Read black authors because you like reading

ANNOUNCEMENT: If you are a black writer who reads this newsletter and would like to write anything about women’s literature (does not have to be about black writers; does not have to be about *this moment*), email me. I pay better rates than most magazines at this point and would love to promote your work.

---

I read my first Toni Morrison novel shamefully late. My freshman year we read The Bluest Eye, and I was absolutely stunned by it. On a sentence level, on a structural level, and on a character development level, it is a fucking masterpiece. What’s incredible is that every single one of Morrison’s books is. When I took a class my junior year that read Morrison’s whole cannon, the professor was very clear with the few white students in the room. Morrison herself was very clear: these books were not written for me. They were written for black people. But that did not mean that I could not love them, could not admire them, could not fawn over bangers of opening sentences like “124 was spiteful.”

Vulture published a wonderful piece by Lauren Michelle Jackson yesterday about the Anti-racist reading list. To summarize, Jackson argues that these lists make people feel better because they can buy a book and even if they never read it, pretend to be working on themselves. But they also reduce incredible work by black writers to something white people read for self-improvement and not beautiful works on their own. Read this paragraph:

An example —The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, a usual suspect. The Bluest Eye is a novel whose grammar precedes exposition, and that grammar is crushing. Racism is relevant to the story to the extent that it is relevant everywhere, including the reluctant enclaves of migrated black characters whose discontinuous narratives fill the pages. In The Bluest Eye racism is the environment—the weather, the climate—and it makes the seasons turn, which is to say that it is happening all the time and therefore no more remarkable than March snowflakes in the Midwest. Every time I read the novel I am fascinated by how syntax expresses illness without pathology, how vernacular holds people together without fixing them. I am not sure if my attention would be drawn in the same way if I had approached Morrison’s fiction as a balm for my own latent racism and I am not sure what purpose the novel is meant to serve on an anti-racist list for someone desperate for understanding. I am sure such a person will find a lodestar worth grasping — the novel stuns after all — but what’s missed in the mission? A novel. And all that language.

You do not read Nobel Laureate and American Treasure Toni Morrison because you feel bad about being white. You read her because she is arguably the best novelist America has ever produced.

As people who love reading, it is important that we diversify what we read not because it makes us “good people” or because it “will help us learn to dismantle systems of racism” but because there are really good books out there that we will miss if we fail to reach outside of the kinds of books we usually gravitate toward. There are great books outside the reach of what is comfortable, books that are beautifully written and moving and fun to read. We don’t read black writers (or trans writers or any other oppressed groups writings) because it is our homework as white people trying to be better. We read these books because they are good and we like reading good things.

I am now going to recommend a few books for you to buy that are wonderful stories and that I have personally loved that are written by black writers. You can buy them after you donate to a bail fund or neighborhood fund or Black Lives Matter. You can buy them because you want a good book to read. You can definitely by them from a local black owned bookstore even if it costs two dollars more. You cannot buy these books and think that in doing so you have done a political action.

Some great books:

-Sula by Toni Morrison

-Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson

-Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

-The Tradition by Jericho Brown

-What it Means When A Man Falls From the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah

-The Turner House by Angela Flournoy

I’ll be spending my next week with Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half.

Happy Friday!