As nationwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism continue, we white people may have clutched our pearls and perhaps entertained thoughts like this: What will this accomplish? When will it be over? Can’t we just go back to normal? Isn’t protesting just asking for trouble?

To be clear, these are the thoughts of someone who lives in safety. These are the thoughts of someone who never got turned down for a job or an apartment because of the color of their skin. These are the thoughts of someone who never feared for their life or liberty when they were pulled over by a traffic cop. These are the thoughts of someone who doesn’t worry about being mistaken for a criminal when exercising their 2nd Amendment rights. These are the thoughts of someone who hasn’t repeatedly had their communities marginalized by governments and legislation. These are the thoughts of someone who hasn’t watched, again and again, the brutalizing and killing of people who look like them, and who have watched helplessly as justice was not served, as nothing was made right.

I’m not trying to say that white people all live perfect lives that are free of strife and trouble. But that strife and trouble has never been because of the color of our skin. Also? It’s not about you. It’s not about me. It’s not about how uncomfortable the free expression of grief and frustration and fury by our countrymen, our fellow citizens, our neighbors, our fellow humans makes white people feel.

White people will never understand, fully, the experience of existing in America while black. But it is our duty as humans and Americans to do the work of trying, even if that work never ends.

It starts by being present with the discomfort you feel when you watch a police vehicle drive into a massed crowd. Feel uncomfortable when you see a cop pick a woman from a group of people and fling her into a curb so hard she doesn’t get up. Feel uncomfortable watching a cop beat someone with his baton, the person long subdued. Feel that discomfort. Feel it build to disbelief and horror. Feel it curdle to fear. Sit with it. Live with it. Then maybe, in a tiny little way, we’ll begin to understand.

The list is what we can do is short and simple—some of it is even easy: Protest if that’s your thing; donate to organizations that support black communities and causes if you can; turn out to vote against racists politicians and racist policies; listen to what black voices are telling you about what they experience; and, I would add, read. Read African American literature. Not only is almost all of it amazing just as literature, as stories, as art, as content, but it will help you spend 200 or 300 or 500 or more pages walking in shoes you wouldn’t and couldn’t otherwise wear. It’s part of the eternal work of trying to understand.

The first work of African American literature that I read that truly opened my eyes to the persistent injustice that dogged the black experience in America was Native Son by Richard Wright. It was on the syllabus for the African American literature class I took from Dr. Patricia Hill at USF. It was not, of course, the first book on the syllabus. There were works by Fredrick Douglass and Sojourner Truth. Novels, poems, essays and narratives by Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston and the great James Baldwin, and gorgeously harrowing and joyful works by contemporary writers like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou. We worked our way from slave narratives to reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance to the civil rights movement. The voices of African Americans are, obviously, not only found in literature—but books are part of how I do the work of trying to understand, as much as I am able to. That single literature class unlocked an American history, an American experience that I had barely learned about before.

Native Son by Richard Wright is the story of Bigger Thomas, a black man who is so divested of a place in the world, his position so lacking in empowerment, he can’t help but make terrible decisions. It’s easy to put on a paternalistic, patronizing cap and think of Bigger as a dumb kid who doesn’t know any better, whose own bad decisions warp him into a criminal. But he does know better; it’s just in every situation he is hemmed in by terrible options, damned no matter what. His inherent intelligence and sense of agency are completely shackled by the conflicting expectations and prejudices of his circumstances and the people around him, white and black.

I am in no position to expound on the emotional experience of black Americans, but reading this book I was able to relate, if not to Bigger’s existential entrapment, to the notion of entrapment and the endless fear that both fed it and resulted from it, a closed circuit of insecurity and anxiety. I was able to imagine his position and be terrified by it. This is a credit to Wright’s beautiful writing that thoroughly embraced the complexities of his main character and the world—emotionally, culturally, physically—that he inhabited. It’s also a credit to Dr. Hill’s syllabus and her teaching that had handily tuned this white girl, raised in a minimally diverse community, attending a private college with a lot of other privileged people (not a great many of them black), to emotionally invest in that which I had not experienced and did not understand. The literary stepping stones to Native Son were not arbitrary.

All due respect to Walt Whitman, JD Salinger, Earnest Hemingway and William Faulkner, if in more people’s formative school years we’d replaced The Scarlet Letter with The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass or 12 Years a Slave, would white Americans as a whole have a better understanding, more empathy for the black experience in America? What if we’d read Sonny’s Blues instead of Catcher in the Rye? Could we have dismantled the machinery of systemic racism by now? If we had read the poems of Langston Hughes instead of ee cummings, would we be able to equally share the outrage of the black community? Could we have made a clearer path toward equality more quickly? What if, literature aside, we collectively faced the terrible aspects of our country’s history that victimize black Americans to this day, rather than try to sweep it all under the rug? Would we still be so resistant to the inevitable accounting for our nation’s sins?

Those who are protesting, like Bigger Thomas, are stuck between impossible choices: protest peacefully and be ignored yet again, some more; protest ardently, violently and be reviled as criminals and thugs. And whatever you choose, you act under the continuing threat of police brutality. Have I, have any of us, white friends, truly sat with their predicament? Probably not. Because we can’t. We move through a different reality than black people. We call the police when we need them, confident they’ll safeguard us. We don’t have to worry that random people will chase us down in a truck and shoot us when we go out for a jog. The preconceptions people have about us when we meet them for the first time are generally mild, even when inaccurate. When we make choices, we generally have a better set of options. We yearn for wholeness, we long for all this terrible shit to be fixed so we can get back to being “normal.” But if there’s one thing these nationwide protests are screaming at us, it’s that “normal” was fucked, and going back is not an option.

It is no secret that we learn about other people, other times, other ways of life and living through books. Books help us understand things that we never thought we needed to. To my point today, reading books helps us build empathy and emotional intelligence. One could not be blamed for looking at our most ardent societal dialogues and find them sorely lacking in both. It seems we are on the verge of being swamped by assholes who see things only through their own experience, agree with things that only confirm whatever it is they’re comfortable believing and feeling. Somedays, the deluge of fuckery seems to reach ever higher.

We must do the work of listening, learning and understanding. We must counter the fuckery with wisdom, with knowledgeable empathetic action and an openness to the discomfort that hard conversations inspire. We must ensure that the fury and anguish and sacrifices of our fellow citizens isn’t for nothing.

(PS: A starter reading list of some of my favorite titles written by black people;

Beloved by Toni Morrison—truly anything by Toni Morrison
Underground Railroad AND The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead—TWO Pulitzer Prizes do not lie
The Sellout by Paul Beatty
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nahesi Coates
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Literally anything that James Baldwin wrote.

There are so many more! Please throw titles at me, at all your friends! Also, here’s a link to black-owned bookstores you can buy from. Do it up!)

(PPS: I highly recommend the June 1 episode of The Daily for a sonic view of the protests and the ongoing complexities within and surrounding them.)