Illuminating Nonfiction and Fantastical New Releases

While most of the books I feature in this newsletter are by authors of color, I will occasionally share a book by a non person of color that is either about a person of color or highly relevant to BIPOC communities. I’ve noticed there are a lot of non marginalized authors writing nonfiction about people of color in history, which is good, but also sometimes makes me wonder about representation and opportunity in academia, since I know it is severely lacking. That is another issue for another day, though.

Today, I’m recommending this much-anticipated new book by Matthew Desmond because it aims right for the so called morality that lies at the core of the Judeo-Christian American Dream this country was founded on, and asks how it could sentence its most vulnerable citizens to poverty. The U.S. is the richest country on earth, but 1/8 of its children don’t have basic necessities, and the number of people without housing is astronomical. Desmond uses research and original reporting to show how the comfort afforded to some comes at the severe cost of others. Luckily, he also shares how to change it, recommending that we all become poverty abolitionists — a term I really appreciate because of how it calls back to slavery abolitionists (thereby drawing parallels between slavery and capitalism).

This and the next book fit so well with the first I mentioned because of how absolute and far reaching the system of privilege is in the U.S. Here, Thomas shows how, to save the environment, we have to look at racial discrimination and the communities it’s hurt. This is because Black and Indigenous people are disproportionately affected by environmental injustice, and only by uplifting their voices — and the voices of other BIPOC communities — will we truly be able to tackle issues threatening the planet.

Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about how living through COVID has been as a disabled, queer femme-presenting person. The fact that the world was made for non disabled people was made even more clear since the onset of the pandemic, but in this book, they imagine a world where the majority of people are disabled. They posit that disability justice and disability culture is vital to overcoming things like fascism, the environmental crisis, and other issues. They also talk about the care crisis, and how disabled people have supported each other, and how they can continue to.