Anti-Racism Reading Guide

I picked this graphic novel, intrigued by the cover illustration and utter lack of words inside. The Arrival is a familiar story told through the eyes of someone leaving his family behind to emigrate to a foreign land. Fantastical though the illustrations appear, they lovingly simulate immigration so that anyone can experience that disorientation of a new world for themselves. I am fascinated at how much information can be conveyed just in these few lavishly illustrated pages, from the confusion over new foods to the camaraderie of fellow immigrants. As the news continues to report hate crimes against AAPI people, many of them immigrants and children of immigrants, The Arrival kept coming to mind. This simple story made me think more about immigrant experiences than studying abroad did. I would highly recommend this story to anyone, but especially to those who have never left their home country. Reviewed by Kat Cyr.

In Dying of Whiteness Jonathan Metzl, a doctor, investigates how pursuing the politics of “whiteness” ironically leads to worsening economic, health and life expectancy outcomes for middle and low income white people, particularly white men. Metzl shows how the white backlash conservative agenda (ex. tax cuts, repeal of Obamacare, opposition to gun control) have harmed the welfare of their supporters. He compares the health outcomes in Tennessee, a state that has opposed Obamacare and Medicaid expansion, vs neighboring Kentucky, a state that embraced the ACA and has seen health outcomes rise. He looks at the gun culture in Missouri and how loosening gun laws and opposing gun reforms has led to a steep rise in gun suicides by white men. He examines how tax cuts in Kansas resulted in the reduction of funding for public education and harmed lower income Americans, including white Americans. In short, the book explores how white racial resentment and white privilege have only hurt the people who hold these beliefs. The book incorporates the stories of individuals he interviewed to illustrate the impacts on a personal level. I highly recommend it! Reviewed by Brenda Ellis.

This slender book is easy to pick up and hold in one hand — very convenient for bedtime reading! It’s a collection of stories of women who immigrated from Japan to the United States in the 1900s. The book’s first-person plural perspective made the content feel a little distant, but I’m glad I kept reading it. (Another novel by the same author, When the Emperor Was Divine, was much more my style.) Despite all of the literature I’ve read about the Japanese-American experience, this book still offered new insights. Reviewed by Carrie Macfarlane.

Winner of a 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award, this work recounts the brutal history of the treatment of African Americans following the Civil War. The author details how new laws and “black codes” allowed the horrors of slavery to continue under other names. She shows how the courts and elected leaders stripped African Americans of the rights that constitutional amendments were supposed to have protected, and how those who tried to stand up for their rights were routinely subjected to the worst violence and brutal murders. The examples the author shows of the invisible “white rage” against any progress made by African Americans, reveals the true depth of racial hatred and resentment that is a part of our country’s history. This work is a must read for anyone who wants to understand what African Americans have experienced at the hands of powerful, racist whites, and how systemic racism has persisted through our justice system, our educational system, and all aspects of society to the present day. Reviewed by Brenda Ellis.

A gorgeously-written epic novel that follows Rosa Rendón’s journey in the early 19th century from her family’s farm in Trinidad to her arrival in Crow Nation in the American West, Book of the Little Axe by Lauren Francis-Sharma explores colonial power, race, love, family secrets, war, and memory. Francis-Sharma, the Assistant Director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, is a captivating storyteller, and as she reveals more about Rosa’s childhood in the Caribbean, and later, her life with her husband, a Crow chief, and her son Victor, who is coming of age and seeking answers to his life’s mysteries, what threads these characters together over several fraught decades in North American history are powerful, and timeless, questions of identity, belonging, and home. Reviewed by Kellam Ayers.

How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi is exactly what it says on the tin, but with an added element of humanity that takes what could have been a dry, instructional read into something engaging. Kendi grounds these complex ideas in his own experiences to prove how internalized our racism is without vilifying or condescending to people who are still ignorant of their own racist beliefs. His breakdown of different intersections of racism, such as with sexism or homophobia, also brings to light how complex these issues are without ever drowning the reader in academic gobbledygook. Reviewed by Kat Cyr.

This 200-page workbook begins with an assumption that if you are white then you are a white supremacist. It also assumes that since you picked up a book called Me and White Supremacy, you’re willing to at least try on that label for size. I sought out Me and White Supremacy because it was recommended by the author of White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo. I am half-white, half-Asian. After 28 days of guided reflection, I feel more able to talk about the ways in which I have participated in a system of white bias and privilege, and I have a more concrete understanding of the impact that system has had on Brown, Black and Indigenous people. Reviewed by Carrie Macfarlane.