Carrboro, NC | 35.9101° N, 79.0753° W | August 28, 2020
“If Barack Obama came to embody America’s history of racial progress, then Donald Trump should come to embody America’s history of racist progress. And racist progress has consistently followed racial progress.” — Ibram X. Kendi
The following should go without saying but I’ll say it anyway: reading big books about racism does not automatically make you anti-racist. It does not make you woke or superior. It does not inoculate you from the constant, horrific headlines about innocent Black people murdered by people who are supposed to protect them.
But in a time where participating in protests is not always possible, and donating money to Showing Up for Racial Justice, Black Lives Matter, and the Equal Justice Initiative (and many, many other initiatives) simply doesn’t feel like enough, reading about the Black experience in America feels like a proactive (albeit small) thing to do during this challenging time.
For those who do not have the spare time to read or the spare money to buy books, I wanted to share some of what I’ve been reading.
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
by Bryan Stevenson
I frequently had difficult conversations with clients who were struggling and despairing over their situations—over the things they’d done, or had been done to them, that had led them to painful moments. Whenever things got really bad, and they were questioning the value of their lives, I would remind them that each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.
In the midst of all the heartbreaking headlines and political despair over the past few months, learning about Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative has provided a firm ray of hope. Simply knowing that people like him exist is helpful.
Just Mercy weaves between personal narrative and harsh statistics about incarceration and Black lives in America:
The prison population has increased from 300,000 people in the early 1970’s to 2.3 million people today. There are nearly six million people on probation or on parole. One in every fifteen people born in the United States in 2001 is expected to go to jail or prison; one in every three black male babies born in this century is expected to be incarcerated.
Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days.
But what makes Just Mercy a page-turning book (I read it in three days) is Stevenson’s experiences working on Death Row. One of the more poignant passages in the book comes when he describes saying goodbye to Herbert Richardson, and his subsequent execution. Stevenson describes the obvious discomfort displayed by the prison guards, and the grisly details of his death. It is chilling and heartbreaking and a bit sick. It made me think that perhaps people who so ardently support the death penalty should be required to witness an execution:
Abstractions about capital punishment were one thing, but the details of systematically killing someone who is not a threat are completely different… I couldn’t stop thinking that we don’t spend much time contemplating the details of what killing someone actually involves.
Throughout the book, Stevenson demonstrates that effective legal work is not just about books and paperwork and precedent and fairness. So much of it comes down to showing compassion and being a good listener.
The hours passed, and I knew that I had probably exhausted whatever helpful information could be obtained from Walter’s family, but folks still wanted to talk. There seemed to be a therapeutic relief in voicing their concerns to me. Before long I heard some hopefulness in voicing their concerns to me.
I wondered about the title “Just Mercy” from the beginning. In the final pages, Stevenson clearly defines his meaning.
I didn’t deserve reconciliation or love in that moment, but that’s how mercy works. The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving. It’s when mercy is least expected that it’s most potent—strong enough to break the cycle of victimization and victimhood, retribution and suffering.
Walter’s case had taught me that the death penalty is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit. The real question of capital punishment in this country is, Do we deserve to kill?
Mercy is just when it is rooted in hopefulness and freely given. Mercy is most empowering, liberating, and transformative when it is directed at the undeserving. The people who haven’t earned it, who haven’t even sought it, are the most meaningful recipients of our compassion.
Additional Media and Resources:
True Justice: Bryan Stevenson's Fight For Equality
Just Mercy (currently streaming free on most major platforms)
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi
Slavery was not that long ago. Abraham Lincoln was actually pretty racist. So was Frederick Douglas. The Ku Klux Klan started in Tennessee, and in addition to spouting deplorable racist hatred, the group embraced a particularly disgusting breed of misogyny.
Hooray for U.S. history!
This book is not a light read (obviously). But it is critically important. Providing an in-depth and comprehensive overview of this masterful text feels a bit out of my league. Instead, I’m going to list just a few of the more poignant facts I learned. And if reading this book feels too daunting, I’ve listed some additional resources for learning about its content and the author below.
Abraham Lincoln
In 1858, just seven years before the start of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglas engaged in a series of public debates. During one of them, Lincoln said the following:
“I am not, nor ever had been, in favor or making Black people voters or jurors, or politicians or marriage partners. There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together… while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of hearing the superior assigned to the white race.”
The KKK
It became almost standard operating procedure to justify Klan terrorism by maintaining that southern White supremacy was necessary to defend the purity of White women. Black women’s bodies, in contrast, were regarded as “training ground” for White men, or a stabilizing “safety valve” for White men’s “sexual energies” that allowed the veneration of the asexual pureness of White womanhood to continue.
After 1830, young, single, and white working-class women earning wages outside the home were growing less dependent on men financially and becoming more sexually free. White male gang rapes of white women began to appear around the same time as the gang assaults by White men on Black people. Both were desperate attempts to maintain white male supremacy.
Black versus white, according to federal data
The KKK almost tripled its national membership between 1971 and 1980.
Young Black males were twenty-one times more likely to be killed by police than their White counterparts between 2010 and 2012, according to federal statistics.
Federal data show that the median wealth of White households is a staggering thirteen times the median wealth of Black households—and Black people are five times more likely to be incarcerated than whites.
