This week’s post comes from Jennie Wintermote. Jennie is a native Kansan, an interim pastor, grad student, and director of the Western District Conference Resource Library. She loves reading, scrapbooking, and trying to figure out what it means to live out her faith every day. She also tries to remember to blog at prairieroseramblings.weebly.com.

Here are five things worth paying attention to this month. These are designed to expose you to a perspective you may not normally come across in your daily lives.

I’ve been thinking about race relations lately and what ways I might better understand white privilege and move to more understanding and unity. Here are five resources to help on that journey.

1. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas: A young adult novel about a girl trying to find her place who witnesses a friend shot by a white police officer during a traffic stop.

2. Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult: A novel about an African-American labor and delivery nurse who is removed from the care of a white supremacist’s baby who later dies. The nurse is put on trial for the death.

3. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander: An in-depth exploration of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African-Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status.

4. Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward: On my “to-read” list, an African-American woman and her two children take a road trip to pick up their white father from prison.

5. Trouble I’ve Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism by Drew Hart: Published in 2016 by Herald Press, this volume places police brutality, mass incarceration, antiblack stereotypes, poverty and everyday acts of racism within the larger framework of white supremacy.