Inkwell: Lauren Michele Jackson

Keep reading but don’t expect black writers to do the hard work for you.

I HAVE THIS PET theory about book recommendations. They feel good to solicit, good to mete out, but someone at some point has to get down to the business of reading. And there, between giving and receiving, lies a great gulf. No one can quite account for what happens—reading, hopefully, but you never can be sure.

It’s that time again. Race is happening. Never mind that race is always happening, but it is especially happening now, urgently happening, and God help you if you’re not paying attention (though history will probably pardon your procrastination, for history too is belated). I should clarify that “happening” here indicates an agreement, a collective bargain that something has risen to the level of a thing by degrees of egregiousness or luck. It applies to anodyne hiccups, as regular as public figures putting their foot or face in it by using slurs and dark makeup, to the no less routine euphemized murders by police. In any case, there is the eruption of sentiment, none perhaps stronger than stupefaction, on behalf of the many at a loss for how to metabolize such a moment, how to metabolize race “happening” despite the fact that race is always happening. The weeks and months following the 2016 presidential election were just such a moment. The “How could this happen?” meets the “I told you so.” They rendezvous at the anti-racist reading list.