“A new phenomenon emerged after George Floyd, that of the anti-racism reading list: compilations of books and authors and media intended to serve as guides for white people wanting to educate themselves about anti-Black racism. Spanning genre and form and era, I understood both the logic and the appeal. There is a belief in some quarters that racism is simply a matter of ignorance, and that everyone can therefore be educated out of it (which I suppose is easier to stomach than the idea that racism might be something more conscious, or deliberate). And so the work of the anti-racism reading list begins, like a counter-missionary attempting to decolonise what was previously colonised. There is of course much to be gained from white people more fully understanding the history and intricacies and complex topography of racism, but I often worry that the exercise of anti-racism reading encourages white people to satify - even exhaust - themselves with swotting up on the semantics of the struggle, without necessarily translating that knowledge into real-world action. It’s relatively easy to be a theoretical anti-racist. Writing for The Atlantic, Saida Grundy observes that consciousness-raising through anti-racist reading often constitutes ‘mere filibustering - white people learning about their privilege and power without ever having to sacrifice either’, that it can actually undermine progress ‘by presenting increased knowledge as the balm for centuries of abuse’, and that ‘literature and dialogue cannot supplant restorative social policies and laws, organisational change, and structural redress’. In presenting these lists as the solution to racism, there is a danger that an academic understanding of racism becomes the end goal, rather than anything more substantive or action-focused.”
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