A Los Angeles Times reporter recently asked me and a couple of others which two books or essays students should read regarding race and racism in the Ferguson era. Whittling it down to only two was almost impossible, but I managed–it was an interesting exercise. I pared it down to James Cone’s A Black Theology of Liberation and a Harper’s Magazine interview between Cornel West and Jorge Klor de Alva. You can read more about these two texts in the L.A. Times article that came out yesterday.
Baltimore
Hua Hsu, “The Trouble with ‘White People'” in The New Yorker
A spot-on comment from Hua Hsu in The New Yorker:
“The scenes of American injustice that we see on a regular basis are not failures of people being insufficiently nice to one another. They are about the legacies and structures that hem in our choices, that define the circumference of our imaginations, that trigger our personal gut reaction to the very word ‘dream.’ They are about those whom the truth cannot set free. We can control and harness our feelings. I have no idea how to destroy and rebuild our institutions.”
Read the full commentary here.
My So-Called Race 