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‘Every Work of American Literature Is About Race’: Writers on How We Got Here

Amid the most profound social upheaval since the 1960s, these novelists, historians, poets, comedians and activists take a moment to look back to the literature.

Clockwise, from top left: Bayard Rustin in New York City, August 1963; Tyra Wilson and Kita Williams kneel outside Dallas City Hall in honor of George Floyd, June 4, 2020; the novelist Jesmyn Ward.Credit...Eddie Adams/Associated Press; Lynda M. Gonzalez, via The Dallas Morning News, via Associated Press; David Levenson, via Getty Images

Almost 100 years ago, responding to the public outcry over the violent drowning of a Black boy by a white mob at a public beach on Lake Michigan, a citywide (multiracial but white-led) commission published “The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot.”

“Centuries of the Negro slave trade and of slavery as an institution … placed a stamp upon the relations of the two races which it will require many years to erase,” the nearly 700-page 1922 report began. “The past is of value only as it aids in understanding the present; and an understanding of the facts of the problem … is the first step toward its solution.”

As protests spread across America once more, bringing to front pages and the forefronts of our minds ugly truths about our country that shouldn’t have been forgotten in the first place, we turn again to the written record, to the literature. In an effort to deepen our understanding of race and racism in America, we asked writers to share with us the texts that have done the most to deepen theirs. Together these histories, novels and verses have helped shape our collective consciousness of a subject that is irreducible, and universal.

Appreciating social movements in hindsight is a complicated endeavor. Leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Harriet Tubman are often whitewashed to appease modern sensibilities. Some, like Bayard Rustin, are almost forgotten entirely.

I came across John D’Emilio’s LOST PROPHET (2003) by chance, in my local bookstore in college. I don’t often take notes while reading for pleasure, but this time I made a detailed index on the back flap, marking pages and lines I wanted to save for future reference.

For example, did you know Rustin introduced Gandhian tactics of nonviolent protest to Dr. King? Did you know he helped organize the first Freedom Rides, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a boycott of segregated New York City public schools?

As a young Black man with a temper, I credit Rustin with strengthening my faith in pacifism. He was a Black queer Quaker from Pennsylvania who went to jail for his sexuality and his refusal to fight in American wars. When I myself came face to face with armored cops a few weeks ago, I felt a powerful calm. I didn’t want to lash out. I wanted them to look me in the eye and see I wasn’t afraid; I wasn’t going to move. They could attack me, arrest me, shoot me with gas and rubber, and still, I wasn’t going to move.

UNEXAMPLED COURAGE (2019), by Richard Gergel, is a remarkable book. In clear and elegant prose, Gergel — a United States district judge in South Carolina — strips legal cases of jargon and presents them as what they essentially are: human drama. The result is intellectually and emotionally satisfying. The author’s loving admiration of Judge J. Waties Waring — who descended from slave-owning Confederates, but turned his back on “the doctrine of white supremacy” in his courtroom — is obvious, but the evidence for it is rendered so dispassionately that it feels apt. As I finished it I felt deeply moved all around, but mostly by the incredible courage of the ordinary Black Americans in the 1951 Briggs v. Elliott case, over school segregation. Meticulously researched and full of heart, this book is important at this time when the United States is confronting its ever-present past.

Ira Katznelson’s WHEN AFFIRMATIVE ACTION WAS WHITE (2005) was one of the first books that helped me concretely understand how racism was embedded into federal policy. In my American history classes growing up, the New Deal had been celebrated as the great catalyst of intergenerational opportunity and wealth for millions across the country. And it was. What I had not been taught, however, was how New Deal legislation was intentionally crafted to prevent millions of Black Americans from having access to its benefits. As Katznelson outlines, in the 1930s, 75 percent of Black workers in the South were employed as either maids or farmworkers. People in those professions were excluded for decades from social programs that set the minimum wage, regulated work hours, created labor unions and Social Security — which is to say, the programs that were the economic bedrock for millions of White Americans.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES (2014) helped me clarify my place in this country. It confirmed what had been told to me by my ancestors: that Indigenous peoples, from the North Pole to the South, have been here since before the world was known as round. As a conquering nation, the United States has rewritten history to make people of the U.S. forget our past as natives to this land. This is especially apparent in the Mexi-phobic, immigrant-phobic policies of our time.

