Black History Month

Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome – Dr. Joy DeGruy

What do repeated traumas, endured generation after generation by a people produce? What impact have these ordeals had on Black people today? With over thirty years of practical experience as a mental health professional, Dr. DeGruy helps to lay the necessary foundation to ensure the well-being and sustained health of future generations and provides a rare glimpse into the evolution of society's beliefs, feelings, attitudes and behavior concerning race. On order at King’s and available through Omni partners

Immigration, Race and Survival – Cecily Pouchet Alexander

This memoir begins with a childhood in Trinidad where classism is a theme, to immigration to Canada at nineteen, which opened her eyes to the challenges she would face. In this account of Alexander’s life story, the reader will see that her experiences of racism, mainly in two work settings, are clearly a series of microaggressions. Her use of critical race theory also helps put Canada's racism into context. F1035.B53 A37 2021

The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison

Mocked for her dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes, Pecola Breedlove yearns for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in. As her dream grows more fervent, her life starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. Morrison’s first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that characterize her writing. PS3563.O7 B5 2007

So You Want to Talk About Race – Ijeoma Oluo

Oluo guides readers of all races through subjects ranging from police brutality and cultural appropriation to the model minority myth in an attempt to make the seemingly impossible possible: honest conversations about race, and about how racism infects every aspect of American life. E184.A1 O454 2019

Becoming – Michelle Obama

In her memoir, Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her—from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her time at the world’s most famous address. Warm, wise, and revelatory, this is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations—and whose story inspires us to do the same. E909.O24O33 2018

The Path Made Clear – Oprah Winfrey

Oprah shares what she sees as a guide for activating your deepest vision of yourself, offering the framework for creating not just a life of success, but one of significance. The book’s ten chapters are organized to help you recognize the important milestones along the road to self-discovery, laying out what you really need in order to achieve personal contentment, and what life’s detours are there to teach us. Available through London Public Library.

The Book of Negroes – Lawrence Hill

A sweeping story that transports the reader from a tribal African village to a plantation in the southern United States, from the teeming Halifax docks to the manor houses of London, The Book of Negroes introduces one of the strongest female characters in Canadian fiction, one who cuts a swath through a world hostile to her colour and her sex. Watch the miniseries on CBC Gem. PS8565.I444B66 2007

The Skin We're In: A year of Black resistance and power – Desmond Cole

In his national bestseller, celebrated writer and activist Desmond Cole punctures the naive assumptions of Canadians who believe we live in a post-racial nation. Chronicling just one year in the struggle against racism, The Skin We're In shows the injustices faced daily by Black Canadians. Cole draws on his own experiences in this personal, painful, and comprehensive picture of entrenched, systemic inequality. F1034.A1 C65 2020 + ebook + streaming video

Until We Are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada – Rodney Diverlus, Sandy Hudson & Syrus Marcus Ware, editors

The Black Lives Matter movement found fertile ground in Canada, where Black activists speak of generations of injustice and continue the work of the Black liberators who have come before them. This collection contains some of the best writing on the hottest issues facing the Black community in Canada: the latest developments in Canadian Black activism, organizing efforts through the use of social media, Black-Indigenous alliances, and more. F1035.B53 U58 2020

Angry Queer Somali Boy: A complicated memoir – Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali

Kidnapped by his father on the eve of Somalia’s societal implosion, Mohamed Ali was taken first to the Netherlands, and then to Canada. Unmoored from his birth family and caught between twin alienating forces of Somali tradition and Western culture, Mohamed must forge his own queer coming of age. This is a fierce and unrelenting account of one young man’s nascent sexuality fused with the violence wrought by displacement. HQ75.8.A398A3 2019 + ebook

They Said This Would Be Fun: Race, campus life, and growing up – Eternity Martis

A powerful memoir about what it's like to be a student of colour on a predominantly white campus. As one of the few Black students at Western, Martin learned more about what someone like her brought out in other people than she did about herself. Using her award-winning reporting skills, she connects her own experience to the systemic issues plaguing student, in a memoir of pain, but also resilience. LC212.43.C3 M37 2020 + ebook

The Outer Harbour: Stories – Wayde Compton

In his debut story collection, poet Wayde Compton explores the concept of place and identity in which characters and space merge to make narrative. With interconnected stories moving from 2001 through to 2025, this is both a history book and a cautionary tale of the future, condensing and confounding our preconceived ideas about race, migration, gentrification, and home. PR9299.1.C653O98 2014 + ebook

