This week, a book called Communion landed on shelves across the country. It was written by the sitting Vice President of the United States. It is already everywhere.
We’d like to point you toward a different book called Communion.
bell hooks published Communion: The Female Search for Love in 2002 — the culmination of her trilogy on love, a book that challenges every woman to courageously claim the search for love as the heroic journey we must all choose to be truly free. It is not the only thing she gave us. Not even close. And it is one of dozens of books by Black authors and activists that have built the intellectual and moral foundation of everything Integrated Schools stands on.
This Juneteenth, we want to use our platform the way it’s meant to be used: pointing you toward the people whose ideas have actually shaped this work.
Some of the authors we keep returning to:
Noliwe Rooks — Integrated and Cutting School. Rooks tells the truth about who integration actually served after Brown v. Board — and at what cost to Black communities, Black teachers, and Black institutions. Her work is essential and uncomfortable in exactly the right way.
Eve L. Ewing — Original Sins: The Miseducation of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism and Ghosts in the Schoolyard. Ewing argues that American schooling was never designed to prepare Black and Native children for leadership — and that understanding this history is the only honest starting point for changing it.
Nikole Hannah-Jones — The 1619 Project. A reframing of the entire American story around the contributions, labor, and resistance of Black Americans. A reminder that the history most of us were taught was always incomplete.
Resmaa Menakem — My Grandmother’s Hands and The Quaking of America. Menakem teaches us that racialized trauma doesn’t just live in our minds and our systems — it lives in our bodies. And so does the possibility of healing. His work is some of the most important we know for understanding why this work is hard in ways that go deeper than ideology.
Heather McGhee — The Sum of Us. McGhee makes the case — with data and story — that racism costs everyone, including White people, in ways most of us have never been invited to see. Her concept of “solidarity dividends” is one we return to constantly.
Loretta Ross — Calling In. MacArthur Genius and founder of the “calling in” framework. Ross teaches us that accountability doesn’t require public shaming — that we can hold each other to a higher standard without breaking our communities in the process.
And of course, bell hooks — whose body of work on love, feminism, race, and belonging is so vast and so alive that we keep finding new things in it every time we return.
On the difference between reading and doing
In addition to this, we understand that Juneteenth deserves honesty more than it deserves performance.
Buying a book is not the same as doing the work. A shelf full of antiracist titles is not evidence of a liberated mind, and it is certainly not evidence of a more integrated world. We have all seen what happens when reading becomes a substitute for action — when people collect the language of justice without changing the patterns of their lives, their school choices, their investments, their votes, their silence at the playground when someone says something that goes unchallenged.
Books matter. Ideas matter. Self-education is not optional — you cannot advocate with integrity for things you don’t understand, and you cannot understand systems you’ve never been asked to examine. The authors on this list have given us tools that are genuinely irreplaceable. We are better at this work because of them.
But reading is a beginning, not an arrival. The point of understanding how segregation works is to stop participating in it. The point of learning what racialized trauma does to bodies is to build communities where fewer people carry it. The point of Juneteenth is not a reading list. It is freedom — actual, material, structural freedom — that has been promised and deferred and fought for and deferred again for more than 160 years.
So yes: buy the book. Read it. Let it change how you see things. And then let that changed vision change what you do — in your school, in your community, in the choices that feel private but aren’t.
That’s the work. The books just help us get ready for it.
This Juneteenth, support an author doing the actual work.
Shop through our Bookshop.org storefront — a portion of every purchase supports local, independent bookstores, and a portion comes back to Integrated Schools. Link in bio and below.
And if you want to go further than the bookshelf: take the Two Tour Pledge. Connect with a family through Caregiver Connection. Show up for your public school.
The reading list is the invitation. You get to decide what comes next.
Happy Juneteenth from all of us at Integrated Schools. We are still becoming what we promised.
0 Comments