Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates Ta-Nehisi Coates, in a book written as a letter to his teenage son, provides an unflinching testimony of what it means to be Black in America. Inspired by James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Between the World and Me won the National Book Award for nonfiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
SIGNALS TO NOISE AS THE ARTISTIC TEAM AND CAST began to create this production, director Jaki Bradley, assistant director Nailah Harper-Malveaux, and literary/dramaturgy fellow Charlie Dubach-Reinhold assembled an incredibly rich list of books and other resources that help contextualize the world of the play. Here are some selections if you want to dig more deeply into the thorny issues of White Noise.
White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo Robin DiAngelo, an academic as well as a diversity and inclusion training educator, dissects the ways white people react when challenged about their notions about race that perpetuate systems of exclusion.
Faces at the Bottom of the Well by Derrick Bell This book is full of short allegorical stories that explore the way that racism operates, evolves, and cements itself in our world. Written by Derrick Bell, a founding thinker behind critical race theory, it uses simple, yet incisive myths/ fables to re-examine the quest for racial justice and argue that racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of our society.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
The 1619 Project nytimes.com/1619 This New York Times interactive site, launched to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the first slaves arriving in America, reexamines the way we think and talk about American history and the legacy of slavery in this country. It’s also an ongoing podcast series that you can listen to for free.
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In this novel, a woman gradually escalates her use of prescription medications in an attempt to sleep for an entire year, an experiment as radical in its own way as the one explored in White Noise.
