sit back and not even broach the subject isn’t good enough. The very fact that I have a choice in whether and to what degree I want to engage with discussions about race is a mark of my privilege, and a choice denied to many. I shouldn’t have that option. It should be something I have to confront every single day, and it should be something that marks my journey through the world. I won’t ever be able to understand the full weight of racism. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try. I may have no right to talk about this, but I can listen, I can read books by Black authors, and I can do my best to recommend those books to others. And if this process makes me uncomfortable, good. I should be. Compared to what Black people and people of colour have to face every time they walk out the door (or even when they turn on their computers) my discomfort is literally nothing.

When it comes to books by Black authors, I think it’s vital to go out of our way to seek out these books – not only because it’s important to let publishers know we want them to be putting more of their resources into seeking out and promoting them, but because these books are an easily accessible way to start learning about Black culture, history and perspectives. It’s great that books by Black authors are selling out in bookstores everywhere (try finding a physical copy of How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi anywhere), but why does it take Black people losing their lives for that to happen? Demand for Black authors should be at this level all the time. It’s great that white people are starting to realize the pervasiveness of racism and are willing to start standing beside Black people who need support, but that shouldn’t be a new thing. And I’m in no way exempt from this. I need to be more aware of opportunities to be vocal in my support and I need to take responsibility for trying to fill the gaps in my knowledge and awareness.

Because the main thing I hope to accomplish here is amplifying Black voices, and because nothing I say can come close to what Black people are telling us right now, I’d like to share some videos from Black members of the BookTube community about their experiences within the community, their frustration with being marginalized or ignored, their frustration with White people refusing to use their platforms to speak up and share vital information about Black Lives Matter, and telling us what it feels like for them right now. Their courage in speaking this honestly is amazing, especially when you consider the context. Some of them are actively protesting while being teargassed and shot with rubber bullets (Jesse from Bowties & Books) and all of them are dealing with a level of fear that is more accurately described as terror for every minute of every day. Many are discussing how they don’t even feel safe in their own homes or in their own beds after what happened to Breonna Taylor. This is the reality they are in while still finding time to explain to us what that feels like and ask us again and again to speak up with them. That’s a staggering burden. So please watch the links I’m putting below – but also take some time to follow links shared in these and other videos, do some searching yourself, because there are many, many more videos like these that deserve your attention, time and respect.

Francina Simone’s “This Video Is Sponsored by Oppression”

The Novel Lush’s “We Are Not Your Token Knee Grows”

Brown Girl Reading’s “A Chat”

Bowties & Books’ “Being Black On YouTube, Protests, & Fake Allies”

Bookish Realm’s “I Don’t Trust You, I Don’t Want Your Sympathy, & I Don’t Believe You // 6 Years As A Black BookTuber”

Bookish Realm’s “Town Hall: Race & Inclusion on BookTube”

There are so, so many more. But most seem to say a few things: If you have a platform to speak from, don’t stay quiet because you’re uncomfortable – silence is complicity. Don’t expect the Black people in your life to educate you on racism. Find ways to stand up and show that Black Lives Matter with your actions, not just by saying so on the internet (but also say so on the internet). If you’re asked to speak up or if you’re called out, don’t respond with defensiveness or excuses. Acknowledge, apologize, do better. (I’m paraphrasing and this is based on what I took away from the videos, so hopefully I got these right.)

Despite the fact that most of these videos include Black people saying they don’t bear responsibility for educating white people (there’s Google for that) they nonetheless continue to do exactly that. So watch. Subscribe to their channels – not just because they’re speaking out now, but for their past and ongoing amazing book content and to address bias in YouTube communities. Take note of the things they are saying they need you to do to help. Spend some time going down that YouTube rabbit hole that normally does nothing other than add unnecessarily to your TBR and take away hours of your life that you won’t ever get back to watch something that will actually give you something in return.  A better understanding of what it means to be Black. Outside of the bookish community there are a lot of important and informative videos you can easily find. Here are a few I came across and found very informative:

Emory University (Carol Anderson)’s “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Nation’s Divide”

TED (Baratunde Thurston)’s “How to Deconstruct Racism One Headline at a Time”

Francina Simone’s “Being Black”

TEDx Talks (Anthony Peterson)’s “What I Am Learning from My White Grandchildren – Truths About Race”

TEDx Talks (David Ikard)’s “The Dangers of Whitewashing Black History”

I started this post with the idea of putting together a list of books by Black authors. There are a couple of reasons I want to do this. First, because I’m hoping that having so many in one place will be inspiring and useful. Second, I wanted to find more books by Black authors to add to my own TBR. And finally, I feel incredibly helpless to make any kind of change. But as a reader, books are how I try to make sense of the world. So when it comes to a situation like this, I think they’re a good place to start interrogating how I think about race and looking at what I need to become more aware of. As White people, we are incredibly lucky that, through literature and film and the internet, we have access to the shared experiences of Black authors if only we make the effort to engage with them.

