Required Reading For White America From A Group of Black Writers and Academics - The Boston Globe

4/28/2020 Required reading for white America from a group of black writers and academics - The Boston Globe
Books
We asked several black writers: What book

should all white Americans read? Here’s what
they said
FEBRUARY 16, 2018
https://www3.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2018/02/16/requiredreading/Aph8SccZPiFn4PizfEiFWP/story.html?arc404=true 1/9
This nation has always been riven when it comes to race. Recall that disagreements over
slavery and inequality ran so deep that the Founding Fathers decided to just look the other
way, pretty sure that otherwise no union would be possible — and hope some future
generation would find an answer. Fast-forward to police-shooting deaths, income inequality,
widespread incarceration, and a president who looks at a torch-bearing procession of white
nationalists in Charlottesville, Va., and sees some “very fine people.’’ Amid the turmoil we
asked a group of black writers and academics this question: If you could assign a book for all
white Americans to read right now, what would it be?
“My Soul Looks Back: A Memoir” by Jessica B

Harris
The writer Tiphanie Yanique told me once that the most

revolutionary novel about race ever written would be
about two people of color who fall in love, live their lives,
and nothing terrible or catastrophic happens to them.
What she meant by this, of course, is that too often, books
with people of color as protagonists focus on the pathological, on the struggle of living in a
world of white supremacy. It takes a super act of imagination, for many of us living under
white supremacy, to imagine black people as having the same rich, complex inner lives as
white people and that often those lives have little concern with what white people think or
believe. Harris’s memoir of her life in late-’70s and early-’80s bohemian New York, where
she was a kind of younger sister to artistic geniuses like James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, and
Nina Simone, is remarkable for this very reason. Harris presents a portrait of free black
womanhood that is exhilarating and promises a way of being that feels wholly original. At the
heart of this book is Harris’s love affair with the magnetic, enigmatic Sam — confidant of
Baldwin and Angelou and her initial link to this circle of black excellence. It’s a poignant
relationship that wavers between romance, friendship, and something else, and feels sharply
relevant to the romantic confusions of 2018 America.
KAITLYN GREENIDGE
Author of the novel “We Love You, Charlie Freeman’’ and originally from Arlington
“The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the

Making of American Capitalism’’ by Edward E.
Baptist
It changes the way one sees the world because it helps

readers to understand how slavery is rooted into the very
foundation of the United States — how it has affected
everything that came after. It’s a revelation.
JESMYN WARD
First woman to win two National Book Awards for fiction, a MacArthur fellow, and
author, most recently, of “Sing, Unburied, Sing’’
“The Souls of Black Folk’’ by W. E. B. Du Bois and “Their Eyes Were Watching God’’
by Zora Neale Hurston
Du Bois and Hurston bring to light the very human history of black folks in language steeped
not in sociology or anthropology but in art and literature. Both reveal black experiences in
ways that demonstrate that African-Americans, even in the darkest days of slavery, were not
simply acted upon but were actors in and authors of their own stories. And both stress the
metaphor of “duality,” as Du Bois put it, of being an American and black, a duality that we
saw so brilliantly illuminated in “Get Out.”
HENRY LOUIS GATES JR.

Alphonse Fletcher university professor at Harvard

University
“Olio’’ by Tyehimba Jess
Before it received last

year’s Pulitzer Prize, it
had already been
awarded the Anisfield-
Wolf Award, on whose
jury I serve. My fellow
jurors Henry Louis
Gates Jr., Joyce Carol
Oates, Steven Pinker,
Simon Schama and I
declared ourselves
wowed by “this roller-coaster mélange of poetry, anecdote, songs, interviews and transcripts
code-switching its way through the briar patch of American history.”
RITA DOVE
Pulitzer Prize winning poet, former US poet laureate
“Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the

Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on
Violence’’ by Patrick Sharkey
This just-published book really enhanced my

understanding of the dramatic decline in urban violent
crime in the last two decades. It also makes readers aware
of the positive consequences of safer cities, including
improved children’s school test scores, which accompanied the reduction of trauma from
neighborhood violence; the increased chances of poor children rising into the middle class;
and the notable rise in African-American men’s life expectancy. He points to the upsurge in
community organizations during this period and documents the impact of nonprofits, as one
of several important factors, on crime reduction in the nation’s largest cities. This book is a
real eye-opener, and should be read by members of all racial/ethnic groups.
WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON
Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser university professor of sociology at Harvard University,

former MacArthur fellow, and author of such books as “The Declining Significance of Race:
Blacks and Changing American Institutions’’ and “More Than Just Race: Being Black and
Poor in the Inner City’’
“When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives

Matter Memoir’’ by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha
bandele.
This incredible story of an American life gives a face to the

resilience, the love, and the resistance that founded BLM.
CLAUDIA RANKINE
Acclaimed poet, essayist, playwright, and MacArthur

fellow
“The Autobiography of Malcolm X’’ by Malcolm X

with Alex Haley
This remains one of the most important books I have ever

read. While there is debate about certain liberties and omissions made by Haley, nonetheless
it is a compelling American coming-of-age story. The book can and should be supplemented
by further inquiry, but there is no denying the power of this epic and tragic tale of a young
complicated, flawed, contradictory, and passionate visionary. Malcolm is a case study in the
effects of misused power, racism, and the perils of “un-critical thought.”
IDRIS GOODWIN
Rapper, essayist, poet, and the author of several plays,

including “How We Got On’’ and, most recently, “Hype
Man,’’ which is currently being performed at Company
One.
“The Warmth of
Other Suns: The
Epic Story of
America’s Great
Migration’’ by Isabel
Wilkerson
It is a gorgeously,
unbearably human
story of American
history. It has the bite
of factual truth and the
readability of a great
novel.
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
Award-winning novelist (“Purple Hibiscus,’’ “Half of a Yellow Sun,’’ “Americanah’’),

essayist (“We Should All Be Feminists,’’ “Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen
Suggestions’’), and MacArthur fellow
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin’’ by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852); “My Bondage and My
Freedom’’ by Frederick Douglass (1855); “Incidents In the Life of a Slave Girl’’ by
Harriet Jacobs (1861)
I find it impossible to recommend just one book when the stakes are this high. So I’m going
to recommend three and ask readers to treat them as one vast and multivocal saga. All were
published in the tumultuous years that led to and launched the Civil War. Drawing on
memoir, fiction, and journalism, each explores, exposes, and dramatizes the brutal
particulars of slavery and the thrilling particulars of desiring, imagining, and achieving
freedom.
MARGO JEFFERSON
Former Pulitzer Prize-winning book and culture critic for The New York Times and author
of “On Michael Jackson’’ and “Negroland: A Memoir’’
“Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
I would honestly recommend anything that he writes. He is that brilliant.
ANGIE THOMAS
Young-adult novelist whose best-selling debut, “The Hate

U Give,’’ was named a Printz honor book, won a Boston
Globe-Hornbook Award, was longlisted for the National
Book Award, and is being turned into a movie
“Beloved’’ by Toni
Morrison
This is the story of

Sethe, who murders
her daughter to save
the toddler from being
returned to slavery.
Years later the ghost of
the dead baby appears
in the body of a young
woman who wreaks
havoc on Sethe’s
household. I would
like white readers to
focus in on the
brutality of slavery, which is part of the ongoing history of racist white violence that has
brought the country to its current troubled condition.
DONNA BAILEY NURSE
Columnist for CBC Radio’s The Next Chapter and The Literary Review of Canada
“No Name in the Street’’ by James Baldwin
This is a terribly difficult question. So many to recommend and my choice might surprise
some. The book tries to come to terms with the fact that the struggles of the 1960s failed to
transform the spirit of the nation. In spite of the tumult and sacrifice, too many continued to
believe, and still do, that this country is a white nation. Baldwin struggles with loss (e.g., the
deaths of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther

King Jr.), the constraints of his own celebrity (he has
become an example of the “exceptional negro’’), and with
fractured time (that the heady days of the early freedom
movement have given way to white resentment and
cooptation). In the end, Baldwin grapples with the
implications of America’s ongoing failure to deal with the
reality of race. As he once said, “America’s sense of reality
is dictated by what it is trying to avoid.” What an insight
for our desperate times . . .
EDDIE S. GLAUDE
Chairman of the Department of African American

Studies at Princeton University and author of
“Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the
American Soul’’
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4/28/2020 Required reading for white America from a group of black writers and academics - The Boston Globe

We asked several black writers: What book

FEBRUARY 16, 2018

“My Soul Looks Back: A Memoir” by Jessica B

The writer Tiphanie Yanique told me once that the most

“The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the

It changes the way one sees the world because it helps

HENRY LOUIS GATES JR.

Alphonse Fletcher university professor at Harvard

“Olio’’ by Tyehimba Jess

Before it received last

Pulitzer Prize winning poet, former US poet laureate

“Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the

This just-published book really enhanced my

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON

Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser university professor of sociology at Harvard University,

“When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives

This incredible story of an American life gives a face to the

Acclaimed poet, essayist, playwright, and MacArthur

“The Autobiography of Malcolm X’’ by Malcolm X

This remains one of the most important books I have ever

Rapper, essayist, poet, and the author of several plays,

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE

Award-winning novelist (“Purple Hibiscus,’’ “Half of a Yellow Sun,’’ “Americanah’’),

“Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

I would honestly recommend anything that he writes. He is that brilliant.

Young-adult novelist whose best-selling debut, “The Hate

This is the story of

DONNA BAILEY NURSE

“No Name in the Street’’ by James Baldwin

deaths of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther

Chairman of the Department of African American

© 2020 Boston Globe Media Partners, LLC

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