By Feliks Garcia, Offsite Editor
After our Uprising issue, we are by no means near a conclusion. The pieces we shared with you spoke to black lives that deserve to flourish despite the bullets, brutality, and inequality that proliferates from the state. Injustice extends beyond Baltimore, Ferguson, Cleveland, and Olympia; nor has it happened in a vacuum. Yet, the uprising continues to move forward, and it will not be silenced.
In the spirit of the movement, we encourage you to continue reading — read essays, read poetry and fiction, read the news, tweets, any information you can grasp. The more truth permeates, the better chance we have at finding justice, for fully realizing — as a society — that Black Lives Matter.
Below is a list of suggested reading materials related to Baltimore and the #BlackLivesMatter movement, but also the larger history surrounding the current movement. This list is by no means definitive, nor is it final. It is simply a starting point, or a continuation.
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“James Baldwin Tells Us All How to Cool It This Summer”
with James Baldwin, Esquire
“There Are Some Things I Just Can’t Tell You About”
“To Establish Justice at the Gates”
by Justin Campbell, Los Angeles Review of Books
“The Case for Reparations”
“Nonviolence as Compliance”
by Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic
“A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement”
by Alicia Garza, The Feminist Wire
“Silence on Black Female Victims Weakens Fight Against Police Brutality”
by Kali Nicole Gross, The Huffington Post
“Black women get killed by police, too: the #SayHerName demonstrations explained”
by Jenée Desmond-Harris, Vox
“Teaching Resistance”
bell hooks, from killing rage: Ending Racism (pdf)
“Our Demand is Simple: Stop Killing Us”
by Jay Caspian Kang, with DeRay McKesson and Johnetta Elzie, New York Times Magazine
“Towards a Black Muslim Ontology of Resistance”
by Muna Mire, The New Inquiry
“These Are the People We Ignore When We Talk About Black Lives Lost to Police Brutality”
by Darnell L. Moore, Mic
“In Defense of Looting”
by Willie Osterweil, The New Inquiry
“Undue Force”
by Mark Puente, Baltimore Sun
“Black Riot”
by Raven Rakia, The New Inquiry
“You are dark in the car…”
by Claudia Rankine, from Citizen
“The Police Are Killing One Group at a Staggering Rate, and Nobody Is Talking About It”
by Zak Cheney Rice, Mic
“The Hyper-Criminalization of Black & Latino Male Youth in the Era of Mass Incarceration”
by Victor M. Rios, Souls (pdf)
“Open Letter to White Poets”
by Danez Smith, Squandermania and other foibles
“What is Systemic Racism?”
with Jay Smooth & Rinku Sen, Race Forward (video playlist)