Frying Plantain – Zalika Reid-Benta

Set in “Little Jamaica,” Frying Plantain follows a girl as she navigates the tensions between mothers and daughters, second-generation immigrants experiencing first-generation cultural expectations, and Black identity in a predominantly white society. A rich portrait of growing up between worlds, these stories show how, in one charged moment, friendship and love can turn to enmity and hate, well-meaning protection can become control, and teasing can turn to something much darker. PR9299.2.R35F94 2019

Gutter Child: A novel – Jael Ealey Richardson

Set in an imagined world in which the most vulnerable buy their freedom by working off their debt to society, Elimina Dubois is one of one hundred babies taken from the Gutter and raised in the land of opportunity. As a modern heroine in an altered but recognizable reality, Elimina must find the strength to forge her future in defiance of a system that tries to shape her destiny. PR9299.2.R52G98 2021

Butter Honey Pig Bread: A novel – Francesca Ekwuyasi

An award-winning intergenerational saga about three Nigerian women; a novel about food, family, and forgiveness. Butter Honey Pig Bread is a story of choices and their consequences, of motherhood, of the malleable line between the spirit and the mind, of finding new homes and mending old ones, of voracious appetites, of queer love, of friendship, faith, and above all, family. PR9898.N59E365 B98 2020

The Night Piece: Collected short fiction – André Alexis

Vivid, profound, moving, and with moments of sly humour, these stories reveal worlds both familiar and deeply strange. Drawing from Alexis's acclaimed debut collection, Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa, and the highly original Beauty and Sadness, and including previously uncollected stories, here is the surreal and brilliant short fiction of one of Canada's most extraordinary writers. PS8551.L4 A6 2020

Black Matters – Afua Cooper

Halifax’s former Poet Laureate Afua Cooper and photographer Wilfried Raussert collaborate in this book of poems and photographs focused on everyday Black experiences. The result is a jambalaya — a dialogue between image and text. This visual and textual conversation honours the multiple layers of Blackness in the African diaspora around North America and Europe. The result is a work that amplifies black beauty and offers audible resistance. PS8555.O584 B53 2020

Dominoes at the Crossroads: stories – Kaie Kellough

In this collection, acclaimed sound performer and writer Kaie Kellough’s characters navigate race, history, and coming-of-age by way of their confessions and dreams. Through the eyes of jazz musicians, hitchhikers, quiet suburbanites, student radicals, secret agents, historians, and their fugitive slave ancestors, Kellough’s characters allow the force of imagination to tip the balance of time like a line of dominoes. PS8571.E58643 D64 2020

Washington Black: A novel – Esi Edugyan

Eleven-year-old field slave George Washington Black is terrified when he is chosen as a manservant. But soon Wash is initiated into a world where even a boy born in chains may embrace a life of dignity and meaning. This dazzling, original novel of slavery and freedom asks what freedom is. And can a life salvaged from the ashes ever be made whole? PS8609.D59W37 2018

I Am Still Your Negro: An homage to James Baldwin – Valerie Mason-John, & George Elliott Clarke

Spoken-word poet Valerie Mason-John unsettles readers with potent images of ongoing trauma from slavery and colonization. Her narratives range from the beginnings of the African Diaspora to the story of a stowaway on the Windrush, from racism and sexism in Trump’s America to the wide impact of the Me Too movement. I Am Still Your Negro is truth that needs to be told, re-told, and remembered. Ebook

Do Better: Spiritual activism for fighting and healing from white supremacy – Rachel Ricketts

Do Better addresses racial justice from a comprehensive, intersectional, and spirit-based perspective. This guidebook illustrates how to engage in the heart-centered and mindfulness-based practices that will help us all fight white supremacy from the inside out, in our personal lives and communities alike. It is a loving and assertive call to do the deep—and often uncomfortable—inner work that precipitates external and global change. Ebook

On Property
– Rinaldo Walcott

In this examination of the relationship between policing and property, Rinaldo Walcott explores the long shadow cast by slavery’s afterlife and shows how present-day abolitionists continue the work of their forebears in service of an imaginative, creative philosophy that ensures freedom and equality for all. Thoughtful, wide-ranging, compassionate, and profound, On Property makes an urgent plea for a new ethics of care. Ebook