In the aftermath of the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville this weekend — and all the violence that ensued — a popular response from good white liberals was that #ThisIsNotUs.
A post-Charlottesville reading list to help explain American white supremacy
Nation Books, Princeton University Press, NYU Press
Constance Grady is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater.
In other words: Blatant, violent racism is not a part of the real America. The Charlottesville rally was a perverse aberration, one that the rest of us have no part in.
But the ideology of white supremacy — the ideology that eventually developed into Germany’s Nazi party — is deeply embedded in the fabric of American culture. What happened in Charlottesville is us, and the only way that will ever change is if we confront our own racist pasts and commit to making our world better.
To that end, here is a list of books about America’s history of racism and its contributions to Nazi Germany — and the violence that inevitably ensues when these ideologies are allowed to flourish and thrive. They can help teach us about who we really are, and help ensure that in the future, white supremacy truly won’t be part of America.
Last year’s National Book Award winner, Stamped From the Beginning travels rapidly through America’s long and ignominious history of racist ideology. One of Kendi’s central arguments is that racism is not a product of ignorance and stupidity that can be solved through education: Some of America’s most beloved intellectuals created some of America’s most stubborn racist myths. But by learning where those myths originated and how they evolved, you can also learn how to destroy them.
The Counter-Revolution of 1776, Gerald Horne
Horne is one of a growing group of historians arguing that the institution of slavery is not an incidental footnote in the history of America but rather a fundamental motivating force. In The Counter-Revolution of 1776, Horne traces the influence of slavery on the American Revolution, arguing that our Founding Fathers fought to free themselves from the British specifically in order to preserve slavery. (Full disclosure: I worked as an editorial assistant on this book.)
When the Nazis crafted the Nuremberg Laws, they looked around for inspiration. And across the Atlantic, they found it in an entire system of race-based caste laws and practices: America’s Jim Crow segregation, citizenship laws, and anti-miscegenation laws; the doctrine of Manifest Destiny that masked a genocide; the wholehearted embrace of eugenics. Some of America’s practices, the Nazis decided, were too harsh, but others created a perfect precedent for their own plans. This book demonstrates the fundamental link between the violent atrocities of Nazi Germany and the American legacy of white supremacy.
The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig
Zweig’s memoir moves from cosmopolitan prewar Vienna through the devastation of the First World War, the runaway inflation and depression that followed, and finally the rise of Hitler. As an account of how a diverse, vibrant community can become complicit in a genocide, it’s invaluable — and the empathetic, heartbroken Zweig is a careful, thoughtful guide.
Night, Elie Wiesel
Have you already read Night? It’s short enough and lucid enough that it gets assigned in a lot of middle and high school classes, so you might have. You should read it again anyway, because Wiesel’s account of Nazi concentration camps is so visceral and so horrifying that if you read it at 13, you probably didn’t absorb it fully. What makes Night so affecting is the tremendous clarity of Wiesel’s language: There is no ambiguity to the idea that what the Nazis were doing to Wiesel and to his family and neighbors was monstrous, and that what they were doing was also the natural endpoint of their ideology.
