We are now launching the Green Sisu book club!
If you are interested in joining the book club, send a message to marjaana.makinen@greensisu.fi and you get to vote on meeting schedules and books we will read (or listen to) next!
Our first theme is racism.
We want the book club to be accessible for all, so you can choose from the list below or read some other book on this theme! There are also some good audiobooks available.
Suggestions:
Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project by Hans Kundnani (2023)
Investigates how the idea of “Europeanness” involves latent ethnic/cultural assumptions, how European identity is shaped by empire and ideas of whiteness, and how racism is built into political imaginaries within the EU.
The Politics of Replacement: Demographic Fears, Conspiracy Theories, and Race Wars by Sarah Bracke & Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar (2023)
Examines how “replacement” narratives (e.g. fears that another group will replace the existing “native” population) spread in European politics. Tackles how conspiracy theory, demographic anxiety, racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia become mainstreamed.
Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics by Matthew Goodwin (2023)
Though focused on Britain, this book touches on how issues of identity, culture, race, and values are reshaping political divisions. It gives insight into political discourse, polarization, and identity politics.
Bones of Belonging: Finding Wholeness in a White World by Annahid Dashtgard (2023)
A collection of essays dealing with the personal and structural effects of being a person of colour in majority-white societies (England and Canada). Though partly memoir, the structural critique of whiteness, belonging, and racial identity has political implications, relevant to European diaspora and immigrant communities.
What is antiracism? And why it means anticapitalism by Arun Kundnani (2023)
Liberals have been arguing for nearly a century that racism is fundamentally an individual problem of extremist beliefs. However, liberal antiracism has proven powerless against structural oppression. Fighting racism means striking its capitalist roots. The author has been active in antiracist movements in Britain and the United States for three decades.
Racism: A short history by George M. Fredrikson (2022)
Surveys the history of Western racism from its emergence in the late Middle Ages to the present. Beginning with the medieval antisemitism that put Jews beyond the pale of humanity, he traces the spread of racist thinking in the wake of European expansionism and the beginnings of the African slave trade. And he examines how the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century romantic nationalism created a new intellectual context for debates over slavery and Jewish emancipation. The author was an American author, activist, historian, and professor.