Reading List #28 (Patreon)

Hey Patrons! 

This is the very first reading list of 2019! Woo-hoo!

Speaking of reading, do you have a reading goal for this year? I do! While my days and weeks are always filled with non-fiction books, scholarly papers, and op-eds, I want to munch my way through three books-for-pleasure per month this year. At the very least, I want to read ONE book-for-pleasure per month. So my goal for 2019 is to read between 12 and 36 books. What about you? How many books do you plan to read for pleasure this year? Leave a comment below and I'll be back in January 2020 to see how it went. 

Without further adieu, here's Reading List #28. 

1. How Young, Black Girls Were Hypersexualized In America — And How That Enables Predators (Elexus Jionde) 1/9/19

Of course I'm plugging my latest freelance piece for Bustle. This essay was penned due in part to the airing of Surviving R. Kelly, the controversial Lifetime documentary that put R. Kelly on blast and set the timeline on fire.

Read Length: Short

2. The Turn-On Switch: Fetish Theory, Post-Freud (Lisa Miller) 7/21/13

A really compelling essay on the psychology behind fetishes from a modern perspective.

Read Length: Long 

3. The Sad, Strange Life and Death of Devonte Hart: The Crying Black Boy Who Famously Hugged A Cop (Zaron Burnett III)

An investigative piece on the life and murder of Devonte Hart, the black boy in the infamous 2014 staged cop photo. His body still hasn't been found.  

Read Length: Medium

4. Ed Buck and The Queer Black Lives That Don't Matter (George M. Johnson) 1/15/19

Democratic Party donor Ed Buck needs to be held accountable for the deaths of two dead black gay men, Gemmel Moore and Timothy Dean. Writes George M. Johnson:

Ed Buck is using his wealth, class, and power to manipulate black queer men who are vulnerable. Men who are sex workers or struggling to make a livable wage to sustain their own existence. Men who are already caught up in the meth epidemic and fall prey to sexual exploitation in return from drugs. How many more lives must be lost before a stop is put to this?

Read Length: Medium

5. The Other Church Abuse Story (Stacey Patton) 1/15/19

The brilliant Stacey Patton (whose book I've referenced for my JSYK video about child abuse and spankings in the black community) wrote a piece on how the church not only encourages the abuse of black children, but stems from a white-puritanical ideology about children. She also drops a stat that illustrates the divide between young black people and older ones when it comes to the church:

As Luna Malbroux writes in Splinter, “Although black Americans still tend to be more religious than the general population, those under 30 are three times as likely to avoid religious affiliation as black people over 50.”

Read Length: Long

6. Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girlhood (Rebecca Epstein, Jamilia J. Blake, Thalia Gonzalez) 

This detailed study delves into the disparities and discrimination black girls face. You may want to print this one and break out the highlighter. 

Read Length: Long

7. I Was A Cable Guy. I Saw The Worst Of America. (Lauren Hough)

Funny and disturbing. Americans are weird. This piece gave me a renewed sense of admiration for service people who enter the homes of folks they do not know. 

Read Length: Long

8. How the Bad Sex Ed You Got in High School Is Still Hurting You (Amelia Thomson-Deveaux) 11/2/18

If you haven't watched episode four of Lets Talk About Sex History (or even if you have), this is the perfect companion piece to reiterate the lesson. In this Cosmopolitan piece, the atrocity of conservative backed abstinence-only sex ed programs are connected to a whole heap of social issues. As an advocate of the line "I'm pro-sex, not pro-trifling", the need for comprehensive sex-ed is an issue I'm very passionate about. If you love sex, or simply hate STDs and teen pregnancies, this is an issue that should be high on your priority list. 

Read Length: Long

9. The NRA's Most Wanted Customer: Women (Ben Wofford) 6/28/2018

This piece made me think of the sickening faux-empowerment antics of the curly-headed white girl on twitter who always goes viral for posing in pictures with guns and saying something ignorant. 

In 2012 the NRA spent a few hundred dollars on Internet advertising (only $300 on banner ads in the second half of the year), according to Pathmatics, a marketing research agency. These promotions didn’t feature a single woman until 2014, when ads appeared showcasing young moms guarding a crib or a pregnant woman imploring viewers not to take away her rights. By 2018 the NRA had spent more than $4 million online before June on ads viewed a staggering 600 million times. About 23 percent of their Facebook ads targeted women, concentrated in metro areas like Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, and New York City.

Read Length: Medium

10. The Jonestown We Don't Know (Gaiutra Bahadur) December 2018

You've probably heard of the 1978 Jonestown Massacre, in which over 900 members of the Peoples Temple cult committed suicide (under threat of death) or were murdered for refusing to do so. I've seen countless documentaries, but this essay discussed the tragedy within the framework of race. The incident took place in Guyana, a country filled with black people, though their realities during and after the Jonestown massacre have been largely ignored. The essay is written by a Guyanese-American immigrant. 

An aura of contingency continues to surround Jonestown, so often portrayed as the tale of a lone madman, a charismatic crackpot who imploded in a random heart of darkness. In truth, as I have come to learn, Jonestown does not point to a singular erratic Svengali but, rather, to fundamental aspects of both my adopted and my home countries. About 70 percent of the community’s 914 dead were African Americans, whose precarious place in the country of their birth made them responsive to pitches to leave it. Their individual stories have been lost in the commemorations, an erasure that also obscures the systemic character of what unfolded. America in the 1970s was still so warped by the legacies of slavery that it inspired the followers of Jim Jones to dream elsewhere, and Guyana’s politics at the time made it fertile ground for their dreaming.

One person I always remembered from the Jonestown Massacre was one of the few survivors, a 76-year-old black woman named Hyacinth Thrash, who hid under a bed while everyone died outside. I was pleased to read more about her background, which provided insight on how she ended up at the People's Temple, an interracial cult that preached equality.

Thrash’s own encounter with institutional racism began with her childhood in rural Alabama. In her small town, whites attended school nine months a year; for blacks, it was only four. Nor could her parents, an illiterate domestic worker and a small-time farmer who supplemented his income as a cook on the railways, exercise the vote. Surrounding “sundown” towns barred blacks with, effectively, a curfew. Thrash’s family believed that her grandfather had been killed for violating such an ordinance.

Read Length: Long

11. How Cities Make Money By Fining The Poor (Matthew Shaer) 1/8/19

Well, well. Exploitation of the poor in a capitalist society? You don't say. 

Read Length: Medium