cream & sugar book club recommendations

Dear White Friends, 

If you’re feeling overwhelmed with how to begin the journey toward becoming an anti-racist ally, I want you to know that your feelings are not unique. We all feel overwhelmed. Regardless of the color of their skin, no one is doing this work with any measure of exact skill. No one enters this work having it all figured out, and therefore can lead a conversation with calm, cool confidence. This work is heavy. This work feels dangerous and suffocating at times, yet freeing and energizing on other days. Doing this work will help you to not despair so often, especially when the news headlines and social media feeds are littered with the latest racially-ignited tragedy.

The only way to do the work is to just do it and then practice, practice, practice. And the best way to practice is to read books and articles about racism in this country. If you’re unable to read, listen to audio books. In order to truly know what you don’t know, you have to open books written by those who know the “unknowable” stories. I will never know what it’s like to defend an inmate on death row or what it feels like to lead a revolution, or what it was like being a teenaged black girl in Jim Crow south. But I have read books that have been more than willing to share these unknowable, intangible experiences and make them as real as the concrete beneath my feet.   

There are so many books, friends. But unfortunately, we only have so much time. So if you’re only going to choose one book to read about race in our country, I hope its one of these thirty: 

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson
Letter from the Birmingham Jail by Dr. Martin Luther King
Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
Coming of Age in Mississippi: The Classic Autobiography of a Young Black Girl in the Rural South by Anne Moody
The Color of Compromise: The Truth About The American Church’s Complicity in Racism by Jemar Tisby
Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillian Cottom
Talking to Stranger: What We Should Know About The People We Don’t Know  by Malcolm Gladwell
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas 
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Becoming by Michelle Obama
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America from Ibram X. Kendi
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
Reading the Bible with the Damned by Bob Ekblad
The Winged Seed by Li Young Lee
Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible by E. Randolph Richard and Brandon J. O’Brien
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Devil’s Highway: A True Story by Luis Alberto Urrea
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay
Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah
The Body Is Not An Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor
Breathe: A Letter to My Sons by Imani Perry
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Little Fires Everywhere: A Novel by Celeste Ng
Be the Bridge: Pursuing God’s Heart for Reconciliation by Latasha Morrison
Black America Short Stories Edited by John Henrik Clarke
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward 
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy by Elizabeth Gillespie McCrae

I know, white friends, that this is not a definitive list. The above are mostly written from the black experience. But I am living a black experience. These books are my most beloved, or challenging, but this isn’t meant to give a full representation of all of the stories available to us.