February 28

2018: Happy Black History Month! Today’s book rec is Native Son by Richard Wright. This is the most intense novel I’ve read, to the point where I was kind of reluctant to pick it up again. It’s about a guy named Bigger who accidentally kills a rich white woman and tries to hide the crime and then it all goes downhill from there. This book changed American literature forever. It was another one of the books on the official Black Panther reading list. It’s hard to describe how big and important and amazing this book is and all the stuff it does.

2017: Feb 28: Happy Black History Month! Today’s book rec is A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. This is without question the most significant of the ex-slave narratives published in this country. Frederick Douglass explains how he came to realize just how oppressed he was as a slave, and how he snatched education and learning whenever he could, eventually learning how to read and write, which slaves were nearly always forbidden to do. Douglass describes the beatings he received, and of the process by which he decided he needed to escape slavery. He doesn’t reveal how he escaped and who helped him, as they’d be in legal danger if he did so. The book ends with him finding his fiancee and becoming an abolitionist orator and writer. This book was hugely influential and is still crazy inspiring. Its emphasis of the importance of education in raising yourself and your people from oppression is timeless. It’s interesting, though, to note that this book had to be prefaced by a note from a white man, Wendell Phillips, vouching for the credibility of the book and its author, since few white people would believe the book had really been written by a black, formerly enslaved man if a man of reputation were not willing to cosign on his work. White people and institutions refusing to take the word of black people on its own, needing verification from a white source to be believed, is a recurring theme in our nation’s cultural and legal history. I hope that, moving forward, we’ll listen to black and other marginalized voices and believe them, no matter how much we like what we’re hearing, and acknowledge the validity and truth of their experiences.