When the Black Lives Matter protests started and the idea of working toward becoming anti-racist was talked about more and more, one thing people started to do was to create anti-racism resource lists. I shared links to a few of these lists last week. And I’m grateful that people took the time to create these lists so we could start working on our anti-racism education as soon as possible.
I started to watch video clips that were posted right away. And I quickly read many of the online articles that were shared. Those were easy resources to access and view. But I wanted to make sure I was reading books from the reading lists too. Ideally, I would have bought those books to support those authors. I know that is the best thing to do, but I really don’t have the money right now to do that. So the next best option for me was to get those books from the library.
And I think a lot of people had the same idea as I did because when I went to put myself on the waitlist for “White Fragility” (which was the book many people recommended to start with), I saw that it might be a while before I had a chance to read it.
But I think the library saw how many people wanted to read the e-book and they quickly bought more digital licenses for it. I got an email 2 days after putting myself on hold that the book was available. I am currently finishing another book I was already reading, but this is the next book that I will be reading and I have several friends also reading it that I can discuss things with.
The same day that I got off the waitlist for the book, I saw on social media that the library was posting about how they have added an on-demand social justice book section online.
There are so many books now that are available without having to put yourself on hold. I love that the library did this because not only does it help people read these books as soon as they want to but it prevents people from forgetting that they want to read them if they had to wait weeks or months before they were available. I do hope that reading anti-racism or social justice books isn’t just a trend or fad and people will always want to educate themselves, but I’m scared that in a few months people won’t be as passionate about the issue as they are now. So letting people read those books now (or listen to the audiobook version) is a really good thing.
I haven’t gotten any of the on-demand books yet since I am going to work through one book at a time, but I have been going through the reading lists and either putting myself on the waitlist or adding books to my wish list so I have more than just the ones that are on-demand available to me. I know that I need to read up on how to be anti-racist and I’m glad that the library has so many books for me to choose from.
If I feel like I need to re-read one of the books or take notes in them, I might buy one so I could do that. But for now, I’m just going to use the library for the resources they have for me and not use not being able to buy books as an excuse to not read them.
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