As I mentioned earlier in this post, bookstores are selling out of books by black authors right now, so instead of waiting for one of the titles you can’t get, take a look at this list and I guarantee you there will be another place to start – actually, many. I hope that this post will help some of you to find a few books you might not otherwise have discovered, and that it might encourage some discussion. It’s by no means an exhaustive list – that would literally be never-ending – it’s more a selection of the books I’ve come across in my reading life that I have either read and been impressed by, that appealed to me the most, or that I’ve seen discussed favourably. I’d love to hear your recommendations, your opinions of the books you have read from this list, and any other thoughts you may want to share.

The first thing I need to say before launching into my reading list is that I’m ashamed of how few of these books I’ve read from cover to cover. There are some I’ve read and that have had a deep impact on me. Others I’ve read part of but never finished. But the majority of these I haven’t read yet, and I’m starting to realize just how much of a gap there is in my knowledge and reading. I’m going to be working on changing that. So consider this largely my own TBR, one that I’ll be trying to make steady progress on, and continuing to add to. The list below is largely disordered, but I plan to keep adding to it and will be tidying it up and putting it in more of a structured order as I go along! (This post has already taken me two weeks to compile, so I feel like getting it out there is more important than perfecting it right now!)

Let’s start with some classic books by Black authors and/or on the topic of race – particularly of race in America:

Ain’t I a Woman and everything by bell hooks
Are Prisons Obsolete, An Autobiography and everything by Angela Y. Davis
Assata – Assata Shakur
The Autobiography of Malcolm X – Malcolm X and Alex Haley
Black Boy and Native Son and everything by Richard Wright
The Bluest Eye, Beloved and everything by Toni Morrison
The Color Purple and everything by Alice Walker
The Fire Next Time, Go Tell It on the Mountain and everything by James Baldwin
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and everything by Maya Angelou
Kindred and everything by Octavia E. Butler
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
A Raisin In the Sun – Lorraine Hansberry
Sister Outsider and everything by Audre Lorde
The Souls of Black Folk – W.E.B. Dubois
Soul On Ice – Eldridge Cleaver
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Barracoon and everything by Zora Neale Hurston
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
Twelve Years A Slave – Solomon Northup
Everything by Gwendolyn Brooks
Everything by Langston Hughes
Everything by Martin Luther King Jr.
Everything by Sojourner Truth

Contemporary Fiction and Poetry:

An American Marriage – Tayari Jones
Americanah and everything by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Another Brooklyn and Red at the Bone – Jacqueline Woodson
Behold the Dreamers – Imbolo Mbue
A Brief History of Seven Killings – Marlon James
Don’t Call Us Dead – Danez Smith
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere – ZZ Packer
Everything Inside – Edwidge Danticat
The Fifth Season – N.K. Jemison
Finding Gideon – Eric Jerome Dickey
Five-Carat Soul – James McBride
Freshwater – Akwaeke Emezi
Ghana Must Go – Taiye Selasi
The Girl with the Louding Voice – Abi Daré
Girl, Woman, Other – Bernardine Evaristo
Hell of a Book – Jason Mott
Homegoing and Transcendent Kingdom – Yaa Gyasi
How Beautiful We Were – Imbolo Mbue
How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House – Cherie Jones
I Almost Forgot About You – Terry McMillan
Indigo – Beverly Jenkins
Long Way Down – Jason Reynolds and Danica Novgorodoff
Loving Day – Mat Johnson
The Mothers and The Vanishing Half – Brit Bennett
My Sister the Serial Killer – Oyinkan Braithwaite
New People – Danzy Senna
Nightcrawling – Leila Mottley
Open Water – Caleb Azumah Nelson
Ordinary People – Diana Evans
Patsy – Nicole Dennis-Benn
Poor – Caleb Femi
The Prophets – Robert Jones, Jr.
Queenie – Candace Carty-Williams
Remembered – Yvonne Battle-Felton
The Rose That Grew from Concrete – Tupac Shakur
Ruby – Cynthia Bond
The Runaways – Fatima Bhutto
Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing – Jesmyn Ward
The Sellout – Paul Beatty
Seven Days In June – Tia Williams
The Shadow King – Maaza Mengiste
Stay with Me – Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀
Such A Fun Age – Kiley Reid
This Mournable Body – Tsitsi Dangarembga
The Trees – Percival Everett
The Twelve Tribes of Hattie – Ayana Mathis
The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys – Colson Whitehead
The Water Dancer – Ta-Nehisi Coates
We Cast a Shadow – Maurice Carlos Ruffin
Welcome to Braggsville – T. Geronimo Johnson
We Need New Names – Noviolet Bulawayo
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours – Helen Oyeyemi
What We Lose – Zinzi Clemmons
White Teeth and Grand Union – Zadie Smith