Additional Materials and Resources:
Learn more about Ibram X. Kendi and his work at the BU Center for Antiracist Research
Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You
Stamped from the Beginning: A Timely History of Racist Ideas in America
Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America
By James Forman Jr.
As soon as I started reading this book, it became obvious why it won the Pulitzer Prize. Forman is a truly talented author — he takes the complicated, convoluted history of black-on-black crime and turns it into a striking narrative.
When city leaders in Raleigh, North Carolina, hired four black officers in 1868, the Daily Sentinel responded with headlines proclaiming “The Mongrel Regime!! Negro Police!!” Readers were warned that “this is the beginning of the end.”
There is nothing wrong with seeing policing as a source of stable employment or upward mobility. But the fact that so many blacks joined the force for these reasons undermined the theory that integration would change police practice. After all, most new black officers saw policing as a job, not as another front in the civil rights movement. Expecting them to change how police fought crime was like expecting black firefighters to change how the fire department fought fire.
Forman illustrates the tangible fear felt in Black neighborhoods during the crack epidemic:
One way to understand the fear crack induced in Black America is to consider the analogies it provoked. At the height of the epidemic, Black political and civic leaders often compared crack to the greatest evils that African Americans had ever suffered. In March 1988, the president of the NAACP chapted in Prince George’s County, Maryland, called the drug “the worst thing to hit us since slavery.” Two months later, Rev. Jesse Jackson equated drug dealers with Klansmen.
He outlines the realities of inequality in crime enforcement, from the local level to the federal level:
The most notorious outcome of this poker game was the hundred-to-one cocaine-to-crack ratio. Under this policy, someone selling a small amount of crack would incur the same severe mandatory minimum sentence as someone selling one hundred times as much cocaine.
Clinton invoked black victims in support of a variety of tough-on-crime positions, including the 1994 federal crime legislation that funded prison construction across the country.
According to the most recent data, African Americans are held in state prisons at a rate five times that of whites.
Perhaps the most surprising points Forman makes is the idea that downgrading non-violent drug offenses won’t solve our prison problem.
Basing criminal justice reform on leniency for nonviolent drug offenders reinforces a deeply problematic narrative… roughly 20 percent of America’s prisoners are in prison on drug charges. As a result, even if we decided today to unlock the prison door of every single American behind bars on a drug offense, tomorrow morning we’d wake up to a country that still had the world’s largest prison population.
When Obama declared that he has “no sympathy” or “no tolerance” for those who have committed violent offenses, he effectively marked this larger group of violent offenders as permanently out-of-bounds. Such talk draws no distinctions and admits no exceptions. It allows for no individual consideration of the violent offense. The context, the story, the mitigating factors—none of it matters. Any act of violence in your past casts you as undeserving forever.
Additional Media and Resources:
James Forman, Jr. - "Locking Up Our Own" and the Path to Criminal Justice Reform | The Daily Show
Teaching Mass Incarceration: The Locking Up Our Own Curriculum
Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making ALL BLACK LIVES MATTER
By Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith
Knowledge is a necessary but not sufficient component of being anti-racist. You have to put your knowledge to use in order to eradicate the problems of racial injustice.
This is a true textbook on anti-racist thinking. It is a straight-up, no-bullshit, no-sugar-coating and well organized collection of the racist realities that exist in our society, everywhere, every day. In addition to clearly defining terms like “colorblind racism” or “white fragility” the authors present examples of daily racism as well as thought experiments and tough questions.
When we lump together the beautiful and the terrible histories and experiences of “people of color”, we do all of them a disservice. The history of genocide and contemporary marginalization of Indigenous Americans, the history of slavery and contemporary mass incarceration of Black Americans, the history of exclusion and contemporary double standards set up for Asian Americans, and the history of colonization and contemporary demonization of Lantinxs are inextricably intertwined but they are not synonymous.
Colorblind racism (tool of oppression)
1. The worldview that suggest that since race should not matter, it does not matter.
2. An ideology that insists that everyone be treated without regard to race, accompanied by a denial of the causes and consequences of racism.
Gaslighting (wisdom of popular culture)
1. To psychologically manipulate a person or group of people into believing that they cannot trust their own memories, perceptions, or interpretations of events.
2. Racial gaslighting: a systematic effort to discredit claims of racism, typically by means of contradiction, outright denial, misdirection, and lying.
White fragility (tool of oppression)
1. A state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, gear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.
Intersectionality (foundational concept, tool of liberation)
1. A theory that highlights the heterogeneity of privileges and layers of oppression that individuals within a group may experience.
2. A paradigm, rooted in the analysis of Black women’s experiences, that reveals that Black women are “doubly bound”, due to overlapping layers of oppressions, including racism and sexism; this paradigm asserts that race constructs the way women experience gender, and gender influences how women experience race.
It’s important not to go down the Oppression Olympics rabbit hole. The point of intersectionality is to make us cognizant of the fact that the lives of Black people are vulnerable to anti-Black racism, but that vulnerability manifests itself in very different ways for members across the racial group.
Each chapter concludes with a list of questions and additional materials to consider, including books, films, websites, and podcasts. These lists serve as a pertinent reminder that educating oneself on race and anti-racist action is a lifelong learning process, especially for white people of privilege.
Additional Materials and Resources: