The Black Experience Book Club

This monthly book club will revolve around works that focus on the Black Experience in America with a goal to highlight the broad spectrum and commonalities of what it means to be “Black” in America.

We will read a wide variety of genres including, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Selected books will serve as a jumping off point to discuss, in more detail, how we as a group relate to the experiences of the author or characters.

Free & open to the public. Registration required via ticketing or by contacting us.

April book: Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine’s book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time.

The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named “post-race” society.

We have 10 copies of the book available for discussion participants.