Contemporary Non-Fiction/Memoir:

The 1619 Project – Nikole Hannah-Jones
All Involved – Ryan Gattis
An African-American and LatinX History of the United States – Paul Ortiz
The Antiracist Handbook: Practical Tools to Shift Your Mindset and Uproot Racism in Your Life and Community – Thema Bryant and Edith G. Arrington
Bad Feminist – Roxane Gay
Barracoon – Zora Neale Hurston
Becoming – Michelle Obama
Between the World and Me and We Were Eight Years In Power – Ta-Nehisi Coates
A Black Woman’s History of the United States – Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross
Black Fatigue: How Racism Erodes the Mind, Body, and Spirit – Mary-Frances Winters
Black Fortunes – Shomari Wills
Black Is the Body – Emily Bernard
Born a Crime – Trevor Noah (another great audiobook!)
Brit(ish) – Afua Hirsch
Brown Baby – Nikesh Shukla
Chokehold – Paul Butler
Citizen and Just Us – Claudia Rankine
The Color of Law – Richard Rothstein
A Different Mirror – Ronald Takaki
Dreams from My Father – Barack Obama
Eloquent Rage – Brittney Cooper
Entertaining Race: Performing Blackness in America – Michael Eric Dyson
Finding Me – Viola Davis
The Fire This Time – Jesmyn Ward, ed.
The Girl Who Smiled Beads – Clemantine Wamariya
Growing Up Ethnic In America – Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan (eds.)
Heavy – Kiese Laymon
Hood Feminism – Mikki Kendall
How to Be an Antiracist and How to Raise an Antiracist – Ibram X. Kendi
How to be Black – Baratunde Thurston (great audiobook!)
How We Fight for Our Lives – Saeed Jones
I’m Still Here – Austin Channing Brown
It Was All A Dream – Reniqua Allen
Just Mercy – Bryan Stevenson
Killing the Black Body – Dorothy Roberts
Known and Strange Things – Teju Cole
Locking Up Our Own – James Forman Jr.
Manifesto: On Never Giving Up – Bernardine Evaristo
The Matter of Black Lives: Writing from the New Yorker – Jelani Cobb (ed.), David Remnick (ed.)
Me and White Supremacy – Layla F. Saad
Men We Reaped – Jesmyn Ward
More Than Enough – Elaine Welteroth
Natives – Akala
The New Jim Crow – Michelle Alexander
On Critical Race Theory – Victor Ray
One Day It’ll All Make Sense and Let Love Have the Last Word – Common
Ordinary Light – Tracy K. Smith
A Promised Land – Barack Obama
Punch Me Up to the Gods – Brian Broome
Raceless – Georgina Lawton
Raising Antiracist Children: A Practical Parenting Guide – Britt Hawthorne and Natasha Yglesias
Redefining Realness – Janet Mock
Rest In Power – Sybrina Fulton
She Came to Slay – Erica Armstrong Dunbar
The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace – Jeff Hobbs
Since I Laid My Burden Down – Brontez Purnell
So You Want to Talk About Race – Ijeoma Oluo
Solitary – Albert Woodfox
Stamped from the Beginning – Ibram X. Kendi
The Sun Does Shine – Anthony Ray Hinton
They Can’t Kill Us All – Wesley Lowery
They Were Her Property – Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
This Bright Future – Bobby Hall
Tears We Cannot Stop and What Truth Sounds Like – Michael Eric Dyson
Thick – Tressie McMillan Cottom
This Will Be My Undoing – Morgan Jerkins
The Trayvon Generation – Elizabeth Alexander
Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man – Emmanuel Acho
Understanding and Dismantling Racism – Joseph Barndt
We Gon’ Be Alright and Who We Be – Jeff Chang
We Live for the We – Dani McClain
Well-Read Black Girl – Glory Edim
What I Know for Sure – Oprah Winfrey
When They Call You a Terrorist – Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandela
White Fragility – Robin DiAngelo
White Rage – Carol Anderson
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together In the Cafeteria? – Beverly Daniel Tatum
Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race – Renni Eddo-Lodge
Wow, No Thank You. and We Are Never Meeting in Real Life – Samantha Irby
The Yellow House – Sarah M. Broom
You Are Your Best Thing – Tarana Burke and Brené Brown, eds

