5 Books to Help You Learn How to Talk About Racism

I haven’t been writing much. I haven’t been posting much. Instead, I’ve been listening, supporting Black voices and doing my best to educate myself so that I don’t lead with ignorance or a lack of a historical perspective when speaking out against systemic racism in this country. I encourage you to do the same and I even have some book recommendations that will help you learn how to talk about racism and yes, you need to learn. We all need to learn. Please, please do not be the kind of person that believes they have nothing to learn about racism. That kind of person is blind to their own faults and dangerous to us all.

Why learn about racism when you already know it exists?

It’s important to learn about the history of racism in order to be able to speak about it intelligently and so that we can be armed with the historical facts needed to be actively and effectively anti-racist. It’s not enough to claim to not be racist and leave it at that. Racism is a continuum and declaring yourself not racist doesn’t help. All it does is let you as an individual off the hook so that you don’t feel guilty and therefore don’t have to do anything about racism.

Think about it, what good does it do to declare that you don’t see color or that you were raised to treat all people the same when the institutions of this country do factor in color and do NOT treat all people the same?

You won’t learn unless you seek out the facts yourself.

Personally, I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of racism. I’ve been aware of racism for as long as I can remember because although I am fair-skinned, I am not white and have never identified as such. I haven’t been able to pretend that racism doesn’t exist because I am a Latina of Mexican descent and even with my fair skin – skin that by the way isn’t fair enough to keep me from constantly being asked “What are you?” – I’ve seen and experienced racism at work in both overtly blatant and insidiously subtle ways my entire life.

The thing is that even though I’ve been aware of racism and know on a gut level that it exists not only to keep people of color down, but also to pit them against each other, it wasn’t until college that I began learning about how institutionalized racism was built. Sadly, I had to seek that knowledge out myself through La Raza studies classes because it’s not part of the standard educational curriculum. This knowledge matters because racism is a system of oppression that cannot be dismantled unless we all understand how it came to be in the first place.

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