If every politician were to read and understand this book — which should be required in every high school curriculum — we would have a reconsideration of our current border policies and our practice of detaining human beings in cages. Our present is made of a past of genocide and colonialism. This book is necessary reading if we are to move into a more humane future.

Right now I’m rereading Marlon James’s BLACK LEOPARD, RED WOLF (2019). Wild that fantasy is where I turn to think about race and these states. But the book’s first line, “The child is dead,” begins all our troubles these days. George Floyd, still his mother’s son, calling for her with his last breath. James’s book follows in the tradition of Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison: In his world, like our own, everyone is complicit. A few pages in, I remember that the one telling us what has happened is in a cell — death and prison, aren’t these the sources of this nation’s discontent? Name a story more American than that. And still, the story gives me hope. On the first page is tragedy; the next 600 explore, challenge and critique an encyclopedia of phobias and isms, in language so rich and a story so compelling that you aren’t even aware the reading is making you wiser until it already has.

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From left: James Baldwin at his London book launch, April 1972. An 11-year-old protester, Elliot Logan, stands in front of a portrait of George Floyd in Minneapolis, June 3, 2020.Credit...Popperfoto, via Getty Images; Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

Desus: As a child, I attended a program for extremely gifted children. We were so advanced we read Richard Wright’s BLACK BOY (1945) in third grade. I still have my copy and it’s in shambles, because that became my favorite book. The vivid description of Richard’s life in the South fascinated me — and, as a young boy in the Bronx, I could still relate. His depiction of racist situations, and being called the “N-word,” hit me; because at that age I too had already been called the “N-word.” That book showed me Black people have been going through the struggles I’d been going through forever.

Mero: I read TO BE A SLAVE (1968), by Julius Lester, illustrated by Tom Feelings, in around seventh grade. My teacher, shout-out to Mr. Adeghe, was from Ghana and very passionate. All the “American History” classes I took prior to that were all about Pilgrims and Native Americans shaking hands and eating turkey. This book was like a nuclear bomb of knowledge that made me connect even more with my Afro-Latino identity and roots.

For understanding the Jim Crow South, I always recommend AFTER FREEDOM (1939), based on the anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker’s hard-won observations in Mississippi and the best of the great fieldwork studies from that era. Less often read, although it ought to be more, is Mark Schultz’s THE RURAL FACE OF WHITE SUPREMACY: Beyond Jim Crow (2005). Schultz spent years on this oral history project, capturing the fascinating personal stories of elderly black and white residents of a Georgia county who spoke candidly about race relations in the first half of the 20th century. For contemporary inner-city politics and violence issues, check out Cid Martinez’s THE NEIGHBORHOOD HAS ITS OWN RULES (2016), an astute analysis of activist politics in Los Angeles. Although it is not about America, INFORMAL JUSTICE IN DIVIDED SOCIETIES (2002), by Colin Knox and Rachel Monaghan, helped me place our domestic race issues in a global context. Americans tend to view this country’s racial situation as singular and distinct, but in the streets of Watts ring echoes of Belfast and Cape Town.

Among the books I have gone back to in this historic moment are: DARKWATER: Voices From Within the Veil (1920), by W.E.B. Du Bois, because of his thoughtful insights 100 years ago into the very matters that now call people into the streets at some risk; and DARKNESS OVER GERMANY: A Warning From History (1943), by E. Amy Buller, because of what she tells us about the mass psychology of fascism.

Race is a living, breathing thing that morphs across time and context and even our own understanding; so the most important books that have shaped my understanding of race are tied to who I was at the time that I read them. The list will change as I change, and that is as it should be.