Books for Young Readers:

All American Boys – Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely
Black Enough – Ibi Zoboi
Brown Boy Joy – Dr. Tomishia Booker
Brown Girl Dreaming – Jacqueline Woodson
Celeste’s Harlem Renaissance – Eleanora E. Tate
Children of Blood and Bone – Tomi Adeyemi
The Colors of Us – Karen Katz
Copper Sun – Sharon Draper
Daddy Calls Me Man – Angela Johnson and Rhonda Mitchell (Illustrator)
The Day You Begin – Jacqueline Woodson and Rafael López
Dear Martin – Nic Stone
Don’t Touch My Hair – Sharee Miller
Firebird – Misty Copeland and Christopher Myers
Ghost – Jason Reynolds
Ghost Boys – Jewell Parker Rhodes
Grandpa Cacao – Elizabeth Zunon
Hair Love – Matthew A. Cherry and Vashti Harrison (Illustrator)
Happy to Be Nappy – bell hooks and Chris Raschka
The Hate U Give and On the Come Up – Angie Thomas
How To Read A Book – Kwame Alexander and Melissa Sweet (Illustrator)
I Am Enough – Grace Byers and Keturah A. Bobo (Illustrator)
I Love My Hair! – Natasha Anastasia Tarpley and E.B. Lewis (Illustrator)
Imani’s Moon – Janay Brown-Wood, Hazel Mitchell (Illustrator)
Knock Knock – Daniel Beaty and Bryan Collier (Illustrator)
Little Leaders and Leaders & Dreamers – Vashti Harrison and Kwesi Johnson
Lullaby (for a Black Mother) – Langston Hughes, Sean Qualls (Illustrator)
Miami Jackson Gets It Straight – Patricia and Frederick McKissack and Michael Chesworth (Illustrator)
Mixed Me – Taye Diggs and Shane W. Evans (Illustrator)
Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters – John Steptoe
My Brother Charlie – Holly Robinson Peete, Ryan Elizabeth Peete and Shane Evans (Illustrator)
One Crazy Summer – Rita Williams-Garcia
Please, Baby, Please – Spike Lee and Tonya Lewis Lee
Schomburg – Carole Boston Weatherford and Eric Velasquez (Illustrator)
The Snowy Day – Ezra Jack Keats
Stamped – Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi
Sulwe – Lupita Nyong’o and Vashti Harrison
Tar Beach – Faith Ringgold
Trombone Shorty – Troy Andrews and Bryan Collier (Illustrator)
The Watsons Go To Birmingham – Christopher Paul Curtis

One thing I’ve been realizing in recent years is how little we discuss the current and historical relationship between Canada and its Black citizens. I think there’s an assumption that Canada is a benign, multi-cultural and open-minded place. This perception is erroneous and harmful. We have a history of slavery. We have racism. We have police brutality. We have systemic bias. We have a lot of issues, but we often don’t acknowledge or talk about them because it’s easy to compare ourselves favourably to our southern neighbour and end the discussion there. But it’s time we started to learn about the reality of race relations in Canada, because there’s no way to change something you don’t even talk about. It’s harder to find non-fiction books about Black issues in Canada, but not impossible. And there are some brilliant Black Canadian authors writing amazing fiction, too. I’ve found it a little bit easier to find Indigenous Canadian voices, another important topic of related discussion (if this post seems to be helpful I might do another on Indigenous Canadian books at a later point). There are resources out there, and hopefully we will soon have more. It’s in the list below, but I’d highly recommend starting with Policing Black Lives by Robyn Maynard. She concisely and eloquently introduces vital information missing from school curricula, and discusses pretty much every angle of race in Canada. I’m reading this one right now.

