by Tyler Sperrazza
Ph.D., History & African American and Diaspora Studies

The United States has been rocked by two simultaneous crises: COVID-19 and the rash of racist murders of black citizens at the hands of our cities’ police forces. In moments of crisis, we are often told to “look for the helpers.” As both a historian and theater practitioner, I have always responded with “look for the storytellers.” They are the ones who can offer us perspectives on the crisis and provide paths forward. So, in the midst of a viral outbreak that has forced us to remain in our homes, coupled with a nationwide white reckoning with racism and white supremacy, I looked to the storytellers: the historians and black artists who can help us make sense of the moment. I put out a call for participants to join me in an “Antiracism Working Group.” The response was overwhelming.

I have often bemoaned the insular nature of history as an academic field. A common refrain of mine, familiar to my colleagues and friends goes something like, “the election of Donald Trump proves that the historical profession has failed the American people.” Now, that may be an exaggeration or over-simplification, but I believe that the heart of the statement is true: historians have accepted their lack of “public influence” as a failing of the populace, rather than looking inwardly at the ways in which the academic field more broadly fails to effectively engage that populace. I remember sitting and fuming at an academic conference in the wake of Trump’s election listening to historians debate about political minutiae during the antebellum era and thought: this is where we choose to put our energy and skills as researchers and storytellers? Really?

With this animus of disappointment and disengagement with my scholarly field driving me, I decided to finally put my time and resources where my complaint-filled mouth was: I would dedicate one night a week to hosting a Zoom meeting to discuss antiracist readings. The backdrop of the pandemic made this an easy response: we had all gotten used to Zoom meetings after three months of quarantine, so asking folks to sit on Zoom for two hours per week was an easy request.

The advertising was quick and simple: I slapped together a couple of Facebook and Instagram posts and shared them out to my meager lists of friends and followers. I am not a social media person—if that is something one can actually be. I was hoping to get the posts circulating and added a disclaimer: if we get more than twenty people signed up, we’ll probably need to break up into two sessions so the discussion group isn’t too large.

The next morning, I woke up to a list of over fifty people signed up. I took a deep breath, looked at my scheduled, and figured, “I can run this like a college course.” So I sent out an email welcoming the group members and proposing a schedule: three weekly sessions for folks to choose from, one in the morning and two in the evenings. That way, hopefully the fifty people would more or less spread themselves evenly across the three meetings. I told myself that I would cap the group at sixty participants.

But the signups kept coming, and I didn’t want to turn anyone away because they were clearly desperate for any chance to engage with this material. There have been plenty of critiques of this exact type of behavior by white people in the wake of events that force them to reckon with white supremacy. Reading groups and book clubs pop up, and white folks are desperate to read a recommended book or two and then return to normalcy. But this was different—I had advertised that this was a ten-week commitment, and we would be reading a book a week. This was not a once-a-month book club, but a crash ten-week course on whiteness, antiracism, structural inequities, and the paths forward offered by black artists and intellectuals. And people still wanted in.

Four days after the initial post, over ninety people had signed up, and I increased to four sessions per week. I announced that I would close the sign up form in twenty-four hours, and almost immediately received another forty participants. That was the first moment of panic. I made a decision that there was no way I could handle this many participants with only four weekly sessions—so I added two more. And to calm myself, I did the basic math: I was committing twelve hours a week to meet with people from around the country who were desperate for this information. They wanted to process these readings in a group, rather than simply doing the work in isolation with no one to reflect with, challenge their interpretations, or provide useful contexts or paths forward. Twelve hours a week for ten weeks. The math made it plain—less than two-percent of the total hours in the year. A week after sending out the initial ad, the adrenaline and endorphins that came with pressing send on the first advertisement had begun to wear off. But seeing the numbers laid bare, “less than two-percent of my year,” renewed my faith in why I had decided to do this in the first place: because my profession had failed the people of this country, and to take two-percent of my year to try and help rectify that failure in some small way was the absolute least I could do.

I believe in this model for this moment. I truly believe that at any other point in time, even if the protestors were just as full-throated and the cause just as righteous, I would not have gotten over one hundred people to sign up for this group. Coronavirus has interrupted our patterns of normalcy, so it is impossible to simply return to that normalcy in these moments where we are forced to confront systemic inequities. Instead, we are seeking connection with others, and if it comes via a two-hour antiracism Zoom meeting once a week, so be it.

We are in the third week of this experiment, and have understandably seen participation wane. We began with one hundred and thirty people across nineteen states signed up. Week one saw eighty-seven participate in one of the meetings. Week two saw that number dip to seventy-one. Drop-off is to be expected, especially as states begin to loosen quarantine restrictions, but seventy-one people per week is far more than the zero people I was reaching sitting at home reading these books by myself.

And therein lies the point of the work. I believe it is our duty as academics to understand the roles in which our scholarship can be shared with the general public. We have a responsibility to the knowledge and wisdom we gain through our scholarly pursuits. For me to sit idly by, as a graduate of Penn State’s African American Studies Department, would have turned my back on the legacy of activism that department was built on and continues to uphold. And who better for me to bring that wisdom and knowledge to than fellow white Americans who are potentially in the same place I was before I began to engage with African American history during my graduate studies.

To someone in the field, my reading list might seem like a basic, ten-week introduction to African American history. But it is important to remember that these histories are not taught to the majority of white Americans. I was in graduate school in an African American Studies program before I read any of the books that I included. I was twenty-four before I “unlearned” the civil rights movement for the first time. I was twenty-five when I first read Audre Lorde. Doing this work seems like the bare minimum, because it is—white Americans are often starting from zero when engaging with antiracist work, so even what seems like a basic re-telling of history can be completely paradigm shifting.

