Ok a more serious opinion on this - prominent on this list (but not totally so; what I say here does not go of New Jim Crow or Just Mercy, say) are, like, racial self-help books. This to me just seems very inadequate to the moment, a quite wrong approach being widely adopted...
... what prompted the present moment are a renewed bubbling to a head long standing complaints about police brutality and the general relationship between the justice system and black America. This has evidently been expanded to include some concern with historic monuments...
... this, to be frank, just doesn't seem appropriately addressed, at all, by quasi-therapeutic interventions on the psyche of individual white people. It's not even just not likely to work, it is the wrong sort of thing, it's not even (or barely) pertinent to the topic at hand...
... such psychotherapy might not be intrinsically objectionable, idk I ain't read these particular books. But an intelligent informed response to the present moment seems to require knowledge of history, sociology, political theory and, broadly, social science and philosophy....
... & there's books for that! See e.g. Du Bois' Black Reconstruction, Ida B. Wells' Red Record, Mills' The Racial Contract, Davis' Women, Race, and Class. All actually pertinent. But I'm rather unimpressed with well meaning people seeing this as a moment for personal improvement.