Canadian Books:

Africville – Jeffrey Colvin
Angry Queer Somali Boy – Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali
Any Known Blood and The Book of Negroes – Lawrence Hill
Black Writers Matter – Whitney French, ed.
BlackLife – Rinaldo Walcott and Idil Abdillahi
Blank – M. NourbeSe Philip
Brother and I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You – David Chariandy
Brown Girl In the Ring – Nalo Hopkinson
Butter Honey Pig Bread – Francesca Ekwuyasi
Dominoes at the Crossroads and Magnetic Equator – Kaie Kellough
Emancipation Day – Wayne Grady
Execution Poems – George Elliott Clarke
Frying Plantain – Zalika Reid-Benta
Gutter Child – Jael Richardson
Half Blood Blues and Washington Black – Esi Edugyan
The Hanging of Angelique – Afua Cooper
The Heart Does Not Bend – Makeda Silvera
How She Read – Chantal Gibson
In the Black – B. Denham Jolly
Land to Light On and What We All Long For – Dionne Brand
No Crystal Stair – Mairuth Sarsfield
North of the Colour Line – Sarah-Jane Mathieu
One World – Anuradha Rao
Policing Black Lives – Robyn Maynard
The Polished Hoe and ‘Membering – Austin Clarke
Queer Returns – Rinaldo Walcott
The Return – Dany Laferrière
Shame On Me – Tessa McWatt
Shut Up You’re Pretty – Téa Mutonji
The Skin We’re In – Desmond Cole
Son of Elsewhere – Elamin Abdelmahmoud
Sonnet’s Shakespeare – Sonnet L’Abbé
They Call Me George – Cecil Foster
They Said This Would Be Fun – Eternity Martis
Things Are Good Now – Djamila Ibrahim
Until We Are Free – Rodney Diverlus, Sandy Hudson and Syrus Marcus Ware, eds.

Some things to watch:

13th
Fruitvale Station
Black Panthers
Just Mercy
When They See Us
Dear White People
If Beale Street Could Talk
Hidden Figures
Whose Streets
Who Killed Malcolm X?

How to get involved:

Support Black-owned businesses. Penguin Random House Canada has put together a list of Black-owned bookstores in Canada that you can find here. There’s also a list by Black Canada of Black-owned arts and bookstores here. Afrobiz.ca has a list of Black-owned businesses in Vancouver, BC here. And Populist has a list of 21 more Black-owned businesses in Vancouver here.

There are a lot of petitions online that you can sign, Change.org’s petition calling for justice for George Floyd can be found here (it has over 17,000,000 signatures and has broken records). I read an article that says donations made through Change.org are being siphoned off to the company rather than going towards the cause, so bear that in mind and find other places to put your donations. I’d suggest searching on Google for the type of organization you want to donate to (whether one supporting Black Lives Matter, one specifically focusing on legal aid or legal reform or groups that are working at a grassroots level within Black communities – also if you want to find somewhere local to where you live to donate) and checking multiple articles to see which organizations seem to be popping up on more than one reliable list of where to donate. Also read through the websites of any organization you are considering donating to looking for information on where donated funds go. Make sure it’s an organization that has been around for a while, not one that has just popped up in the last few weeks as those might be more likely to be scammers cashing in. Look for organizations that have a long track record of proven work in the community. You can also find a lot of links organizations that need support in BookTube videos that are talking about this issue. I know Books and Lala has a ton in the info for her recent live video, so that’s a good place to start.

If you’re local to my area and looking for some places to start, you can visit Black Lives Matter Vancouver here. There’s a helpful list of other organizations you might want to consider supporting published by The Georgia Straight here.

I’m no expert on this – my suggestions are based on some Googling, common sense and little else. So you can easily find plenty more information by doing that yourself! And if you know of any other sites that list Canadian or British Columbian Black-owned businesses or have any local organizations you’re familiar with and want to raise support for, drop a link in the comments. Likewise if you know of any Black-owned bookstores anywhere else that will ship to Canada so we can support them, please share that information!

Now it’s your turn. The purpose of writing this post was to try to expand my knowledge base on this vital issue, and to hopefully help some of you find some books you might not have found yet. Since the whole point of this is to learn and to unlearn, I welcome any feedback. Share anything you want on the topic (as long as, of course, it is respectful and in the spirit of this post). If you want to share information, I’d welcome it. And of course, if you have more books or other resources to add to this list absolutely share them below. I’d particularly love to hear from any Canadians out there who have Canadian information, resources or recommendations to share. If you know of organizations who are doing vital work and need support, drop a link. And thank you for reading this and for your patience with any errors I might have made in this post. I’ll be updating it to add new books as I find them, and to reflect anything I learn from feedback or in my own search for more information and understanding.

For those of you protesting right now, thank you for doing what I can’t, and please try to stay safe!