Here’s my own anti-racist reading list for Northam and my fellow Americans who are truly awakening after their own blackface moment. It is for people realizing they were taught by their relatives and friends and the media how to be racist. How to paint on blackface as if it were nothing. How to look down on black faces like they were nothing. How to support racist policies like they harm nothing.

This anti-racist syllabus is for people realizing they were never taught how to be anti-racist. How to treat all the racial groups as equals. How to look at the racial inequity all around and look for the racist policies producing it, and the racist ideas veiling it. This list is for people beginning their anti-racist journey after a lifetime of defensively saying, “I’m not a racist” or “I can’t be a racist.” Beginning after a lifetime of assuring themselves only bad people can be racist.

This list of nonfiction books on antiblack racism is introductory, for minds beginning to open to the ubiquity of racism in the 21st century and its history. The list includes the books I would read if I were beginning my journey today. Recent or enduring books. Books accessible to anyone. Books that primarily expose racist policies and ideas. Books that are ambitious and sweeping, mostly covering a long period or wide scope, or a specific space or time from the eyes of the nation, from the ears of history. The kinds of books that send us searching and learning and changing more and more. It is 38 books for two 19-week introductory courses. But please add to it.

Amanda Mull: Ralph Northam’s yearbook page speaks for itself

We should begin by developing clarity and direction that can come only from definitions.

Definitions of race: Dorothy Roberts’s Fatal Invention.

Definitions of racist and anti-racist, which I seek to explain in my books: Stamped From the Beginning and the forthcoming How to Be an Antiracist.

If you are white and feeling on edge already, then read Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. If you are a person of color and think this syllabus isn’t for you, then read James Forman’s Locking Up Our Own.

Once definitions and feelings are clear, it may be prudent to be carefully led into racism and anti-racism through political memoirs of the past—Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and The Autobiography of Malcolm X—and then of the present, with Janet Mock’s Redefining Realness, Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage, and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy.

From memoirs, proceed to essays: James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Coates’s Between the World and Me, and Jesmyn Ward’s anthology, The Fire This Time.

From the essays, move to the nonfiction monographs:

Slavery: Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told. Daina Ramey Berry’s The Price for Their Pound of Flesh.