The Stillness of Reading, Anti-Racist Book-lists, & The Black Bookstore
“Reading, as you can see, is not just an avocation or a habit for me. Reading is trying to understand the world around us, with a belief that it is possible to make it sweeter and better.” — Imani Perry “Breathe: A Letter to my Sons”
On Reading and Steering.
My relationship with reading has been serendipitous. A pleasant surprise.
An act, that started out as an escape from reality, has led to my unyielding desire to have the firmest grip on reality. It has birthed my deep skepticism of those who strive to drown out the good pain that the truth of our reality commands us to face and live with.
Which is funny because reading has also taught me how much the reality I know, and that I rigorously seek to keep knowing, is very much so the product of someone else’s imagination. Someone, or some group who also wanted to leave the truth of their reality so bad that they created a new truth and pulled all of our pasts and presents into it with them. As Janaya “The Future” Khan (IG: @janayathefuture)said at a Los Angeles Black Lives Matter rally recently,
“Somebody imagined shackles on Black wrists, and enough people believed it to make it true. Somebody imagined borders, and enough people believed it to make it true. Somebody imagined police, and enough people believed it to make it true. . . ”
So reading has taught me to live in “the real world” yes, but also to not assume that this version of the “real world” was inevitable. It taught me to never think that our present was always going to be like this. That history was always going to pan out the way it did. It taught me to remember that there were millions and millions of people who not only dreamed of alternatives but committed their bodies to steering the world in that fresh direction.
Following the logic, reading also taught me not to assume that “a better future” is inevitable. Reading taught me to not ignore the fact that futures are but the product of imagination. The question is “who’s imagination?” Reading taught me that I am — right now — sitting neatly in someone's deep future and someone’s deep past. I am, and we all are, both products of certain steering and simultaneously steering a future product.
Books brought me to those realizations. Reading brought me there.
Reading. An act that involved stillness, patience, care, and curiosity. A sedentary task has moved me the most.
And I think about the writers of the books. Who also must sit. Be still. Wait. Think. All not necessarily sedentary tasks but still they demand a slowness, a patience, a care.
Reading is a stillness that another stillness called forth. At its root it is a communal meditation. Simultaneously it is elongated personal reflection. Wrestling with new ideas. Picking up a book after years and re-reading. This is reading. An intense practice in deep listening. The type of listening where one is not eager to talk back but to listen more.
The Anti-Racist Book List
The calls for anti-racist book lists do not appear to come from a willingness to sit and listen on a deep level.
The type of reading that an Anti-racist book list rewards is not congruent with the manner in which these lists are being called forth.
In my head I imagine publishing agencies, blogs, and book industry influencers in the stance of a quarterback. Instead of a stillness, these book lists are hurled across the field to a wide receiver (the White, or non-Black, answer-seeker-demander) who catches them while still in motion, continuing at full-speed on the path they were already on.
The type of life-upending, world-collapsing and subsequent re-building that is needed to truly shift into an anti-racist way of being cannot be delivered amongst a culture that praises immediate gratification. A culture that fears the demands of prolonged sitting, silence, and deep reflection.
The anti-racist reading list is not another “self-help” genre. Actually, if the list is any good, it will show you that a world where “self-help” is prioritized over “community-help” is not the world that we seek to live in.
In the world before the spread of the Corona Virus and subsequent calls for physical distance, I spent a lot of my time in bookstores. In Los Angeles there is a gigantic bookstore in the heart of Downtown called “The Last Bookstore”. This is a bookstore that lives up to its name. It truly feels like the last place on Earth where every book that ever was has chosen its final resting place.
As a reader, it is not suggested to have one of your favorite bookstores also be one of LA’s number one tourist spots. It does not make for good reading. It does however make for good observations about how people perceive books and the world of reading.
Almost every Sunday I would plant myself at the center of the universe. In the world of The Last Bookstore, that’s the second floor. All the tourists flock to the second floor for one thing and one thing only. Pictures.
Moms, dads, cousins, old-timers, best friends, children, and fatigued aunties alike — all flock to the photo-op spot. Its a circle, perfectly framed by books. When you place your head in the frame it forms a shot that creates a romantic Belle-from-Beauty-and-the-Beast/Brandy-playing-Cinderella type of “lost in a literary wanderlust” aura. It’s an influencer’s dream shot. Everyone from your local neighborhood struggling author to the likes of Kobe Bryant have arranged themselves for the golden shot. After waiting in line (yes, in line), people hurry to take their photos and then they move on.
