Photo: Baton Rouge, LA 2016. (C) Reuters.

A couple weeks back I asked Facebook, especially international friends, if they would read something I wrote about how we got to where we are today with‪#‎blacklivesmatter‬. I tried writing the piece, but I failed. It was painful and it’s was just really hard to condense contextual understanding of this moment in history into one essay.

#BlackLivesMatter is a self-evident truth that doesn’t require an explanation of “why”, per se. Below is simply a personal reading list that has shaped my own understanding of and existence in America over the past three decades growing up and living in Kansas, Los Angeles, Washington DC, and San Francisco. I include some brief excerpts from each piece.

and for fun…

10. How To Be Black — Baratunde Thurston, 2012

‘The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air; but now that the whole ship’s cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential.

The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us.

This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers.

This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated.

The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable.

I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life: so that, with the loathsomeness of the stench and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat.

I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me; but soon, to my grief, two of the White men offered me eatables; and on my refusing to eat, one of them held me fast by the hands, and laid me across I think the windlass, and tied my feet, while the other flogged me severely.

I had never experienced any thing of this kind before; and although not being used to the water, I naturally feared that element the first time I saw it, yet nevertheless, could I have got over the nettings, I would have jumped over the side, but I could not; and besides, the crew used to watch us very closely who were not chained down to the decks, lest we should leap into the water: and I have seen some of these poor African prisoners most severely cut for attempting to do so, and hourly whipped for not eating.’

2. Reconstruction — Frederick Douglass, 1866

‘Slavery, like all other great systems of wrong, founded in the depths of human selfishness, and existing for ages, has not neglected its own conservation. It has steadily exerted an influence upon all around it favorable to its own continuance. And to-day it is so strong that it could exist, not only without law, but even against law…’

‘Custom, manners, morals, religion, are all on its side everywhere in the South; and when you add the ignorance and servility of the ex-slave to the intelligence and accustomed authority of the master, you have the conditions, not out of which slavery will again grow, but under which it is impossible for the Federal government to wholly destroy it, unless the Federal government be armed with despotic power, to blot out State authority, and to station a Federal officer at every cross-road. This, of course, cannot be done, and ought not even if it could.’

The policy that emancipated and armed the negro — now seen to have been wise and proper by the dullest — was not certainly more sternly demanded than is now the policy of enfranchisement. If with the negro was success in war, and without him failure, so in peace it will be found that the nation must fall or flourish with the negro.’

3. The Soul of Black Folks — W.E.B. Du Bois, 1903

W.E.B. Du Bois

‘The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.’

‘Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people, — a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly people.’

‘So far as Mr. [Booker T.] Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the… effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambitions of our brighter minds ­ so far as he, the South, or the Nation does this ­ we must unceasingly and firmly oppose them. By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive for the rights which the world accords to men.’

4. Letters from a Birmingham Jail — Martin Luther King Jr., 1963

Dr. King Jr.

‘I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.’

5. The Autobiography of Malcolm X — Alex Haley & Malcolm X, 1965

‘….My first view in the mirror blotted out the hurting. I’d seen some pretty conks, but when it’s the first time, on your own head, the transformation, after the lifetime of kinks, is staggering…The mirror reflected Shorty behind me. We both were grinning and sweating. And on top of my head was this thick, smooth sheen of shining red hair — real red — as straight as any white man’s…How ridiculous I was! Stupid enough to stand there simply lost in admiration of my hair now looking “white,” reflected in the mirror in Shorty’s room.

I vowed that I’d never again be without a conk, and I never was for many years…This was my first really big step toward self-degradation: when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man’s hair.

I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are “inferior” — and white people “superior” — that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look “pretty” by white standards.’

6. Beloved — Toni Morrison, 1990

‘White people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way . . . they were right. . . . But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place. . . . It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread . . . until it invaded the whites who had made it. . . . Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.’

‘Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.’

7. The Drug War is The New Jim Crow — Graham Boyd, 2001

‘Pervasive racial targeting provides another peculiarly U.S. stamp to the drug war. We are incarcerating African-American men at a rate approximately four times the rate of incarceration of black men in South Africa under apartheid.’

