ANTI-RACIST READINGS AND FEATURED BLACK ARTISTS: RECOMMENDED READING BY THE COLUMBIA REVIEW

  • “Rankine’s Citizen has rightly been praised as a necessary read for the times, but her 2004 book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely shouldn’t be missed: a beautiful lyric criticism of America and one that expresses grief with a unique clarity.” –Morgan Levine
  • “Jace Clayton, also known as DJ /rupture, is a rigorously curious genius and his insights have shaped the way I think about music today. This book is interested in collage and connection across time and place.” –Morgan Levine
  • “Abdurraqib, a music and culture essayist from the great city of Columbus, OH, weaves political and social commentary into beautiful reflections on music, masculinity, and blackness. This particular collection was unlike anything I’d read before. It demonstrated the creativity and intricacy of 90s rap, an era and an art form too often overlooked in canonized studies. He also writes lovingly of the problematic, aspirational city I call home.” –Maddie Woda
  • “McMillan Cottom, a sociologist and professor at UNC, writes eloquently and passionately about the experience of black women in academia (and in life). She is exceptionally educated and well researched—her writing is both a treat to read and a powerful, disturbing call to action. When people—particularly people who fancy themselves scholars—ask for my best anti-racist readings, this is the book I give them. It is a humbling experience to read McMillan Cottom’s work.” –Maddie Woda
  • “The Fifth Season (2015) is the first book in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy: a classic of contemporary speculative fiction, it explores systemic racism and ecological crisis with piercing narrative voices and extensive worldbuilding. Tolkien could never.” –Spencer Grayson
  • “Passing (1929), a novel deeply concerned with the unsaid and the surfaces of things, reminds me of Jemisin’s Fifth Season through its pointed interiority. It follows the unwieldy relationship between Clare and Irene, two white-passing Black women in 1920s Harlem, and their slippage between racial, sexual, and class distinctions.” –Spencer Grayson
  • “These two books (Their Eyes Were Watching God and Sing, Unburied, Sing) are masterpieces in their own right, but read together, they provide a vision of the incredible richness and imagination of Black Southern literature.” –Sofia Montrone
  • “These two books (Their Eyes Were Watching God and Sing, Unburied, Sing) are masterpieces in their own right, but read together, they provide a vision of the incredible richness and imagination of Black Southern literature.” –Sofia Montrone
  • “It’s no secret that today’s struggle against racism bears the weight of a generations-long oppression. Pairing the first novel written by an African-American (William Wells Brown’s Clotel) with one of our century’s greatest (Toni Morrison’s Beloved), I chose two equally moving accounts of a woman’s escape from slavery to reflect the Schomburg Center’s equally expansive catalog and mission.” –Ryan Daar
  • “It’s no secret that today’s struggle against racism bears the weight of a generations-long oppression. Pairing the first novel written by an African-American (William Wells Brown’s Clotel) with one of our century’s greatest (Toni Morrison’s Beloved), I chose two equally moving accounts of a woman’s escape from slavery to reflect the Schomburg Center’s equally expansive catalog and mission.” –Ryan Daar
  • “Essential reading on national reckoning and the early Civil Rights Movement.”–Hanna Andrews
  • “An ethnographic approach to Blackness and class situated in Harlem and driven by in-depth interviews.” –Hanna Andrews
  • “Suzan-Lori Parks’ play Father Comes Home From the Wars is riveting, painful, and deeply rooted in histories, traumas, and ancestors both American and otherwise. Her work can only be described as a brilliantly rendered triptych of the American concept of freedom, of freedom rotted, of enslavement not just physical or political but insidiously personal and psychological. Weaving traditions from the Homeric epics with questions of war and choice, of names and of homecoming, Parks deconstructs the very concept of what it means to be a hero.” –Ilina Logani
  • ” James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son should be required reading for every American (and, heck, for those outside of the U.S. too) who cares to call themself an ally, who cares to be conscious in any meaningful way of deeply-rooted structural racism in America. A collection of essays probing the complicated realities of being Black in America at the dawn of the civil rights movement, Notes of a Native Son allows us to view a hypocritical, fearful, and difficult America through the eyes of an artist, activist, social critic, American, son, and Black man. If this book has not crossed (and been crossed off) your reading list yet, put it at the top.” –Ilina Logani