Reads

Some of my reads this past year:

Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes

• While I understand I'm not suppose to cry, I felt overwhelming emtional connection with the family of Jerome while reading this book. What is particuarly powerful is how the book centers on the perspective of Jerome-the young boy shot in the first few pages of the book and incorporates the historical legacy of violance against young Black powers AND features an unlikely white girl as an ally. The discussion quesitons at the end are particularly powerful for educators.

This Book is Antiracist: 20 Lessons on How to Wake-Up, Take Action, and Do The Work by Tiffany Jewell and Aurelia Durand

• Yes please! This book is a terrific handbook for upper elementary to early high school. Not only does it do a terrific job explaining race, racism, and systemic racism, it gives the reader advice on how to an an active anti-racist.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

• If you haven't read Ta-Nehisi Coates, "Between the World and Me", do. It is soulful, gut wrenching, and an intimate look as his truth.
• “But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming 'the people' has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the belief that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes , which are indelible--this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, to believe that they are white. These people are, like us, a modern invention. But unlike us, their new name has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white--Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish--and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myths. I cannot call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, was not achieved through wine tasting and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.”

The Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison

• Toni Morrison's first novel and I believe one of the most powerful pieces of fiction in the American canon. Her story feature Pecola Breedlove, a young girl you won't soon forget. The story is about oppression; female oppression, racial oppression, and the characters are both haunting and inspiring.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid