When I entered prison as a creative writing workshop facilitator for the first time in my early 20s, this dubiousness became both more prescient and important. Extensive education in the work of radical thinkers and activists including Augustus Boal, Frantz Fanon, and Paulo Freire (among many others), alongside my sojourns to prison, opened up a world that allowed for me to question this “good/bad” binary with which I’d been obsessed, as I weekly entered a space I was told was for “bad people,” and yet my experiences did not match this warning. Later, a relationship with an incarcerated person further troubled my assuredness concerning what is “good,” “just,” “righteous.” I was thusly confronted with an option: double down on my binary thinking, or endeavor a journey in deconstructing how I’d been conditioned to think and behave. I chose, and try to continue to choose, the latter, and understand this is a lifelong commitment to living and thinking and writing and loving in—forgive me—the gray area.

Below is a list of books I’ve found invaluable to this journey, in the order I read them. Many of these are texts I’ve read and re-read, sometimes yearly, sometimes even more often. They challenge me to consider and reconsider what I think makes a “good” person at any given time, always leaving me with the non-resolution that there is no such thing as a “good person” in the way I’d conceptualized, and that furthermore, progress toward liberation requires we actually abandon such obsession to “goodness” or “rightness” in order to meet each other with honesty and jointly work in service of a greater, unconditional, collective freedom.

—Leigh Sugar, "What to Read When You Want to Destabilize the Binaries Between Good and Bad"