I read Anne Moody’s COMING OF AGE IN MISSISSIPPI (1969) as a child, before I knew what memoir was. But still the book resonated with me, as I already understood what it meant to be a Black girl in a world where race and gender circumscribed who we could become. As a young adult, I read A FINE BALANCE (1996), by Rohinton Mistry, and for the first time understood that racism in the United States has genealogies other than the global slave trade. (I immediately signed up for courses on South Asian studies at my historically Black college.) As an adult, I think of Derrick Bell’s science-fiction story THE SPACE TRADERS (1992) at least once a week, mostly wishing everyone else had also read it so that we could stop reliving its message. Finally, there is no book more important to understanding the underpinnings of race, racism and uprisings right now than a new book by William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, FROM HERE TO EQUALITY (2020). Part history and part social policy, it takes economic reparations for Black Americans seriously. I wish we could say the same for America.

Few reading experiences on the history of race in America have been as profound for me as the works of Eric Foner. From RECONSTRUCTION (1988), his definitive study of the era, to last year’s tour de force on the trio of constitutional amendments that established THE SECOND FOUNDING after the Civil War, no one has done more since W.E.B. Du Bois’s BLACK RECONSTRUCTION IN AMERICA (1935) to refute the racist fabrications of previous generations of Lost Cause “scholars.” In rescuing the facts about the promise and violent overthrow of our country’s most thrilling experiment in interracial democracy, Foner has proved that no one set of historians has the final word. “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery,” Du Bois wrote — succinctly, poetically and so very sadly — of the period of Reconstruction’s nakedly racist rollback (perversely named “Redemption”) that ushered in nearly a century of Jim Crow.

I’m also inspired by a new generation of scholars — from Kimberlé Crenshaw’s CRITICAL RACE THEORY (1995) to Martha Jones’s VANGUARD (2020) — who are shining a light on this crucial chapter in our story, pointing out its harbingers in earlier efforts to circumvent the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments (especially voter suppression). As dark and unsettling forces attempt to roll back the gains of what historians sometimes call “The Second Reconstruction” of the 1960s, and as tyrannical impulses seek to curtail our most foundational and sacred constitutional rights, let us look to these examples of great scholarship, which preserve the noble tale of the triumphant determination of black people to rise undiminished out of the ashes of racial repression, violence and lynching.

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Clockwise from left: Derrick Bell, the first tenured black professor at Harvard Law School, took an unpaid leave of absence in 1990 to protest the school’s racist hiring practices; the author Zora Neale Hurston, November 1934; Black Lives Matter protesters march the length of Manhattan, June 3, 2020.Credit...Steve Liss/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty Images; Beinecke Library, Yale University, Van Vechten Trust; Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times

Every work of American literature is about race, whether the writer knows it or not. That said, these are some nonfiction books that have given me necessary tools to think about our culture. In college I read both bell hooks’s BLACK LOOKS (1992) and Donald Bogle’s TOMS, COONS, MULATTOES, MAMMIES & BUCKS (1973), and was never the same. Toni Morrison’s PLAYING IN THE DARK (1992) is utter genius, revealing through literary analysis how whiteness doesn’t exist without blackness. Nella Larsen’s QUICKSAND (1928) and PASSING (1929), both published during the Harlem Renaissance, feel just as contemporary and lucid today in their portrayal of mixed-race women and the perils of white passing. More recently, I have been enamored by the brilliance of both Hilton Als’s WHITE GIRLS (2013) and Margo Jefferson’s NEGROLAND (2015).

Gunnar Myrdal’s massive sociological study AN AMERICAN DILEMMA (1944) saw “the Negro problem” as something that could never be understood through data about black living conditions alone, but as a phenomenon of the majority’s power. It was a moral situation in which conflicting values were held both within the white population and, importantly, within white individuals themselves.

If change did not come about, Myrdal predicted uprisings. “America can never more regard its Negroes as a patient, submissive minority,” he writes. “They will organize for defense and offense. … They have the advantage that they can fight wholeheartedly.”

Myrdal perceptively noted that the average white Northerner did not understand racism as something in which he or she was taking part every day. But he also argued that whites were deeply troubled by the contradiction between their egalitarian principles and their attitude toward black citizens. This was the “American dilemma.”

