Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(48)

Slavery was ensconced in politics, intertwined with the economy, and thus you need to know impressive works like Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet, Manisha Sinha’s The Counterrevolution of Slavery, Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul, Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, and Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told. Vincent Brown’s The Reaper’s Garden offers a haunting glimpse into what enslaved, and enslaving, people in the Atlantic world made of death. Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering does for the Civil War what Brown does for slavery. The Civil War was, centrally, the infernal contest of white regions over black flesh and its future in America, which you’ll discover when you tackle James McPherson’s fiercely elegant Battle Cry of Freedom. You should read about what went on after the Civil War, especially classics like W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America and Eric Foner’s Reconstruction. And you should ride the epic sweep of black migration along with Isabel Wilkerson in her achingly brilliant The Warmth of Other Suns.

Beloved, take in as much as you can about the modern civil rights movement, glimpsed in stellar works like Aldon Morris’ Origins of the Civil Rights Movement and Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer’s Voices of Freedom, the book based on Hampton’s monumental documentary television series Eyes on the Prize, which you should make every effort to see. Or you can make your way through Taylor Branch’s trilogy on Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement, in Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan’s Edge—or the single-volume summary America in the King Years—and David Garrow’s exhaustive and illuminating study of King, Bearing the Cross, or Diane McWhorter’s riveting account of the movement’s impact on white families in Birmingham, including her own, in Carry Me Home. Gilbert King’s heartbreaking Devil in the Grove shines a light on Jim Crow as he probes the case of four young black men accused of raping a 17-year-old white girl in Florida and the valiant defense they got from future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall. You should also read Barbara Ransby’s moving portrait of the great organizer and activist, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement; Kay Mills’ engrossing study of freedom fighter Fannie Lou Hamer, This Little Light of Mine; and In Struggle, Clayborne Carson’s compelling study of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Grapple with the black freedom struggle, too, especially the impact of black nationalism’s most influential leader, Malcolm X, explored in Manning Marable’s magnum opus Malcolm X. Peniel Joseph’s seminal Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour invites us to understand the rich sweep of the black power movement, as does his penetrating study of the movement’s most iconic leader, Stokely Carmichael, in his biography Stokely. To understand how the issue of police brutality inspired social revolution in the seventies, please read Black against Empire, a comprehensive study of the history and politics of the Black Panthers by Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin, Jr. The struggle of black working class folk is captured in Robin Kelley’s landmark Race Rebels. The effort to embrace the intersections of gender, class, sexuality, and feminist politics is portrayed in a series of pioneering books, including Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Barbara Smith’s The Truth That Never Hurts, bell hooks’ Ain’t I a Woman?, Michele Wallace’s Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s Critical Race Theory and, along with co-author Andrea Ritchie, Say Her Name, and Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought.

Beloved, these are just a few books to get you started. Of course the classics must not be neglected, from Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, groundbreaking essays that limn the color line at the turn of the twentieth century, to Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, which wrestles with the perennial black problem of not being seen by the white world. Ellison’s collected essays are masterpieces of elegance and erudition. And you should pay attention to the personal and political essays of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka; June Jordan; Zora Neale Hurston (and her great novel rejecting racial uplift narratives, Their Eyes Were Watching God); and the essays of Alice Walker, along with The Color Purple, her captivating novel about the struggles of black women for room to breathe and love in the south in the 1930s. Great black autobiographies offer a peek into the struggles of some of our most important figures, from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass to Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, from The Autobiography of Malcolm X to Angela Davis: An Autobiography, and from Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings to Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father.

Beloved, you should read as much as you can about race and black identity in the media too. Read gifted black voices like Jamilah Lemieux, Ta-Nehisi Coates, William Jelani Cobb, Jamelle Bouie, Eve Ewing, Clint Smith, Wesley Lowery, Damon Young, Vann Newkirk, Mychal Denzel Smith, Bakari Kitwana, Rembert Browne, Wesley Morris, Nicole Hannah-Jones, and Keisha Blain. The miracle of social media permits greater accessibility than in the past to brilliant thinkers and scholars like Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; Mark Anthony Neal; Marc Lamont Hill; James Braxton Peterson; Salamishah Tillet; Stacey Patton; Kiese Laymon; Melissa Harris-Perry; Treva Lindsey; Obery Hendricks, Jr.; Farah Griffin; Brittney Cooper; Stacy Floyd-Thomas; Elizabeth Hinton; Alondra Nelson; Thadious Davis; Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting; Keri Day; Eboni Marshall Turman; Lawrence Bobo; Leah Wright Rigueur; Marcylinena Morgan; Nell Painter; and thousands more.

Beloved, you must not only read about black life, but you must school your white brothers and sisters, your cousins and uncles, your loved ones and friends, and all who will listen to you, about the white elephant in the room—white privilege. Share with them what you learn about us, but share as well what you learn about yourself, about how whiteness works. You see, my friends, there is only so much I can say to white folk, only so much they can hear from me or anyone who isn’t white. They may not be as defensive with you, so you must be an ambassador of truth to your own tribes, just like the writers Peggy McIntosh, Tim Wise, David Roediger, Mab Segrest, Theodore Allen, and Joe Feagin.