Finally, they get to me.
My sweet spot is the intersection between where many of my intellectual interests collide. It is a magical corner where the “Cultural Studies” sections blends nicely into the “African-American” section which effortlessly blends into the “Ethnic Studies”, “Media Studies” and “Feminism” section. It’s heaven.
The voices swarm in. “Omg what the f — is this? hahaha!”, “Yooo, remember that class where that crazy lady tried to make us into feminists?”, “Ugh, I don’t even know when the last time I picked up a book was”, “You know all of this is crap right?”.
Some tend to the titles, “Have you read this? — Yeah. How was it? — Oh I stopped after the first chapter, it was good though!”
Others skim through the pages. “Yeah I’ll never care enough to finish something like this”, “Oh wait I didn’t even know you like to read. — I don’t”, “How long is this thing?”, “Oh wait wait wait! Stand there! Open the book so it looks like you’re reading!”.
I think that last quote gets to the heart of this current Anti-Racism Book list Super Bowl (and yes, I’m choosing the sport analogy intentionally). This is not about bashing the average non-reader. I too have taken my fair share of bookstore pictures and I am not above potentially waiting in line to do so. But there is a pattern of repeat bookstore-initiated comments that I think speaks to the current moment. There is both a sincere disdain for all of the requirements of reading, while also wanting to seem well-read and highly informed to the vast community. All symbol. No substance.
Black bookstores
If Sundays are for the apocalypse-level bookstores, at least in architecture, then Saturdays are for small “world building” bookstores. When I’m not at The Last Bookstore, I’m at a Black bookstore of some sort.
The setting and atmosphere is almost the opposite of the tourist-site bookstore. Small, intimate, barely any talking above a hushed tone, seemingly everyone comes in with a purpose, and for the most part, everyone is Black.
At Black bookstores I’ve been to, books are caressed, perused with care and sincerity, almost as if people are trying to allow the essence of the book to cry out to them before they commit to a purchase.
There is no need for an Anti-Racist Book-list in a Black bookstore. Or at least that is what one would think when almost every sentence within the building was penned by a Black hand.
Yet this is exactly the fallacy that a truly Anti-Racist book list would critique. Not all Black books are anti-racist the same way not all Black people are anti-racist (prejudice might be a better word here).
An anti-racist book list should do exactly what a Black bookstore does. It should force you to confront the highly nuanced and varied reality of Black life. It would force the reader to grapple with the basic yet bold statement that Black people are human.
Period.
Furthermore, that Black life…matters, and vehemently so. That Black life does not live perfectly sheltered on the moral high ground nor timidly beneath a pitiful gaze.
The truly Anti-Racist Book-list would cause you to rub your chin in astonishment that the same world that produced an Ella Baker or a Fannie Lou Hamer, also produced a Clarence Thomas. That the same Black Church that held the potential to empower a movement could also potentially stir resentment towards the Black Trans community. That so much raucous laughter, love and unapologetic joy could be found at a kitchen table despite the fact that each person at that table has endured a day of unfiltered and unrepentant racism hurled at them on all fronts and at all levels.
The truly Anti-Racist Book-list knows the buck does not stop with racism. Capitalism must also be brought to yield. The struggle does not end with the vindication of a handful of police in prison. It demands the end of prisons and a society lazy enough to believe in prison. It asks what W.E.B. Du Bois asked in 1926, “But is that all? Do we want simply to be Americans?” The book-list shouldn’t leave you thinking Black people just want to peacefully join the crowd in the American project. It says America itself is insufficient at best and a global destructive force at its worst. The list is not only “anti” but “pro”. It envisions as much as it condemns. It not only “calls out” the toxicity, it “calls forth” the remedy.
“History has always proved that books are the first plain on which certain battles are fought.” — Toni Morrison, “Pieces I Am” Documentary
The truly Anti-Racist Book-list would force you to stop. Stop running. Stop walking. Stop talking. And sit. Sit still in both the bitter ugliness and the even vaster beauty that is Black life. Hear the deafening silence left by Breonna Taylor. Hear every sound that she won’t get to hear. Every moment of excitement, boredom, confusion, silliness and pleasure — that we take for granted — that Breonna will never again have the breath in her lungs to experience. It is from this understanding the internal call to action should be birthed, and no place else.
