White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

I’ve read a decent number of books on institutional racism, and I still learned quite a bit from “White Rage.” The author does a fantastic job of researching, and laying out in painstaking detail, the systematic strategies that federal, state, and local lawmakers have employed to perpetuate white supremacy. While I was aware of many of the high-level themes, I learned a lot about the smaller details. For example, I was aware of how the Iran-Contra scandal led to the crack epidemic, but had never heard of Tom Coleman and the arrests in Tulia, Oklahoma. Definitely worth reading.

This was another hard book, and for those of you with generational racial trauma, you might want to be wary. For those of you who've never experienced racism, you need to read this book. If you have any empathy at all, you're going to find your stomach churning. You're going to get samples of the history that we never learned in school. You're going to see examples of the ways that US Society has worked to actively discriminate against black folks in this country - history that a lot of folks want to ignore or pretend. You're going to be moved to tears, and your rage will be a justified, righteous rage.

If you have any empathy at all.

Much more thoughtful than the title suggests, though perhaps not less incendiary. This is a concise and well-cited survey of the backlash against civil rights throughout the history of the US, up until the election of Trump. A very good read for black history month.

While not as thorough and detailed as Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow" this book is an incredibly well-written introduction to the ways in which "White" America has systematized racism and discrimination over the last 230(-ish) years. If this is a subject with which you are already well acquainted, perhaps skip it for something more in-depth. Otherwise this is a great place for "Whites" to begin to educate themselves on the ways in which we've rigged the game against Black America.