There is much value in this big book, but even more to be learned today from Myrdal’s naïveté. By the time of the civil rights movement, it had become clear to a new generation of critics that the whites Myrdal had interviewed — perhaps like many today who are rushing to issue public statements or participating in multiracial rallies — were still perfectly capable of compartmentalizing words and deeds, living with moral dissonance.

So-called third-world problems — hunger, poverty, violence — are often explained as a result of particular “political cultures” endemic to specific nations. But while partly true, that narrative is also reductionist. All countries interact with other countries, and most “developing” nations have to sustain unequal relations with larger powers that systematically abuse them through military interventions, economic sanctions or unequal treatises. The borderlands between Mexico and the United States are a clear and poignant example of this interrelatedness. In THE FEMICIDE MACHINE (2012), Sergio González Rodríguez focuses on Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, where the rate of femicides started escalating drastically in the early 1990s, after decades of mutually accorded industrialization programs that resulted in NAFTA. “The Femicide Machine” discusses the politics of killing women for being women not within the oversimplifying framework of Mexican culture alone, but as a result of the economic interactions between Mexico and the U.S., and the geopolitical conditions that fuel them.

I find myself these days reaching for James Baldwin’s NO NAME IN THE STREET (1972), his first book after Dr. King’s assassination, which broke him. Shadowed by grief and trauma, this memoir is as fragmented as Baldwin’s memories. “Much, much, much has been blotted out,” he writes, “coming back only lately in bewildering and untrustworthy flashes.” The book is also Baldwin’s attempt to come to terms with America’s latest betrayal of Black people, and his effort to muster the energy and the faith to keep fighting — to give Black people the language to keep fighting. The prose is angry, because Baldwin is profoundly wounded. If “The Fire Next Time” (1963) was prophetic, “No Name in the Street” was the reckoning.

I read THE NATURE OF PREJUDICE (1954), by Gordon W. Allport, sometime in the ’70s, while I was in prison. This book had the greatest impact on my ability to understand the difference between prejudice and racism. Prejudice is a normal reaction to the unknown. Racism is a premeditated sickness.

Harriet Jacobs’s INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL (1861), for its sophisticated critique of slavery, 19th-century feminism and the gendered nature of white supremacy. Paula Giddings’s WHEN AND WHERE I ENTER (1984), for the groundbreaking nature of her research, and because in the post-Kerner Commission era, when black women were blamed for “the state of the black family” and stereotyped as “welfare queens,” Giddings provided historical context for understanding the black women I knew as a child. Robin D.G. Kelley’s HAMMER AND HOE (1990) managed to contextualize black radical politics within a rural, Southern and Marxist framework, challenging the liberal argument that civil rights was concerned only with integrated lunch counters, not the dismantling of global racial capitalism.

Jesmyn Ward’s SING, UNBURIED, SING (2017); Isabel Wilkerson’s THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS (2010); Kiese Laymon’s HEAVY (2018); David Oshinsky’s WORSE THAN SLAVERY (1996); Claudia Rankine’s CITIZEN (2014); J. Mills Thornton’s DIVIDING LINES (2002); John W. Dower’s WAR WITHOUT MERCY (1986); Patrick Phillips’s BLOOD AT THE ROOT (2016); Françoise Hamlin’s CROSSROADS AT CLARKSDALE (2012); Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr.’s BLACK AGAINST EMPIRE (2013).

Each speaks, in some way, to the power of racism, and sometimes just sheer, raw, unadulterated anti-blackness, in destroying millions upon millions of lives. Each also lays out the power of the refusal to accept subjugation. And that the subsequent and ongoing battles between anti-blackness and freedom are messy.

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Protesters gather for a silent march outside the Brooklyn Museum, June 14, 2020.Credit...Demetrius Freeman for The New York Times

TELL MY HORSE: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938), by Zora Neale Hurston (1938): Determined to tell the stories of Black people outside of distant, scientific analysis, Hurston writes of her experiences of spiritual practices in these two Caribbean nations.

SING, UNBURIED, SING, by Jesmyn Ward: This is one of the best novels I’ve ever read. Set in Mississippi, it involves an odyssey to the notorious Parchman Farm penitentiary to pick up a lover; a ghost who haunts an elderly former inmate at said prison; and a young boy who observes it all.

