Reading about things is probably not the most active way to help the current situation, but I believe that it’s still important (along with other ways to contribute, including through methods compiled in this link: blacklivesmatters.carrd.co). Reading recommendations below are completely arbitrary based on my own limited bookshelf/knowledge but could be worthwhile summer reads:
1) Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation: a historical analysis of systemic racism and everything leading up to the Black Lives Matter movement.
2) Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s How We Get Free: a collection of essays and interviews (including with BLM co-founder Alicia Garza) celebrating the Combahee River Collective and black feminism.
3) Joshua Clover’s Riot. Strike. Riot.: a historical analysis of strikes and riots as legitimate modes of anti-capitalist resistance.
4) Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: this may be familiar as it was widely talked about when it first came out, but if anyone is looking for something less dense to read this is a prose poetry book examining the everyday realities of black experience.
5) Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation: an alternative history of the Reconstruction era, in which the dead come back as “shamblers” and African American characters experience a new kind of slavery by being trained to protect other citizens from these zombies. An entertaining YA novel highlighting the real historical dispensability of black lives despite its fictional setting.
6) Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts: although there are many other notable Afrofuturist texts, this is a fairly recent SF novel set on a space ship on the brink of revolution where systems of slavery and segregation persist.
Su Cool for School 