Biting The Hand by Julia Less

The book is a story of racism and cultural identity told in three parts. In sections titled “Rage,” “Shame” and “Grace,” Lee traces her intellectual evolution through the events of her own life, growing up Korean and struggling to find her place. She admits, she was an angry girl who grew up to be an angry woman, but she was provoked. She demonstrates a knack for meaningful storytelling as she recounts her father’s harrowing escape from North Korea as a child, and her enrollment at a private all-girls school in a wealthy Los Angeles neighborhood while her parents struggled to make ends meet. Let's be real, anger can be traced through it all, it is only that the slant is slightly different each time. She seamlessly blends her own experiences with piercing discussions of identity and racial stratification, serving up conclusions likely to challenge readers across the ideological spectrum. In fact, recognizing the need for constant reexamination in our white-centered society, Lee even challenges her own views. This is not a gentle book, but rather one that is screaming throughout, and you can't help learning something from it.

Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo

I heard about this book from an NPR interview with Ibram Kendi about the books that he would have his own children and other people's children read in order to raise anti-racist humans, so wrapped this into my post-George Floyd committment to knowing more and being better. A young girl in Harlem discovers slam poetry as a way to understand her mother’s religion, her brother's sexual orientation, and her own relationship to the world. Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers—-especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about. With Mami’s determination to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself. Her mother would quash her passion, but a teacher recognizes her talent and she is invited to join her school’s slam poetry club. She doesn’t know how she could ever attend without her mami finding out, much less find the courage to speak her words out loud. But still, she can’t stop thinking about performing her poems. In the face of a world that may not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to be silent, and her fierceness is something to behold.

So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

I found this book to be the introduction to how to look at, think about, approach, and talk about race in the post George Floyd still COVID America that we live in. The divide has not been wider and the conversations are fewer and harder to have. The quickness of those who clearly have racial bias to shut down in any conversation about race because of their sensitivity to being seen as racist is real, and it certainly meets the definitiion of white fragility, but somehow the book of that title doesn't quite address how to talk about it quite a well. So if you haven't started to read and think about the problem, this is a good place to start. The author, who is biracial with a white mother who raised her and a black father who is not in the picture, is well aware of how utterly exhausting it is to be “the black friend” or to have to coexist in a majority-white environment. Even in her own home there was a lack of an ally, in that her mother did not see the myriad of ways in which her daughter was being assualted on a daily basis. There are some very hard things to read in this book, and I think there will be something for everyone in terms of what happens, what to do, what to expect as a result of what you do, and it is different advice depending on the color of your skin. The author is smart and funny and insightful, and I learned a lot reading this that I hope I can operationalize going forward.

Gender Racism On Display

It is particularly striking in the aftermath of AOC's take down of a fellow Congressman for his overt disregard for a co-worker, where he was so confident in his superiority that doing it in front of witnesses did not faze him in the least until he was blisteringly humiliated by her on the floor of the House.  She skewered him artfully, pointing out that the mere existence of his wife and daughters did not a decent man make.  Indeed it does not, and while her response was not absolutely flawless, it resonated for me and I am sure for many other women. 
So now we have the beginning of the misogyny and racism lens being focused on Kamala Harris.  Having just finished Ibram Kendi's book How To Be An Anti-Racist I am struck by what would he say about this?  If I read him right, he would say we need to focus on the woman herself, not on the "race" she is.  Race doesn't exist.  It is irrelevant to the conversation.  She is the daughter of a Tamil Indian and the descendant of Jamaican slaves.  Those are the cultures that she springs from.  That is how we push back against the ugliness.  Give them no power.  Give her power.

White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

In my experience, it is hard to talk about race.  People do become very defensive very quickly, and it is hard to shift the conversation away from thinking about it personally to look at systemic racism.  In the midst of a nationwide debate on institutional racism and police violence, Americans are bulk-buying recent texts on race to help them grapple with that complexity, and I certainly fall into that cliche.  When I saw that many of these books, this one included, had so many holds on them at my local library, I knew that if i wanted to stay in any way current on what is being consumed, I would have to buy things, and buy i did.  I now have half a shelf worth of reading on this subject.  I had already read Ta-Nehisi Coates book, "Between the World And Me", so I started with Ibram Kendi's "How To Be An Antiracist" and this.  My department at work is reading it, and so while reading them in tandem, I finished this first.
The take home message from this book is that it is really hard to discuss race.  In group settings, people express their subjective feelings of being disadvantaged by their whiteness and their dismay at being unable to say what they want.  Getting people to see another point of view, again at least in a group setting, is very hard at the best and impossible at worst.  There is very little in this book about what to do about these barriers, so it is more about recognizing it in yourself, and warnings about what will happen when you try to point it out to people.

Born A Crime by Trevor Noah

You do not emerge from reading this thinking Trevor Noah grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth, and you do see where his exceptionally insightful interview style grew up.
The title comes from the fact that his Xhosa mother had conceived a child with a white Swiss-German, which was illegal at the time.  Mixed race South Africans could breed with each other, but whites and blacks were prohibited from doing so. It is not a coincidence that Noah's father is a European and not a South African.  Apartheid was on it's last gasps when he was born in 1984, but it was by no means over in the time he was growing up.
His mother, Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah, had the rebellious spirit that enabled her to face down a hostile and inhospitable world, and without her Noah would not have ended up where he is.  However, while you emerge from the book kind of stunned, she is not uncomplicated and flawed.
This book is an engaging, fast-paced and vivid read, traversing Noah’s early childhood, confined by the absurdities of apartheid, where he could not walk openly with either of his parents, where he was often closeted inside his grandmother’s two-roomed home, where he was mistaken for white, through to his troubled years at school, and to his budding success as a hustler selling pirated CDs and DJing at parties, he is very multi-dimensional.  The odds always seemed stacked against him, as they are for South Africa’s black citizens. Many are trapped by the legacies of colonialism, apartheid and post-apartheid profligacy and face poverty, hunger, violence, bullying, racism and limited opportunities.  It is a timely read.