Anti-racist reading list
Sludge magazine was founded with the two main intentions. Separate but co-constitutive intentions. The first was to create a platform to showcase young creative talent, to give young creative the confidence that industry professionals were looking at their work and thought it was worth showcasing. Our team is anonymous but is comprised of multidisciplinary creatives who have worked for the world's biggest brands and publications. The second was to make politics, sociology and economics accessible and palatable to people outside of higher education. We know that the increased access to information due to globalisation and social media is overwhelming. We are constantly inundated with so many catastrophic events that even if you take the time to start researching the cause of one issue, something else will come up before you get anywhere. The language of politicians and mainstream news corporations is also intentionally elitist and downright misleading at times. So we wanted to amplify different voices from every ethnic, religious, gender and sexuality background in hopes that the more different voices were speaking, the more people would find a voice that resonates with them. In regards to the public lynchings of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, the home invasion and murder of Breonna Taylor, and the countless worldwide murders and injustices across the globe at the hands of white supremacy we decided to take some time to work out how best to address the matter at hand.
We have decided to compile a reading list of all of our past articles that showcase white supremacies global impact.
We'd also like to thank Halima Nashir the writer of our latest article KKK 🤝U.S. police 🤝Colonialism🤝U.K. police for compiling a list of anti-racist literature classified by difficulty and topics. As explained in our piece Billionaire brunches and black liberation capitalism is bolstered by anti-blackness so please avoid buying any of the books listed from Amazon. Underneath our reading list is a list of black owned book shops to use alternatively, with thanks to Instagram user blazerfaizer. We would also like to thank Twitter user @esmeatgrlpwr for her list of important petitions to sign.
What ‘The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’ can teach us about manoeuvring for power in the Patriarchy
Beginners List:
Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America - Dr Ibram X. Kendi
How to Be an Anti-Racist - Dr Ibram X. Kendi
So You Want to Talk About Race - Ijeoma Olua
Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race - Reni Eddo-Lodge
Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire - Akala
White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism - Robin DiAngelo
The Burning House: Jim Crow and the Making of Modern America - Anders Walker
Topic specifics in brackets:
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City - Matthew Desmond (housing discrimination)
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America - Richard Rothstein (housing discrimination)
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander (mass incarceration)
Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond - Marc Lamont Hill (mass incarceration, police violence)
Are Prisons Obsolete? - Angela Davis (prison abolition)
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? - Beverly Daniel Tatum (education discrimination)
Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy - Darryl Pinckney (disenfranchisement)
Black Feminism:
Sister Outsider - Audre Lorde
Killing Rage: Ending Racism - Bell Hooks
Women, Race & Class - Angela Davis
Black Feminist Thought - Patricia Hill Collins
Assata: an Autobiography - Assata Shakur
Bad Feminist - Roxan Gay
Black LGBTQ+:
Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements - Charlene Carruthers
No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America - Darnell L. Moore
No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies - E. Patrick Johnson (editor)
Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance - bell hooks
Black-owned bookstores (U.K.)
Happy unlearning - The Sludge Team