‘Worse still, we have managed to replicate-at least on a statistical level-the shame of chattel slavery in this country: The number of black men in prison (792,000) has already equaled the number of men enslaved in 1820. With the current momentum of the drug war fueling an ever expanding prison-industrial complex, if current trends continue, only 15 years remain before the United States incarcerates as many African-American men as were forced into chattel bondage at slavery’s peak, in 1860.’

‘The war on drugs thus offers seamless continuity with the most shameful episodes of our past. Slaves were bound in plantations from which they could not escape. Now, it is prisons that deprive black men of their freedom. For African-American men between the ages of 20 and 29, almost one in three are currently under the thumb of the criminal justice system.’

‘Here lies the new Civil Rights Movement. As in a nightmare it revisits the same issue civil rights activists faced in the 1960s when fighting Jim Crow, the same issues abolitionists faced in the nineteenth century. It is the original sin of the United States that the “”Founding Fathers”” sanctioned slavery and enshrined racism in the Constitution in the form of the three-fifths compromise. And with each generation Americans become uncomfortable with this legacy of racism.

We chronically disavow the sin, distancing ourselves from the old, discredited form of racism. We denounce it. We say we have finally healed ourselves.

But yet, as with the figure of original sin, it rises back up to the surface, and today takes form as the war on drugs. We must recognize it and call it by its true name. It is the U.S. apartheid, the new Jim Crow.’

8. House Rules — This American Life, 2013

Nancy Updike

The federal government’s redlining drove white flight, and the government did not see this as a problem. Open racism was mainstream in the 1930s, including in the federal government. A manual put out by the Federal Housing Administration warned against undesirable encroachment of inharmonious racial groups.

And federal attitudes and policies amplified what was already happening at the local level. There was flat out violence in some places, first of all, against blacks trying to move into white neighborhoods. There were also racial zoning laws, something called racial covenants. These were contracts attached to properties that said things like “At no time shall said premises be sold, occupied, let, or leased to anyone of any race other than the Caucasian.” But discriminatory policies by the federal government had more reach than any local policy.

Nikole Hannah-jones

And what ultimately happens, of course, between 1934 and 1964, 98% of the home loans that are insured by the federal government go to white Americans, building up the white middle class by allowing them to get home ownership. And black Americans are largely left out of that process. And, if there’s one thing that’s amazing about all of this, is how efficient the federal government was in creating segregation.

9. The Problem We All Live With — This American Life, 2015

‘A generation of black Saint Louis residents, tens of thousands of them, remember the Saint Louis desegregation program just as she does, as a great opportunity. They’ll be the first to tell you that it was hard, but also that it was necessary. And for the most part, it worked.

In the schools where white families chose to stay, test scores for black transfer students rose. They were more likely to graduate and go to college. After years of resistance, Saint Louis had created the largest and most successful metro-wide desegregation program in the country. And then state officials worked to kill it.

And then in 1999, just 16 years after real desegregation came to Saint Louis, the desegregation order ended. Just a much smaller voluntary desegregation program remains. Michael Brown’s mother, by the way, was part of that brief 16 year window. She was one of the students who was bussed out of Saint Louis when she was a kid. But her own son went to one of the most segregated districts in the state.

This is what happened in cities all over. With Brown versus Board of Education, we as a nation decided that segregated schooling violated the constitutional right of black children. We promised that we would fix this wrong. And when it proved difficult, as we knew it would be, we said integration failed instead of the truth, which is that it was working. But we decided it wasn’t worth the trouble.’

10. How To Be Black — Baratunde Thurston, 2012

Photo courtesy: baratunde.com

‘If there are segregated plates of fruit, I suggest a four-to-one ratio of non-watermelon to watermelon. Look, they know you want it. YOU know you want it. So if you conspicuously avoid it, that’s an admission right there: guilt by omission.’

‘As I’ve reflected back on both, I realize that my neighborhood was just like The Wire. We had the drug dealing, the police brutality, the murders. Well, it was /almost/ a perfect match. We had everything The Wire had except for universal critical acclaim and the undying love of white people who saw it.’