Hi, I’m Danielle with Put a Finish on It.
I grew up in a pretty conservative Northern California
town. And while it did have racial diversity, 
blacks were definitely the minority, with maybe a
handful in every grade at school. When I was in first grade, there’d be
a tearful frustrated few minutes every morning, while my mom tried to do my hair. It was
never the way that I wanted it, to the point
where as soon as I'd get to
school, I'd take out the ponytail. The ponytail would be all bumpy, not nice and smooth like all
the other girls’ ponytails. I’d tell my mom,
“Cassandra’s hair always looks right!
Why can’t I have hair like Cassandra’s?”
I loved Cassandra’s hair. She had
all these amazingly tiny, perfect braids in
different ponytails all over her head.
I’d never seen braids so tiny. And the best
part was that at the end of each braid,
was a little plastic barrette of a different color, that had an animal
or a bow or something on it. I’d sit
behind her in class and stare at her wonderful
hair dos and all those barrettes
she got to wear. But Mom had never met Cassandra
and didn’t know why I liked her hair so
much.
Later in the year, my mom did meet Cassandra, and the next time I was lamenting my bumpy ponytail
in the bathroom mirror and wishing for
braids like Cassandra's, my mom said, “You don’t want hair
like that. It’s brittle and it breaks.”
This gave me pause. I didn’t want hair like
Cassandra’s? My hair was better because it wasn’t brittle?
Many years later, I recalled the conversation and realized, startled, that my mom had unconscious,
or maybe conscious, prejudices, that, with
that comment, she had passed on to her
six year old. She could have said, “Oh,yes,
Cassandra does have nice braids.” Or, “We
can get you some barrettes for your hair.” Or even, “I can remember getting frustrated
and wishing I had different hair, too.”
After the Eric Garner verdict, there was an
article going around facebook saying what white
people could do, could do to help mend race relations in this country. The advice in the
article was ‘join the conversation,’ and
I thought—really? That’s it?
And I thought about what that could mean for me, and what I could actually do. And of course
I thought of books and booktube.
The United States was built, its economy,
in large part, with slave labor. Slavery
went on for several centuries and ended only 150 years ago. That’s not very long in 
changing something so deeply rooted. When we talk about systemic racism and white privilege,
these come from ideas and actions that began generations and generations ago, and are so much a part
of The United States that, if you’re white,
you only see them if you take a step back and you
realize it’s not ‘just the way it is,’ and that you can actually do something to start changing it.
Maybe it’ll take a couple hundred more years of enlightened and questioning generations
to change all of our ingrained systems and
attitudes.
But I’m glad we’re working on it, however
slowly. I never took any African American
studies classes when I was in college. I did
study the Civil Rights era and read a couple
books by Morrison and Baldwin. And I've started an authors of color shelf on goodreads if
you want to check that out to see where I’m coming from. So I decided this year, as part of reading
more diversely, that I wanted to make an effort to read more African American history and
literature and join the conversation.
I looked up a reading list from the African
American Studies department  at a university,
Rutgers, maybe? And of course there were tons of interesting and intriguing titles. Like,
The Black Image in the White Mind by George M. Frederickson from 1987, Black is a Country,
and The Condemnation of Blackness. I’ve
never been great at reading academic non-fiction
unless I’ve had a professor saying, 'You gotta get through first four chapters by Tuesday.'
So, I want your help. What should I read?
I’m going to list the 18 titles that I wrote
down from that department reading list down below. Where should I start? And most
of all, who wants to join me?
