Fight against racism in books
It is easy to feel helpless while reading the news of this period, especially when it comes to racial injustice. But you can still try to help out, for example by signing petitions launched by Change.org and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Another useful thing we can do? To deepen our knowledge of the history of systemic racism in America and in the world. We have chosen for you a series of works that will help you better understand the fight against racism and the context in which the protests following the disappearance of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American who died while in custody and stuck on the ground by an officer from the Minneapolis Police Department who held his knee on the man's neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds.
Freedom is a constant struggle by Angela Davis
After the tragic death of George Floyd, there were many sentences from activist Angela Davis that went viral on social media, but there is much more that we can learn from the Black Power icon beyond the slogans to be posted on Instagram. Start with Freedom is a constant struggle (Ponte alle Grazie 2016), a collection of thoughts and essays on the most varied topics, from the heritage of Apartheid to the meaning of Ferguson's protests to the many ways in which racism has clouded feminist thinking over the years.
Next time, the fire by James Baldwin
A classic of the Civil Rights Movement, Next time, the fire - Two letters (Feltrinelli 1995) is divided into two parts: the first is a letter that Baldwin wrote to his 14-year-old grandson on the occasion of the hundred years since the abolition of slavery; the second is a powerful reflection on the years of the author's education in Harlem. As far as you tell Baldwin's totally justified anger at the conditions in which the country was in the 1960s, in many respects the book is a stimulating and hopeful reading. "If we - and I mean us whites and we relatively aware niggers, to whom, as lovers, it is up to awaken or create awareness in others too - we do not fail in our duty now, we will be able, we manipulate men , to end the racial nightmare, to shape our country and to change the history of the world ".
beloved by Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison's masterpiece, Pulitzer Prize 1988, tells about the collective trauma of slaves and their descendants. Inspired by a true story reported by the American Baptist in 1856, the novel focuses on the figure of Sethe, a mother and slave probably "escaped" from the fictitious plantation "Sweet Home" to go and live in the free state of Ohio, but persecuted, literally and metaphorically, from the ghosts of its tragic past. As the woman says, "Freeing up was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self another." A demonstration of the novel's great strength, and a lesson of profound empathy.
Between me and the world by Ta-Nehisi Coates
"I'm writing to you in your fifteenth year." Ta-Nehisi Coates points out at the beginning of his long letter to his son. "I'm writing to you because this is the year you saw Eric Garner die suffocated from selling cigarettes: because now you know that Renisha McBride was hit by a bullet while asking for help, that John Crawford was shot because he was giving a ' look at the supermarket shelves. And you saw uniformed men shoot out of the car and kill Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy they had sworn to protect. And you saw men in that same uniform punching someone's grandmother Marlene Pinnock on the side of the road. So now you know, if you haven't figured it out before, that the police in your country have been given the authority to destroy your body. " These heartbreaking words are followed by a subtle analysis of the centrality of racism in America and an important study on the evolution of the fictitious concept of "whiteness".
From here, the contents in English Men We Reaped, by Jesmyn Ward
In addition to his intense novels Save the bones is Sing Spirit Sing (published in Italy by NNEditore) the writer of the National Book Award Jesmyn Ward is also the author of a shocking memoir, Men We Reaped, which tells of the death of five young black men in five years of his life. Men "blocked by poverty and history and racism". The title winks at a verse by the activist for the abolition of slavery Harriet Tubman pronounced after a battle during the Civil War in which many African American soldiers lost their lives: "We heard thunder, and it was heavy weapons; and then we heard the rain fall, and it was the spilled blood; and then we went to harvest the crops, and it was dead men that we collected. "
Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge
Structural racism is by no means a problem affecting the US alone, Reni Eddo-Lodge makes clear in his book Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race. The title echoes the post that Eddo-Lodge published on his blog in 2014, which then went viral, in which she said she was tired of trying to reason with whites who "live their lives by denying that the color of their skin is the norm, and that that of all the others is a deviation from theirs ". The book delves into this concept, condemning the deceptive nature of the "white privilege" and tracing the ramifications of racial prejudice in the United Kingdom, from slavery to lynchings that had spread rapidly in major British cities after the First World War.
