Seven titles that explore collective guilt & individual complicity

Ashley Winstead is the author of In My Dreams I Hold a Knife. A resident of Houston, she earned a Ph.D. in contemporary American literature from Southern Methodist University and a B.A. in English and Art History from Vanderbilt University.

At CrimeReads she tagged seven recent crime novels that explore collective guilt and individual complicity. One title on the list:

The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris

With its George Schuyler-esque twist, this novel has one of the most nuanced explorations of complicity I’ve read. Harris’s main character is Nella, a Black editorial assistant at a predominantly white publishing house, who’s thrilled when Hazel, another Black woman, is hired in her department—until Nella is terrorized by an anonymous note-leaver, and suspects Hazel wants to climb over her to the top. Even as Nella works out how to respond to racism from her colleagues, she begins to question the ways she herself has benefitted from economic privilege and taken for granted certain classist ways of thinking endemic to the publishing industry. Harris gives literal shape to white supremacy by figuring it as a shadowy, amorphous web of antagonists, far scarier than the individuals who compose it, and complicity is also made literal (though again, no spoilers). Harris’s web of antagonists, like the racism they embody, is so insidious, so omnipresent, that no one, no matter how hard they try, can escape.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue