My most recent read is I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown. This is one of the two books Reese Witherspoon selected for Reese's Book Club for June/July. This is a memoir written by a black woman about being black in the United States. As always there may be some spoilers after the picture of the cover. 
This book is hard to review like I normally do but I'll give it a try. This book is important. It doesn't pull punches and calls out white people in the US and challenges them...us to do better...to be better. The thing I wasn't expecting when I started it was how religious the author is and how important her faith is to her story. This was both a barrier to my understanding of her and the thing I understood the most. I grew up in the church. I grew up in a white country evangelical church here in Oregon. I left Christianity first, I found that my faith is too organic to be constrained by a building and by the hate that I've seen in evangelicals as a whole. I left that church second, I found their positions to be intolerable and I found that I would always be considered a second class citizen within those four walls. I left Christianity for paganism and the church for a small corner of my apartment and for all the beauty the outdoors holds. In that respect I didn't understand her reliance on Jesus and in the God of Abraham. But in my history I found the common ground that helped me understand what she was saying about the white church and what they need to do to become the solution and not the problem. The church I used to attend is white, it's very white and old. There aren't many young families, there are next to no children, and there have never been any people of color. They're the church that rents out space to a Latinx church, holds joint services and potlucks a few times a year, and a joint Christmas bilingual program every winter. They claim it makes them inclusive...it doesn't. I remember as a teenager going to a conference in Portland, OR. This was a conference that had hundreds...if not a thousand young people, from middle school through college, and their youth pastors. I can count on one hand how many people of color I saw there and one was my brother's friend. I went to a white high school. The only people of color there were Latinx. I work in healthcare. I've been a caregiver, a medication aide, and now a CNA. My coworkers are predominantly white. I know I'm privileged. I know that although I may worry about my son, I won't have to worry someone will hate my beautiful blue-eyed boy because of the color of his skin. I know that although I have a family member in prison, I don't have to worry about the treatment he receives inside those walls because he's white. This book wasn't just a story about her and her life and her experiences. It is a challenge to do better and I think that is all I'm going to really say about this book.
Yours,
Richelle (and Emma)
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