Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Two books so close as to be indistinguishable

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide; and The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness by Carol Anderson and Michelle Alexander

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You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell […]

An important book about race and social awareness.

What Does It Mean to Be White? Developing White Racial Literacy by Robin DiAngelo

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Lollygagger’s most excellent and comprehensive review of Robin DiAngelo’s What Does it Mean to Be White? Developing White Racial Literacy made me eager to read it for myself. I’m linking to the original review, which I will then build on. Back? Okay, let’s get started. DiAngelo builds on concepts of racism with which we are all familiar and then talks about how being white constructs a specific racial framework through which white people see race, racism, and other precepts of culture and context. Specifically, she […]

Jodi Picoult’s racism book . . . I have thoughts.

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I’ve decided not to rate this book because my thoughts are so conflicted about it, but I do want to say some things. This is a book about a black nurse being prohibited from treating the newborn son of a white supremacist, and when the baby dies, he accuses her of murdering his son. I’ve never read a Jodi Picoult book before, because her books have always seemed like they were Issue Books, designed to be manipulative in a way that emphasizes the subject matter […]

Ignorance Is Not an Option

What Does It Mean To Be White? Developing White Racial Literacy by Robin DiAngelo

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Best for: White people interested in antiracism work (so, hopefully, all white people, but I’m not that naive). In a nutshell: Academic (and white person) Robin DiAngelo breaks down many of the problems white people have in confronting our own socialization in the racist reality we live in. Line that sticks with me: “Because of white social, economic, and political power within a white supremacist culture, whites are in the position to legitimize people of color’s assertions of racism. Yet whites are the least likely […]

Connecting Across Continents and Time

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Best for: Anyone interested in fighting back. In a nutshell: A mixture of interviews and speech transcripts that seeks to connect struggles for freedom across the world. Line that sticks with me: “But those protest movements would not have been necessary – it would not have been necessary to create a mid-century Black freedom movement had slavery been comprehensively abolished in the nineteenth century.” Why I Chose It: I decided to kick off participation in my fifth Cannonball Read with this book because I am […]

Well I definitely learned a lot!

How to Be Black by Baratunde R. Thurston

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Baratunde Thurston writes for The Onion, among other things, and he brings that sense of humor along for this read. He also reveals a lot about himself and his upbringing, and makes some incredibly salient points about the status of race relations in our world today. You know, in between the advice about how to find a black friend: “If you find yourself in the unfortunate position of being black-friendless, you can either go to the nearest black church and strike up a conversation, or just […]



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