Books On Race And Racism

In light of all the discussions on television, radio, in the print media, and online regarding racism, white privilege, social inequality, police brutality toward people of color, etc., I picked out the following six books from my bookshelves that I plan to read. It is my hope that they will be food for thought on race and race relations.

1. The Rage of a Privileged Class: Why Are Middle Class Blacks Angry? Why Should America Care? by Ellis Cose (HarperCollins, 1993).

2. Einstein on Race and Racism by Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor (Rutgers University Press, 2005).

3. The Coming Race War in America: A Wake-Up Call by Carl T. Rowan (Little, Brown and Company, 1996).

4. Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter's Account of the Civil Rights Movement by Simeon Booker with Carol McCabe Booker (University Press of Mississippi, 2013).

5. The Eyes of Willie McGee: A Tragedy of Race, Sex, and Secrets in the Jim Crow South by Alex Heard (HarperCollins, 2010).

6. Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime by Ron Stallworth (Flatiron Books, 2018). Originally published in 2014 by Police and Fire Publishing. The book was the basis for Spike Lee's film.

An Imminent Race War In America?

So much has been written and said in the national news media about Trump's racism;white nationalists in Charlottesville,Virginia; and white supremacy that I'm motivated to read The Coming Race War in America: A Wake-Up Call by the late journalist Carl T. Rowan (1925-2000), published in 1996 by Little, Brown, to see how prophetic it is.

After reading the book, I hope I will be motivated enough to write about it in an essay/review.

A Tale Of Three Quarrels

In the Notes section of James McGrath Morris's Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press (Amistad/HarperCollins, 2015), he quotes from an article that was part of a series called "Industry USA" that Payne wrote for the Chicago Defender in 1951. The series regarded postwar employment of African Americans in Chicago.

A plant manager (presumably white) is quoted as saying, "When two white people have a quarrel, it's just a quarrel. If two Negroes quarrel, it's a disturbance; but if a white person and a Negro quarrel, it becomes an 'incident.'"

Sad to say, more than sixty years later, that statement still applies.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Baldwin's Heir?

One writer on the Internet has called Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author of the bestselling memoir Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau, 2015), The New James Baldwin (TNJB). A lot of critics think he is, too. The trouble with this label is that it tends to pigeonhole a black writer, especially one who writes nonfiction. And since Baldwin wrote mainly about race and race relations in America, and was a firebrand on those issues, the TNJB label says to Coates, a gifted writer, that he should write about race and only race.

There are, however, some black writers like Stephen L. Carter, Malcolm Gladwell, and Hilton Als who have thankfully managed to sidestep this situation to a large extent. Black writers should not be discouraged from writing about race when it is necessary but no one should expect them to be One Note Johnnys.

 Global warming, nuclear proliferation, and other important issues affect black writers as well and these are subjects they should be invited to participate in discussing.

John Hope Franklin, for instance, wrote about black history but he also cultivated orchids in his spare time. How many journalists interviewed him in depth about this hobby? None, it's safe to bet.

 I wanted to interview Gordon Parks, the noted photojournalist, film director, and autobiographer. And to get away from the racial angle, I suggested to a USA Today editor an interview with Parks exploring his views on aging. The idea was shot down. I regret not pursuing it anyway.

 It's the 21st century and black people have other things on their minds besides racism, discrimination, and what white people think of them.

Three Milestone Events To Revisit

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi, the 50th anniversary of the Watts Riots in Los Angeles, and the 30th anniversary of the police killing of the 17-year-old Harlem honor student Edmund Perry, a case which became the subject of a nonfiction book and a 1991 TV movie called Murder Without Motive: The Edmund Perry Story. This would be a good time to commemorate these events by reading books written about them.

 Two books I own and plan to read are Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness by Robert Conot (Bantam, 1967), which is about the Watts Riots and Best Intentions: The Education and Killing of Edmund Perry by journalist Robert Sam Anson (Random House, 1987).

 The Chicago Tribune called Conot's book "something Capote's will never be--a work of potentially historic importance." The reviewer was probably talking about Truman Capote's crime classic, In Cold Blood.

The Importance of African-American Media

"There's no way--and I say it with as much feeling and passion as I can--there's no way for any American to understand the South Side of Chicago or Harlem or Los Angeles without regularly reading African-American media."--Lerone Bennett, Jr., former executive editor, Ebony magazine, author, and historian. (From Richard Prince's Journal-isms, August 15, 2003.)

It's a safe bet that most of the white people who have recently moved to Harlem rarely or never pick up a black newspaper or magazine, opting instead to read the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Therefore they have little or no knowledge of the people among whom they have chosen to live.

"John Bull's Nigger": One Black Man's View Of Other Blacks

One book I would like to read, although it will probably turn my stomach as I turn the pages, is John Bull's Nigger by Dillibe Onyeama, published in 1974. From the way the book is described in the August 1974 issue of the British publication CRC Journal, it contains the rantings of a self-hating black man.

"Mr. Onyeama's high principles and experience of living in Britain," reported the CRC Journal, "lead him to conclude that the black man is '...more of an animal--only marginally human.'"

Furthermore, Onyeama, who was born in the part of Nigeria then known as Biafra, saw black people as being "Dirty! Stupid! Inferior to the white man."

John Bull's Nigger was seen as so inflammatory and hateful that, according to the CRC Journal, it "has been referred to Sir Robert Mark, Metropolitan Police Commissioner, for investigation under Section 6 of the 1965 Race Relations Act, for allegedly inciting racial hatred."

I looked the book up on Amazon. There are four hardcover copies available for $22.57 each. I may check with the Strand, a used-books store in New York City, to see if they have any copies in stock.

If the author, forty years later, is still alive, it would be interesting to talk with him to see if his "very decided views on black people" has changed or remained the same.