As a commenter at ARP pointed out, yes, this is obviously a reading list and a literary approach to the issue of race (Black/white race issues, mostly) in the U.S.. I have posted elsewhere about more hands-on, lived ways to jump into the topic and perhaps I'll post yet more of that soon, since I'm kind of in this zone right now.
Some of the things commenters are adding to the list have me thinking a bit more about why I chose these particular things (and not others) for my introductory "must reads."
First of all, I'm a good post-post-structuralist and therefore not a big believer in The Canon, but I do believe in multiple canons for various purposes and this is mine for a slim slice of the race story in America from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth.
It's the "slim slice" part that is key for a transracial adopter to grasp. There is way too much out there on transracial adoption that posits (or just assumes) a "Black Experience" or a "Black Family" or "Black Culture" and the fact is, there are many more than one of each of these. My list is focused on my interests and concerns. It is quite largely generated from my graduate work in American literature, so heck, it's very much just my tiny facet of a multi-faceted story.
And yet, I feel comfortable offering it to you, because it's as good as any other facet for a starting place. If you start with my list (or 75% or 50% of my list) you will get a sense of what you care most about and what you want to read more of.
But here's why I like my particular list and would defend it against one that starts with Tatum or MacIntosh (both of whom I also really like and think are fabulous and useful to the topic). The goal of my list is not to teach white people that there is racism. The goal of my list is to plunge white readers into Black experience (albeit, literary experience). Rather than offer a bridge between contemporary white experience and contemporary Black experience (which Tatum and MacIntosh do excellently), in the back of my mind (and I only consciously realize it now) I was thinking about the literary equivalent of moving into a Black neighborhood and sinking or swimming.
That plunge--literary though it may be--asks a reader to figure out the world from a Black perspective through direct engagement with that world. And that's something I think is an invaluable feature of reading. It gives a person a chance to have this direct engagement yet at a "safe" remove that allows her to think it through, to come up with "dumb" questions and seek out the answers before risking the scarier personal engagement on her feet that many transracial adopters fear so much that they never go there.
Reading can be a sort of dress rehearsal for walking into that non-white space and having at least some kind of touch stone for what is happening-a touchstone one might call "double-consciousness."
So that's one thing I've been thinking about.
There are others that I will continue to mull before posting. This is a good chance for me to chew on my "syllabus" idea, because to let you in on my as-yet-unformed plans for the future, I do hope to start some kind of reading group for transracial adopters in "real life" once we are settled in Chicago.
Another quick point: yes this is also completely focused on the Black/white thing in the U.S. But I do think a good basic understanding of that is also good background for the whole race thing altogether. It can give you one substructure for white supremacy from which to leap when looking at the nitty-gritty specifics of the experiences of not-Black-not-white people in U.S. history. That said, unless someone knows already of a similar list re: Asian Americans, I'll come up with four or five starter books on that in the next few days, okay?
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