Dear Science and Other Stories, Katherine McKittrick

I’ve been reading this slowly for over a year now — read a chapter, think on it, go back and re-read, think some more. Then I was working on an essay and realized that parts of the book were echoing in my head, and so I started trying to think with it, and found myself writing in a completely different way. It’s not the kind of argument that gives you steps 3 and 4 of your own analytic framework; it’s one that really demands that you engage it creatively; think with it, rather than it doing the thinking for you. Which is all the more remarkable, because meanwhile, what strikes you most about the book — which is, by the way, about Black life and ways of knowing — is how vividly it conveys, or rather, enacts, the process of thinking.