Join your friends at the Fran Park Center as we kick off a year-long, online book study with a variety of books on Race, Education, Awareness and Dialogue.
R.E.A.D. Books & Podcasts:
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
Hosted by Pam Church
Colson Whitehead is an American author who has won two Pulitzer Prizes for fiction (one of which is for The Nickel Boys) a National Book Award for fiction, a "Genius Grant", the Whitting Award, and a Carnegie Medal for fictional excellence. In The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead creates characters that you can genuinely care about while sharing hopes that cross racial borders. The book pulls you into racial issues that arouse strong emotions. And while it is a fictional read, it holds a truth much closer than you would like to believe.
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I Got Shoes: A Memoir by James L. Lipscomb
Pinnacle Member, James Lipscomb pays homage to the Negro community, now extinct, that existed in Coeymans, New York in the first half of the twentieth century. The residents were largely migrants from Virginia and Carolinas in search of a better life. Lipscomb introduces you to the people of the Negro community with engaging profiles that brings the community to life again.
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America for Americans by Erika Lee
In America for Americans we enter the continuing debate over immigration with a compelling history of xenophobia (fear of the stranger) in the United States and its devastating impact. The United States is known as a nation of immigrants, but it is also a nation of xenophobia (fear of the stranger) that fears difference. In this very readable book, Erika Lee shows that an irrational fear, hatred, and hostility toward immigrants has been a defining feature of our nation from the colonial era to the present. Forcing us to confront this history, America for Americans explains how xenophobia works, why it has endured, and how it threatens America. As people of faith, we follow a God "who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing" (Deut. 10:18). This book helps us explore what that means.
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American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt is about the ordeal of a Mexican woman who had to leave behind her life and escape as an undocumented immigrant to the United States with her son. The story reveals the incredible hardships of an immigrant being chased by the Mexican drug cartels and the obstacles of traveling with only the clothes on their backs. It's a must read!
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Kindred by Octavia Butler
The visionary author’s masterpiece pulls us—along with her Black female hero—through time to face the horrors of slavery and explore the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now. Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.
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Tears We Cannot Stop by Dr. Eric Michael Dyson
Dr. Dyson is a Georgetown Professor of Sociology who writes this very powerful book about his own personal experiences partnered with a clear vision of cultural analysis and how we can find a place of redemption. It is short but an emotionally powerful piece that all of us should read as we grapple with the present crisis in our country over race relations. His words come from the heart as he compels us to be committed to change.
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The Color of Compromise by Jemar Tisby
The Color of Compromise takes readers on a historical journey: from America’s early colonial days through slavery and the Civil War, covering the tragedy of Jim Crow laws and the victories of the Civil Rights era, to today’s Black Lives Matter movement. Author Jemar Tisby reveals the obvious—and the far more subtle—ways the American church has compromised what the Bible teaches about human dignity and equality.
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Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Written in the form of a letter to his only son, this book dives deep into Coates' own development growing up as a black man in America. This powerful text offers an open and honest critique of American culture as well as Coates' hopes, dreams, and fears as he watches his own son grow up to face similar and new struggles of his own under the diverse umbrella of American blackness.
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