The summer is nearly over, and September and the beginning of the school year are shockingly soon. If you’re scrambling to finish that summer reading list you swore you’d get through, you’re not alone, but we at Common Justice want to reassure you that it’s never too late to learn more about community and justice. Imagining and strategizing pathways towards a better world is a task for all seasons. With that spirit in mind, we’d like to share a few titles that have inspired us in recent weeks.
Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler
With these prophetic and engaging novels, Octavia Butler revolutionized the genre of speculative fiction. The novels open on July 7, 2024, and center on the life of Lauren Olamina, a Black girl navigating an American landscape destroyed by economic inequality and climate change. Displaced from her home by an attack, Lauren assembles a coalition of outcasts around a vision of a world defined by community care. Butler wrote the two novels in the 1990s, but they resonate all too well with our present: in the sequel, Lauren must protect her people from a Christian nationalist president who runs on the slogan “Make America great again.” In her insistence on the possibility of systemic transformation through solidarity and collaboration, Butler’s voice speaks to our vision for a reality away from punishment and injustice.
“Mariame Kaba: Everything Worthwhile is Done with Other People” by Eve Ewing
This extraordinary dialogue between sociologist and poet Eve Ewing and abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba explores the critical role relationships play in the movement to end mass incarceration. In a conversation spanning Black women’s overlooked contributions to the civil rights struggle, the importance of international frames of reference in justice movements, and the difference between activism and organizing, the two provide us new ways of understanding the work we do.
Jazz by Toni Morrison
In Morrison’s 1989 masterpiece Beloved, she depicted characters—and a nation—still haunted by the violence of enslavement and white supremacy. If the very language of American identity is underscored by the suffering of the marginalized, what does it mean to create art, to create an existence? In this luminous novel set during the Harlem Renaissance, Morrison uses jazz as a prism to explore forms of Black cultural production that improvise on dominant scripts, creating room for life, love, and self-expression. Employing a style that glides across characters, histories, and themes with the tempo and vitality of the title genre, Morrison crafts a love letter to the Black community in New York City.
“All Aboard the Moral Panic” by Youbin Kang
In this recent essay in n+1, Kang unpacks the recent public outcry surrounding violence on the NYC subway. She analyzes the role policy failures by Mayor Adams have played in exacerbating violence through funneling the city’s resources into policing and incarceration instead of public service. If we are to reject the weaponization of violence as a justification for the state’s crackdown on marginalized populations, where do we begin? Kang pushes us to examine the kinds of political responses that are necessary to transform our common spaces, creating a safer city for us all.
Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe
In this spare yet staggering collection of fragments, Sharpe blends the personal, political, and aesthetic to create a singular testament to the power of Black love against the violence of white supremacy. In this wide-spanning love letter to her mother, Sharpe interweaves poetry, imagery, and critical theory. Exploring the architecture of monuments to enslavement, Sharpe contrasts the way memory lives on in national culture and in bodies. In the process, she raises vital questions about the ways the white gaze dictates what becomes legible as harm. She suggests new modes of witnessing and retelling violence that offer the possibility of greater connection and care.
Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
"Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde" is a groundbreaking biography that redefines our understanding of Audre Lorde’s life, work, and lasting influence. Lorde’s concept of survival goes beyond resilience in the face of oppression or illness. It encompasses the entire spectrum of what it means to be in a dynamic, transformative relationship with our planet. In "Survival is a Promise," Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the first scholar to delve deeply into Lorde’s manuscript archives, uncovers this lesser-known aspect of Lorde’s legacy, revealing how we can live ethically and collectively on earth. Like Lorde, Common Justice recognizes that survival is not just about overcoming harm, but about transforming the conditions that give rise to it. By addressing violence and injustice through restorative practices, we seek to create a world where survival and healing is a promise, not just for individuals, but for communities and the earth we share.
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