Book Choices on Racial Oppression and Anti-Racism

Ryan Ko 

The Black Lives Matter movement has shone a light not only on the extent of racism, but has exposed how many of us are ignorant of and know too little about the history of racial oppression, myself included. As many of us are allies and cannot truly relate to the experience of black citizens in the UK and USA, we can still try our hardest to understand the role of power in systemic oppression, the history of British Imperialism and how to be actively anti-racist. 

Books are a great source of this knowledge, both fiction and non-fiction, and I hope we can all start reading more on such topics so that we are all better equipped to fight injustice when we see it. Miss Ramsay-Overall has prepared an amazing list of books on the BAMESOC Google Classroom – it is also constantly updated with other resources. Do join! Code: 5mbi7ra.  Today's post offers some further starting points for reading, very kindly contributed by members of the SPS community and their friends.  

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Recommended by musician and activist Leon John

'I knew that [he] was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country and all the fears that have marked it from birth.'

I bought this book the day before George Floyd was murdered by the police. It was the murder of another black man by police that partly spurred Coates to write Between the World and Me. Michael Brown was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. In 2015 that officer was cleared of all charges. Throughout the book Coates returns to another shooting of a black man by police, a friend of his from college, Prince Jones. This is who the above quote is about. But it could just as easily be about George Floyd. Or Trayvon Martin, the young man whose killing led to the founding of the Black Lives Matter movement back in 2013. Or any of the many black men and women who were murdered for being black in the 7 years between, or the decades before. 

 
The book takes the form of a letter written by Coates to his teenage son, and is a biography of sorts, where through the sharing of personal experience and anecdotes Coates examines the ways in which black Americans are still chained by the construct of blackness, chained by a system that requires someone to be at the bottom in order for those at the top to prosper: 'being named ‘black’ was just someone’s name for being at the bottom, a human turned to object, object turned to pariah'.

Coates recounts his childhood in Baltimore, his college years at Howard University, and his early experiences as a father in New York. In each of these phases of his life Coates questions his own views of the system in which he exists. This system will never allow black people to succeed, and highlights those that do as singular, special and different from the rest. Of successful black people Coates says: 'they [are] singled out, made examples of, transfigured into parables of diversity'. This singling out is something I myself have experienced, and something I resist wherever possible. Some of us are seen as the acceptable face of black people. We are told that we are not like the others, or we are different from other black people, or we are alright, or intelligent, or well spoken. And then are asked to be the voice for a disparate group of individuals. This is not what we want.

The title of the book invokes the idea of divisions which still exists in a post-segregation America: 'what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do.' Some of these divisions are geographical – such as ghettos, or different parts of cities being known as the ‘black part’. Some are cultural. Some are financial. But ultimately our experience of the world as black people is different from that of white people, and this division of experience is due to the colour of our skin. We are made to feel uncomfortable if we venture outside of our designated areas, whether those are geographical or cultural. And like Trayvon Martin, our very lives are at risk if we are in the wrong place at the wrong time. The message we receive, time and time again, is that we should stay in our designated world.

Coates explores ideas of what it means to be black in America, and how blackness, as it exists now, is an artificial construct, an othering of a diverse group of people who have been used and marginalised for the good of ‘The Dream’ and ‘The Dreamers’. ‘This Dream’, this idealised idea of America, has been built on the backs of black people, but not for them. They were a commodity to be bought and sold, a resource to be used up. This othering, this naming as black, serves a purpose - 'Americans believe in the reality of ‘race’ as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism – the need to ascribe bone deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce,and destroy them – inevitably follows from this inalterable condition.'

This is the central nerve that the book touches on again and again: “… ascribe bone deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them.” I found the book to be reassuring – someone speaking the words I would like to say, speaking to my experience as an educated black man – one of the singled out. Though Coates is writing of race relations in America, the situation is the same here in the UK. I have been racially abused, followed by security guards in supermarkets, stopped and searched by the police just for walking down the road, and I’m always questioned at passport control and my bags are checked at the UK border when exiting or returning to the country. My bone deep features single me out, as they do all black people, and leave me open to being humiliated. 

Coates states: 'They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people'. I don’t know what it will take for the division between the world and black people to disappear. I don’t know how many more black people will have to suffer needless brutality at the hands of authority, how many more black people will have to wrongly incarcerated, how many more black people will have to die. The division may never disappear, but I do hope it will begin to lessen. It will take education; a lot of people reading a lot of books like Between the World and Me to help shift the worldview away from this seemingly inalterable condition. It will take for communities, such as St Paul’s, to become aware of the insidious and nuanced struggles that exist for many people living in the UK, to feel the injustice, and to think anew about how they act and speak. It will take for each of us to want to be better – more open and accepting – people.

In the end, Coates urges his son to continue the struggle. The struggle that was started by his ancestors when they refused to be slaves any longer. The struggle that continued with the civil rights movement. The struggle that still goes on today, as we fight for our lives and recognition of our right not to be killed because of the colour of our skin. We all feel that fear. All of us, whether American or British, African or Caribbean, Christian or Atheist, young or old, male or female – we are all black and all subject to destruction because of it.

Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates Jr

Recommended by Miss Ramsay-Overall 

It is an excellent, powerful history on the blurry era between the abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement. As the blurb states, 'If emancipation sparked a “new birth of freedom” in Lincoln’s America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s America?'

Gates answers that question masterfully.

All About Love by bell hooks

Recommended by Dr Gaydon

All About Love does not address race in a particularly direct or explicit way, nor does it offer the necessary historical and cultural education provided by the texts and films Miss Ramsay-Overall has compiled; hence why I would say start with them! It does, however, resonate with powerful lessons and messages about what is perhaps the strongest ethical emotion and the standpoint from which, I feel, we should enter into any discussion on this and other topics that require deep reflection on human relationships. 

Written in 2001, some St Paul's students may feel that its messages on how 'love' (as both verb and noun) has to be unpacked via a lens of gender might be 'old hat' or 'common knowledge' by now. However, as hooks argues, people around the world are still articulating the pain of love's absence, we are taught that love is important but are simultaneously bombarded by its failure, and we seem to forget that 'there can be no love without justice'. We can see all of this more powerfully than ever in the wake of many of the events of 2020. What must we do? hooks answers with undeniable philosophical and emotional potency.

Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge

Recommended by Madame Lapaire-Adumekwe and Dr Gaydon 

From Ms Lapaire-Adumekwe: Being in an interracial relationship I have long since realised that racism is still a bigger problem than most people realise in the UK. It’s easy to think that things have gotten better – but naïve to believe that our own personal daily experience is the same as other people’s experiences (regardless of gender or background). In her book, Reni Eddo-Lodge not only addresses issues of unconscious bias, social and institutional racism, but in doing so also educates us on Black History in the UK. 

It’s not until I read this that I realised that other than American civil rights history, I knew little - if nothing - about black civil right activists in the UK, or France, or Brazil for that matter (all my home countries). So to a certain extent, what I became aware of reading the book, was that not only have millions of people lost their own sense of personal and communal history because of the tangible consequences of slavery and colonialism, but we have also allowed this to happened a second time. It points to how we have erased part of our own history, a history which not only needs to be taught, but discussed and celebrated. The book will certainly be a good introduction to a number of these issues. I would highly recommend listening to the audiobook version too (available on Audible), narrated by Eddo-Lodge herself. 

From Dr Gaydon: Another book that is, along with All About Love, important in my current journey of awakening. I believe this is being spoken about by another member of staff so I will simply state that I feel it not only informs the reader as to the situation surrounding race in the UK, but, particularly for a white man, it offers an excellent training-ground for relaxing a defensive mentality and engaging our capacity to simply listen to stories of lived experiences.

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo

Recommended by William Gee

Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives of twelve interconnected black women at different ages and time periods over the last century to the present, creating a multi-perspective psychological commentary. Each character has their own chapter, which includes reference to the other characters in unconventional ways, which conveys the overlap between their lives in passing, but depicting how their experiences, backgrounds and choices differ. 

The use of a non-linear structure, meandering back and forth through the years, emphasises the stagnant nature of the progress in combatting racial oppression and stereotypes, as women from different centuries face many of the same issues. A key theme of this book is people’s desire to assimilate into conventional British culture, thereby discarding their racial heritage, which speaks to what is now occurring with the Black Lives Matter protests, which advocate that no one should be silenced, and that making a stand, rather than blending in, is a positive and necessary thing.

Black Boy by Richard Wright

Recommended by Chance Leviatin 

Black Boy is the autobiography of Richard Wright, arguably one of the most famous, genre defining African-American writers of the 20th century and author of Native Son (the USA's first best-selling book by a black writer). 

The book follows Wright through his childhood in the South under Jim Crow. Many might ask what possible relevance a book published in 1945 might have today. Wright's story is a hard hitting tale of his personal experiences with racism, seen through the lens of everyday life. While people are increasingly turning to books that attempt to inform them on how to 'not be racist', I would argue that it impossible to achieve this goal without first putting yourselves in the position of those that the system oppresses; Black Boy is one of the most influential, well written accounts of what it is to be black in America.

Huge thanks to Ryan for organising this post, and to everyone who contributed.