What would it be like to be constantly disbelieved for your own experience? To never ever be validated, with or without proof? How does it feel to be dismissed, denied, and rejected? To have your tears and frustration met with responses like, “I don’t believe you. You are lying.”
Has that ever happened to you? No matter what you said or did, no one believed you. And insisted on a course of action or held onto certain beliefs based on their own conclusions about you and what they think you actually experienced. Have you ever felt like you had to keep pleading and begging for someone to see your truth and you are met with disbelief, taunts? “Just suck it up. You are overreacting. It really isn’t that bad. Get over yourself.” “Really? You, again?”
This is an everyday lived experience for most people of color—not only black Americans. But because I have had some interested parties contact me about what can we do, how can we help, I am going out on a limb to help who will be helped.
Don’t Be Afraid to Get Acquainted With the Grief Around You
One of the best things we can do is get more acquainted with the plight of other people. Jesus did it. He became intimately acquainted with our grief and sorrow. Not just white grief, but all peoples’ grief—black grief, Hispanic/Latino grief, Native American grief, Asian grief, and so on. He truly thought that all lives matter, but who was He most compelled to rescue? The fatherless, the orphan, the oppressed, the weak, and brokenhearted… You cannot claim to love or see people as equals if you do not have compassion and empathy for their griefs. Perhaps that is the part that we are afraid to engage with.
I realize that pain is not fun. Laughing, joking, and hanging out is fun. But there are times in our experiences with each other that one or more of us is in more need of help than another. When one of my friends is hurting, I don’t try to call and talk to all of my friends at the same time to console them all when it is this one particular friend who needs my shoulder.
Apathy and lack of empathy are indicative of a lack of awareness and understanding. Anger and dismissal of someone else’s plight are indicative of feeling like you already know the deal and you’ve got the whole thing all figured out.
You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know
What may be surprising to many of us is that when we are in mixed groups there is a lot of masking going on. Even if it seems like there is trust, in many cases, you can count on there being someone in the group who is not being quite as forthright as you think. I love to have one-on-ones with each member of a new group of people I have joined, just to begin to disarm the natural defense mechanism of masking and to build trust.
I myself as a black woman am guilty of masking--most of the time, actually. I say all the time, you will never know if you don't ask me. If you ask, you'll hear it all. Even with the diverse people I know, there are only certain one’s I am completely honest with. I think we all could say that, yes? This being common to us all, we could probably then agree that we don’t really know very much about other people, especially those we’ve seen as so distinctly different from us.
You may have "them" all summed up in your mind, but what do you really know?
So what I am providing you with today is an opportunity to read about a group of people whose plight is being highlighted at this time. You may have them all summed up in your mind, but what do you really know? Do you care what you may not know and how it may be shaping your feelings during this time? What information have you used to arrive at your conclusions? Who are you reading? Who are you listening to? Who are you watching? Are they more like you, sharing your same thoughts and ideas, or are they more like the other whom you want to aim to better understand?
Whenever you want to understand what’s really happening to a people, it is probably best to go to them to ask. Depending on the circumstances, that opportunity may not seem readily available.
In the case of race, there may be shame or fear that keeps us paralyzed and we won’t make a move to discover more. Sometimes there is a fear that comes when we think about how a conversation might go with someone who is hurting. I don’t like to go to wakes and funerals because I am fearful that the pain and grief of the family and loved ones are going to be too great for me to handle. Pretty selfish, right? Just so you know, I go anyway--and I bet you go to them too, even when it's hard. Sometimes we care more about being there for the people hurting than we do about protecting our own emotions. That kind of care is crucial to have in situations like what we see rising to the surface in our country.
We NEED to Read MORE Diverse Books!
I push for people to read cross-culturally because books are one way to engage with a people to some degree without really putting your emotions in harm’s way. Yes, I am trying to help those who care but are afraid of the response if they engage person-to-person. You may be one of those people. It is OK. Come out with it. What’s not OK is to continue in ignorance if you feel the pull to learn more. There are some people who will not be moved from their biases and preconceptions. Don’t be that one.
We have chronicled and scrutinized our own journey in America in such a way that cannot be duplicated—and should absolutely not be underestimated or dismissed.
Though it has been claimed that black people are undereducated, unintelligent, not-quite-so intellectual, inarticulate, and even overemotional, there are a great many literary pieces that prove otherwise. It is just simply not true that we are not able to observe, log, analyze, research, draw conclusions, and take action regarding our time here in America—and we have done it and continue to do it in highly intelligent, wise, and hugely effective ways.
We are our own researchers, professors, scholars, psychologists, sociologists, historians, educators, and political scientists. We have chronicled and scrutinized our own journey in America in such a way that cannot be duplicated—and should absolutely not be underestimated or dismissed. To think that there is any better information about the state of black America to be found anywhere else other than black Americans is absurd to me. Why would you ever solely rely on second-hand information about blacks? (Please see the modifier SOLELY in that sentence.)
Maybe you don’t know where to look for first-hand information. I want to help.
The following is the beginnings of a living list that I hope you will add to. For those who dare to read even one, these books provide windows into black life in America for those who want to understand better, who are not afraid to be more intimately connected with people they’ve shared a country with since its foundation.
10 Must-Read Books for Those Who Want to Better Understand Black America
Nonfiction
1. Free at Last? The Gospel in the African-American Experience by Carl F. Ellis
2. Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome by Joy Degruy, PhD (a study on how slavery continues to affect both whites and blacks)
3. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
4. The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
5. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabelle Wilkinson
Memoir/Biography/Autobiography
6. Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself
7. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
8. Negroland, a Memoir by Margo Jeffers
Fiction
9. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (I highly recommend the audiobook for this one, narrated by Joe Morton--the BEST!)
10. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (brilliant and funny; a perspective of race in America from a non-American black)
But Wait. There's More!
What I am reading now to help me understand people better, because I need help too:
Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King Jr
The Making of Asian America: a History by Erika Lee
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Other books I’ve read that help me understand others:
Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Well-to-do Nigerian family in post-colonial Nigeria)
Interpreter of Maladies by Jumpta Lahiri (Indian-American book of short stories)
Palace Walk by (Egyptian Muslim family life during the early twentieth-century conflict between Egyptian revolutionaries and European colonizers)
Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee (novel based in post-apartheid South Africa)
Yearnings; Mexican-American Literature, edited by Albert C. Chavez (both fiction and nonfiction works)
What other books written by people of color about their lives should be added to this list?