Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Been Here The Whole Time

Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis

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If you look at a bestseller list at this particular moment, it’s stacked top-to-bottom with black writers and white antiracist educators. That’s good, it shows that white Americans want to learn how to identify their racism and eradicate it. However, I’ve heard from multiple black people and other antiracist educators some frustration that Angela Davis’ work hasn’t been centered more. Most of the books purchased have come out in the last few years, while Dr. Davis has been doing antiracism work for five decades. Her […]

A Bit Late to the Party on This One, But Still Relevant

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I have had this book on my iPad forever! Seriously, I think I downloaded it before 13th, the Netflix documentary, was even a development idea. I watched 13th last year, and yet it didn’t spur me to pick this up, but after reading The Hate U Give, this felt like a fitting follow up. I remember being very impressed by 13th, but the nice thing about reading this, is that it really gave me the chance to absorb and contemplate everything, rather than being hit […]

I wish my younger self could have read this book.

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First and foremost, I love, maybe even adore, Coates writing.  He manages to weave narrative with fact and emotion with such grace and power.  If I could write like anyone, it would be Ta-Nehisi Coates. But I can’t write like Coates.  Even if we wrote with the exact same words, I could not write like him because I am not him.  For a long time, especially as a younger man, I believed that if I wanted to do something, it could be done and that […]

Another Book That Led Me to Crack Open My Wallet

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Like many nonfiction books that I pick up, Becoming Ms. Burton, was featured on NPR’s Fresh Air earlier this summer.  I had recently read Just Mercy and come off a spring semester of using “mass incarceration” as a model “wicked problem” that needed systems thinking to solve in my Composition 1 class.  [Students then picked their own “problem” to investigate and understand better for their research project.] It was interesting then to hear Susan Burton’s story of how she hit rock bottom after the death […]

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 […]

A Colorblind Society is an Unjust Society

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Michelle Alexander is a civil rights lawyer and law professor at The Ohio State University.  Alexander first encountered the idea of a racial caste system when she saw a poster stapled to a telephone pole declaring that “The Drug War is the new Jim Crow.” At the time she thought it was hyperbole. After working in the criminal justice system for several years, her thinking had evolved from the system has a problem with racial bias to believing that mass incarceration is a “well-disguised system […]



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