RaeAnna + A Nerdy Lifestyle
This is obviously a list by a white lady with white privilege on her own imperfect and perpetual journey to being antiracist. But I am trying. There are better lists out there, but here's mine. A little of my own experiences and a lot of make room for BIPOC.
Michelle Obama is funny, complex, intelligent, thoughtful, realistic, loyal, hopefully, and more. It’s so easy to water down a person to the image presented by the media; more often than not, she was left to be the woman standing behind the man in the white house. Up until Becoming, I knew very little about her life outside of the basics.
The Water Dancer delves into magical realism and familiar themes of justice, humanity, freedom, and equality. Ta-Nehisi Coates sets his debut novel in pre-Civil War Virginia. Though the prose is excellent and interesting, I found the story largely forgettable.
The book is pretty much summed up in the quote, “We know how to be racist. We know how to pretend to be not racist. Now let’s know how to be antiracist.”
I would not be the person I am today without these authors, their stories, the characters, and the challenges they gave me to face in the mirror and the world. Black authors have done more to open my mind than any other demographic.
The Black Book is a heartbreaking history of Africans’ struggle to gain humanity, recognition, rights, and the hope for equality and citizenship in America from 1619 through the 1940s.