Anti-Racist Reading Roundup - January and February

Here's a list of books I read in Jan/Feb.  They're all great.

The Narrative of Sojourner Truth
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? - Beverly Daniel Tatum
Other People's Children - Lisa Delpit
Race Matters - Cornel West
Sister Outsider - Audre Lorde (haven't finished)
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center - bell hooks (haven't finished)
Black Skin, White Masks - Frantz Fanon
The Souls of Black Folk - W. E. B. Dubois

I was never required to read the classics of black literature in my schooling.  This wasn't deemed important because I was never taught that my race, my whiteness is essential to who I am and to my identity as an ethical being.  Conversely, I was taught that my fellow students' Blackness was a footnote to their identities and should not be dwelled upon.  When I did read a classic of African American literature at school (I can only remember reading one or two in my classrooms), this was undertaken as sort of a charitable frivolity, a way of doing lip service to something a hypothetically nice idea.  When we read white literature (which was nearly all we read), we never interrogated the manifestations of whiteness in these contexts.  So now I am reading the corpus of black literature I was never taught in order that I may learn how to stop participating in the dehumanization and devaluation of people of color.

"My alma mater was books, a good library. . . .  I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity."
- Malcolm X (saw this quote on the tagline of an email and loved it.)