They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, And A New Era In America's Racial Justice Movement, by Wesley Lowery
As a reporter for the Washington Post, Wesley Lowery spent much of President Obama's second term traveling from city to city to write about the deaths of unarmed blacks by white police officers such as Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and Freddie Gray. They Can't Kill Us All it begins with the violent arrest of the same journalist during the protests of Ferguson for not having "dispersed", he was told, quickly enough when the police had cleared a McDonald's, and then continues telling while the evolution of the movement is at the forefront Black Lives Matter. An essential reading right now.
Inglorious Empire: What The British Did To India by Shashi Tharoor
Written by a former United Nations diplomat who was later a member of the Indian National Congress in New Delhi, Inglorious Empire firmly rejects any romantic idea of colonization in India. Published in the aftermath of Brexit, the book documents the systematic submission of a country that had 23 percent of global economic power at the beginning of the 18th century, a figure that plummeted to 3 percent after the British left India . And at a time when Britain dusts off its imperialist fantasies, it is a book to read immediately.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In The Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
As Ava DuVernay pointed out in his extraordinary documentary 13th (available on Netflix), the 13th amendment of the American Constitution prohibits slavery "except as punishment for a crime for which the party has been found guilty in due form". Civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander reflects on the many ways in which this quibble has been exploited, trying to understand why the number of prisoners in America has grown from around 300,000 to more than two million between the 80s and 2010. His theory is that the drug war launched by President Reagan turned out to be "a surprisingly thorough and well-studied race-based social control system that works incredibly similar to the Jim Crow laws." NB: At the end of 2019, as many as 4.7% of all millennial black males in the U.S. were in prison, according to a study conducted by the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality.
The Good Immigrant: 21 Writers Explore What It Means To Be Black, Asian, And Minority Ethnic In Britain Today curated by Nikesh Shukla
Edited by British journalist Nikesh Shukla, this crowdfunded collection of essays includes contributions from Reni Eddo-Lodge, Riz Ahmed and Vinay Patel, among others, who offer their personal perspective on racism so deeply rooted in the UK. The idea for a book about racial problems in Britain stems from a comment under one of Shukla's articles for the Guardian. "I was sick and tired of the preconception that if a black person has an opportunity, it is never because of merit or ability," he said of his project. Focused on the simplistic idea that the "good" immigrant is that represented by the Olympic gold medal athlete of BAME origin (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic, Ed) and that the "bad" immigrant on the contrary is the one considered only a parasite that freezes public money, the book, which Shukla describes as "a document of what it means to be a black person today", explores the theme of "constant anxiety" at the center of the immigrant's experience.
Barracoon: The Story Of The Last Slave by Zora Neale Hurston
"Of all the millions of men brought from Africa to the Americas, only one man remains. His name is Cudjo Lewis and he currently lives in Plateau, Alabama, on the outskirts of Mobile. And this is the story of Cudjo ". Start like this Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston, a collection of interviews between the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God and the last known survivor of the 1927 Middle Passage, the passage of slaves across the Atlantic. The personal story of Cudjo - left in his poetic dialect - intertwines the stories of Hurston, who tries in every way to convince the man to be interviewed: he shows up at his door with baskets full of Georgia peaches and a "box of Bee Brand insecticide powder "to eliminate mosquitoes. A book of fundamental importance and deeply satisfying.
Your Silence Will Not Protect You by Audre Lorde
"I will not be free as long as there are other women prisoners, even if their chains are very different from mine," Audre Lorde said in a relevant speech in Connecticut in 1981. "And I will not be free as long as a black person remains submissive . None of you will be. " All the works of Lorde, who describes herself as "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet" deserve to be read more than once, but this collection of her most important speeches and writings is the most immediate and intense way of knowing her revolutionary voice.
This article was originally published on British Tips Clear.