Academics know how to research, and we know how to create syllabi and reading lists. Many of us may struggle with the pedagogy of how to engage with our students in productive ways, but that is not what this group demands. A group like this demands a facilitator to guide the discussions and hold participants accountable for the things they say in the group. Your job is to be a graduate seminar instructor—letting the discussants drive the conversation and come to revelations and conclusions, while being on hand to offer expertise and pose thought-provoking questions.

We can and should do this work. I believe deeply that this work is vital to the health of our citizenry and democracy. We cannot cling to the belief that our arguments are distilling down from academic presses, journals, and conferences to influence the popular conceptions of history. Most of us laugh in the face of trickle-down economics…well, trickle-down historiography doesn’t work either. Think of it as a community service. Use models from public historical societies or arts engagement organizations who make a living on interfacing with the public to craft a five or ten-week short course to engage with individuals who are desperate to re-learn what they were taught in school but have never known where to turn for the information.

For my group, I designed the reading list like I would any course syllabus—we all know how to do this! I broke the weeks down into three “units”—Antiracism and Whiteness, Structural Inequities, and Paths Forward. The first three weeks focus on books and articles centered on understanding whiteness as a racial category, the middle weeks each take a deep dive into one aspect of structural racism: housing inequities, mass incarceration, and voter suppression. Then the final three weeks center on models for moving forward: dismantling the white myths of the civil rights movement, black feminist thought, and the importance of black artists within the freedom struggle.

I am still in the midst of this experiment, and I remind my participants each week that it is just that, an experiment. I have never done anything like this before and neither have most of my participants—save for the two women who are veterans of the 1960s movements. And many of my friends and family have asked me not only, “what is the point” but, “what is this actually accomplishing?” Those are fair questions.

I was intentional to name this a “working” group rather than a “reading” group. I toyed with the idea of carving out the first half hour of each meeting to sitting together on Zoom while we all drafted emails to our local representatives or wrote letters to our Senators. But I shied away from that model and decided on one that embraced the individuality of my participants. Half of the members of the group were complete strangers to me before the first week, so to assume that they would be interested in that work, or that they were not already doing that work, would be presumptuous. Instead, I modeled a norm of “monitoring your own participation” that includes setting goals for oneself in the group. And I consistently remind them every session that this ten-week interruption to get them thinking about white supremacy and inequity is just one lane on a highway of activism we all need to be engaging in. The readings and discussions provide us with context and tools needed to go out and support antiracism efforts in whichever ways we feel most useful. Two of my members have said that their “cause” has always been climate change, but they are seeing how they can use the tools learned in the working group to engage in antiracist activism within their roles as climate justice advocates.

We are learning that racism is the glue that holds many of these inequitable systems together, and by breaking those bonds we might help dismantle the entire structure.

Below, I’ve included resources for readers interested in the practical development of the Antiracism Working Group, or for those interested in starting their own. I believe that this is a moment where educators and scholars can look outside of the typical institutional models of education in order to reach a public that is desperate to learn. The mechanics of the group are very simple and straightforward. The group uses three primary platforms: Zoom for our weekly meetings, Google Drive to host readings and group materials, and WordPress as our asynchronous discussion forum. If any readers would like more information about developing their own group, they can feel free to contact me at txs392@psu.edu.

Readings List & Weekly Themes

Week One: “Allyship”

• David Campt, “Message to White Allies from A Black Anti-Racism Expert: You’re Doing it Wrong”
• Marlon James Video “Are you racist? ‘No’ isn’t a good enough answer”
• Antiracism Spectrum
• Calderon & Wise, “Code of Ethics for Antiracist White Allies”
• Michael & Conger, “Becoming an Anti-Racist White Ally: How a White Affinity Group Can Help”

Week Two: “Whiteness, or, Why There’s No Such Thing as ‘Reverse Racism’”

• Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (Beacon Press, 2018)
• Vann R. Newkirk, II, “Affirmative Action and the Myth of Reverse Racism”
• Curtis Stokes, et al, “The Language of Affirmative Action: History, Public Policy, and Liberalism”
• Michael I. Norton and Samuel Sommers, “Racism as a Zero-Sum Game”

Week Three: “Why ‘Anti’ Racism”

• Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (Random House, 2019)

Week Four: “Structural Systems 1: Neighborhoods & Housing”

• Richard Rothstein, The Color of the Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (W. W. Norton, 2017)

Week Five: “Structural Systems 2: Policing and the Carceral State”

• Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2010)
• Felice Blake, et al, “Interview with Diana Zuñiga”

Week Six: “Structural Systems 3: Electoral Politics”

• Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2018)

Week Seven: “Deconstructing the White Myths of the Civil Rights Movement”

• Martin Luther King, Jr. The Trumpet of Conscience (Beacon Press, 2011)
• Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance-A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (Vintage Books, 2010)
• Jeanne Theoharis, “Introduction,” A More Beautiful and Terrible History
• Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past”

Week Eight: “Paths Forward 1: Black Feminism”

• Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press Feminist Series, 2007)
• Naomi Schiller, “A Short History of Black Feminist of Scholars”
• Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins-Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color”
• Jennifer C. Nash, “re-thinking intersectionality”

Week Nine: “Paths Forward 2: Educational Equity”

• Beverly D. Tatum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race (Basic Books, 2017)

Week Ten: “Paths Forward 3: Black Arts Movements”

• Dominique Morrisseau, The Detroit Project: Three Plays (TCG, 2018)
• Jackie Sibblies Drury, Fairview (TCG, 2019)
• Nikky Finney, Head Off & Split (Triquarterly, 2011)