Reading Suggestions For Our Moment

I thought I would go ahead and put together a list of books we might look to for guidance in our despair, for understanding how we got here, and how to move forward. This is not meant to be some sort of Trump Syllabus project, and I don't intend it for that level of circulation or comprehensiveness, nor is it meant to be a list for the academic community and classrooms, like those tend to be. Rather its just some books I'm looking back at, and think friends might find useful. I'm particularly thinking about what academic books in and around my field of study my non-academic friends might find useful in this time. I'm also happy to field suggestions and update the list.

First, I think we all need to get sophisticated about whiteness as property and white supremacy. There was a burst of whiteness studies in the 90s that have some limitations but are worth looking at in these times. Start here: David Roediger The Wages of Whiteness

Perhaps the classic intersectional study of whiteness within working class formations. Its a short book, but very pointed about how in the nineteenth century, white supremacy grew as whiteness became a property promised to white workers, how that attachment to whiteness spread through immigrant worker groups, and set the scene for racial oppression and segregation after the civil war. Essential to understand why some people will give up seemingly everything to retain their whiteness and the prestige that is supposed to entail. Further classic whiteness studies: Noel Ignatiev, How The Irish Became White; Alexander Saxton, Rise and Fall of the White Republic. Other important, but more technical, works of racial formation as related to class: Stuart Hall "Societies Structured in Dominance": Denise Ferrara De Silva, Toward a Global Concept of Race. Next, lets think through histories of solidarities, where progressive movements have succeeded and how they have been destroyed by white supremacy, what the process to creating and sustaining a multiracial democracy has been. Start: W.E.B Dubois, Black Reconstruction.

A long, in depth book about the horizons for democracy that opened during the Reconstruction period and their collapse with Jim Crow. Continues the story of how whiteness as property committed poor and work class whites to aid rich planters in the suppression and exploitation of black workers, despite what they may have had to gain through solidarity. But also with glimmers of an emerging democratic order in the south before the fall of reconstruction. The single most fundamental book for our moment to understand what a cycle of white reaction and backlash truly looks like. Continued Reading: Khalil Gibran Muhammed, The Condemnation of Blackness. Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon. Finally, we need to center Black Radical Movements and politics, as well as the political organizations of immigrant and indigenous groups. There literature here is vast and deep, but its vital we see who has been doing the work for generations of fighting white supremacy, we need to learn from them, and how to work for them. I'm much more well read in Black movements than anything else, so I'll make some suggestions there, but would love to hear more. Right now, I've been reading Waiting till the Midnight Hour by Peniel Joseph, a history of black power politics. I'm immediately putting some Robin D.G. Kelly on my reading list, who has written at length about black working class politics. Its always good to keep up with what Angela Davis is doing and thinking. And I think key, is Cedric Robinson's deep investigations of the relationships between black and antislavery politics and marxism.

Finally, I'm hesitant to highlight a book on pop culture right now, because I think we have strong overdepedencies on deeply flawed pop figures right now among young progressives. BUT Richard Iton's In Search of the Black Fantastic is an extremely powerful history of where and how the intersection of politics and black music has succeeded and failed since the 1960s. There's obviously a ton more than this that we need to be reading, and I've made numerous unforgivable omissions particularly regarding gender and sexuality, but I just wanted to get a conversation started, and if anyone in the D.C. area wants to get moving on a study group, hit me up.