MINOR FEELINGS (2020), by Cathy Park Hong: This wonderfully crafted essay collection is a necessary read for those who want to understand Asian-American experiences — as well as immigration and migration, intergenerational trauma and even anti-Blackness.

THICK (2019), by Tressie McMillan Cottom: In her second book, the sociologist, a savant and wordsmith, addresses the intersections of race, gender and class with enviable grace and confidence.

CANNIBAL (2016), by Safiya Sinclair: One of my favorite poetry collections. Sinclair covers so much ground: her Jamaican background, spirituality, womanhood, America, race relations. She laces words together in a beautiful tapestry, full of history, life, death and, most of all, renewal.

Reading is a way of practicing the imagination necessary to broaden our capacities to understand ourselves and others. These four books constellate conversations that have long been held separate from one another, lest their accumulation create an energy perilous to the colony: Simone Browne’s DARK MATTERS (2017), Dina Gilio-Whitaker’s AS LONG AS GRASS GROWS (2019), Dolores Dorantes’s STYLE (2016) and Mahmoud Darwish’s JOURNAL OF AN ORDINARY GRIEF (1973). Each book exists separately within its own conditions, while taking on exponential meaning in relation to one another.

BELOVED (1987), by Toni Morrison: I read this when I was 19. No book, no matter the intelligence behind it, can put the reader into the position of unfreedom in which African-Americans lived as enslaved people. Morrison, I think, knew this. What “Beloved” taught me to see and to feel was what it might be like to have the things we think of as universally human — in this case, a mother’s love for her children — twisted and deformed by the institution and experience of slavery.

CUSTER DIED FOR YOUR SINS (1969): In this essay collection, the lawyer and activist Vine Deloria Jr. shouts, chides, teases and preaches about the pain and absurdity of being Native American in a modern world.

NOTES OF A NATIVE SON (1958), by James Baldwin: No other writer has written as lucidly, powerfully and productively about what it means to be black in America — and, as a result, what this country means.

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE (1967), by Gabriel García Márquez: Billed as a Latin American fantasy, the Colombian-Mexican author’s magical-realist epic is as much an American fantasy, about the lives caught in the web of 19th- and 20th-century colonialism.

There are several dozen books explicitly about race in America that have left lifelong marks on me, but only two have reversed the course of my own thought. The first is Albert Murray’s THE OMNI-AMERICANS (1970). Murray’s argument is simple but profound: America is a mongrel nation, both culturally and in its DNA. Though we may come up with all kinds of methods to obscure this basic truth, “any fool can see,” he writes, “that the white people are not really white, and that black people are not black.”

The second is RACECRAFT (2012), by Barbara J. Fields and Karen Elise Fields. The Fields sisters prove with witty, withering brilliance that racism — and the ideology of white supremacy, rooted in economic exploitation — creates race, and not the other way around.

Finally, though it’s trans-Atlantic in scope, the British sociologist Paul Gilroy’s monumental work AGAINST RACE (2000) argues that race is not something intrinsic and immutable but something fluid, illusory and imposed, “an afterimage — a lingering effect of looking too casually into the damaging glare emanating from colonial conflicts at home and abroad.”

All three books convinced me that we will never transcend racism so long as we continue to reify the illusory, inherently hierarchical color categories that it gives us.

Whites may find it challenging to confront stereotypes and comprehend the deeply embedded legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, but even harder is embracing remedies, because seemingly race-neutral policies perpetuate our racial caste system. With engaging profiles of housing advocates and the opposition they face, Conor Dougherty’s GOLDEN GATES (2020) focuses on California, but has lessons for all metropolitan areas. Smugly deeming itself racially progressive, the state allows high-wage employment (mostly for whites and educated immigrants) to grow faster than housing supply, ensuring that priced-out black and Hispanic families will suffer greater homelessness and displacement to job-starved distant suburbs. Segregation increases as voters enact local zoning codes to prevent new home-building, but those in desperate need of housing can’t register to vote in the no-growth towns that ban them. That’s structural racism.

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