This was the first book I read for fun out of college and I remember being frustrated with my education up until that point. I couldn’t believe I had been in school for the last 16 years and had never heard of Angela Davis.  It really drove home the truth around how Black history is dealt with in our collective societal memory and how if I wanted to know complete truths I was going to have to do a lot of that work on the margins. 

Another text I was required to read in college.  I was really hype when I first encountered it but now I understand how naive it is.  It’s really hard to have rules when your opponent has no soul.  

I love this book so much because I feel like Le Guin really tried and grappled with the idea of an anarchist utopia.  The world wasn’t perfect and people did occasionally suffer or were hurt and I appreciated that.  So often it feels like when you are fighting for a new world you have to have every question answered before you even get permission to try and I feel like this book pushes against that. 

The grief in this book is what radicalized me.  Lutie was doing everything possible to provide the best life for her child and because of the limitations of her options everything still ended up falling apart.  It showed me that putting your head down and doing the work will not save you.  That going along will not save you.  You might as well resist.

I feel like this book provided a sort of demarcation in my life. There was a Cree before Sister Outsider and a Cree after Sister Outsider. When I picked up this book for the first time my life was chock full of boundaryless relationships.  People who didn’t take cues, people who were unhappy with their own lot and passive aggressive toward mine, people who wanted to be close enough to watch but didn’t have it in them to celebrate. Lorde gave me the language and courage to have hard conversations and to set uncomfortable boundaries. One of the essays in the book, The Transformation of Silence to Language and Action, had such a deep impact on me I printed it out and framed it.  It is hanging up around my house.

I was in middle school getting relentlessly bullied about the merits of my blackness.  I didn’t wear the right shoes, I didn’t talk right, I loved broadway music.  Then I met Lani Garver the nonbinary angel who was quite literally unable to fit in any box people threw at them. I started walking around that school with a straighter spine.

Janie, Janie, Janie.  I had just quit my first big girl job.  The one I was supposed to be excited about because it paid 40k a year.  I was supposed to be grateful that I had a path and life at all because I had gotten pregnant at 19.  My parents were frustrated with me, they felt like I was floating and hanging onto them as a raft.  I was supposed to just take the C- life and be grateful.  That is when Janie walked into my life.  She fought tooth and nail for her life to be on her terms and I received that so deeply in every fiber of my being.  Janie showed me that I would be alright.  I was.

Don’t drag me!  I read this in college and it was my introduction to organizing as a career.

I distinctly remember finishing this book, I was in my parents basement.  I closed the final page and took a deep breath and just laid on the floor for forty five minutes.  The most memorable emotions were awe and relief.  Up until that point I felt like my experience as a Black American woman was too nuanced and picky to articulate.  When things would leave me feeling small or invisible I would often second guess myself - obviously I was being too sensitive.  Obviously I had made the error which is why I was made to feel this way.  When Pecola goes into that immigrant mans store - I’ll never forget the line:

“He does not see her, because for him there is nothing to see.  How can a fifty-two-year-old white immigrant storekeeper with the taste of potatoes and beer in his mouth, his mind honed on the doe-eyed Virgin Mary, his sensibilities blunted by a permanently altered Weltanschauung, see a little black girl?”

It was the first time the entirety of my Black girl experience was spoken too.  I felt like I had been witnessed, seen through and through. It was a relief to know that it wasn’t me, I was doing enough it was just, sometimes there wasn’t anything I could do.  Everyone can’t see Black women.  That’s their loss.

I read Assata while working at a summer festival pretzel stand. I was in my mid twenties and my coworker was this little white girl who had just got accepted to American University.  She saw me reading it and the next day came with her own copy and had her mind blown.  The thing about Shakur’s book that stuck with me was the directness -  she spoke to and about the oppression not as if it was some theory or distant experience but as a specific moment of injustice and tied it to the larger social system.  Nothing in the book surprised me - maybe except for her escaping the prison but it was really fun to watch my coworker read it.  I genuinely think it changed her life.

This was one of my first experiences with intersections. I read this in my early twenties and was given language to express that yes, I was a Black girl but I was also a middle class Black girl. I had a baby at twenty and still graduated from college, and was still able to purchase a house.  That was a privilege. My entire identity in this world was not one of disadvantage and it was important that I was aware of that.