This summer, as Black Lives Matter protesters dodged rubber bullets fired by police and Black and brown communities were hit hard by COVID-19, book clubs sprang into being, and into action.

Shoshanna Hecht, an executive and personal coach from New York City, had just joined a book club themed around racial justice in March; she also signed up for a Zoom study group that would complete Layla F. Saads Me and White Supremacy workbook together. Joanna Mang, an adjunct English instructor in North County San Diego, was invited to join a new book club, called the Equity Re-Education Discussion Group, by a friend from her Stroller Strides group.

JaRod Morris, founder of the Atlanta-based book club Black Men Read, didnt have to form a new group. The truth is, we have been having these conversations about police brutality, he told HuffPost. Though the club was designed for literary discussion rather than activism, any space where Black people gather, he said, is a good space for political mobilization. Were on the front lines. We are the subject of this. As the protests broke out, he called a state of emergency meeting to discuss how members could get involved.

Many white Americans, however, have not been having these conversations. The protests following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis seem to have changed that.

I have been very, very surprised by the apparently sudden outpouring on the parts of what appears to be millions of people, many of them white, who realize, wow, we have a lot of work to do, we have a lot we need to learn in order to do that work, said Dr. Crystal Marie Fleming, author of How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide.

Since late May, it seems like every well-meaning, left-leaning white person in America has been trying to get their hands on a copy of White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. Or How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. Or So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo. Or, hey, maybe all of them. Anti-racist manuals have been cleaned out from virtual bookstore shelves and pushed to the top of bestseller lists.

And often, these buyers dont want to read alone. Enter the anti-racist book club.

Anti-racist book clubs hold great allure, and potentially great power, at a moment when many, particularly white people, are becoming conscious of their own educational blind spots around Black history and racial justice. Book clubs sit at a slippery nexus between education and relaxation, radicalization and affirmation; theres a vibrant history of reading groups expanding peoples political consciousness and moving them to action, but also a deeply entrenched tradition of book clubs for white women as social spaces. This tension likely makes them an appealing starting point for people who want to dip their toes into the struggle for perhaps the first time, in a setting that theyre familiar with. The real test, of course, will be what comes next, once the book club attendees have gotten their feet wet with some radical reading.

The problem of white supremacy, said Dr. Fleming, a professor of sociology at Stonybrook University, is not something that an anti-racist reading group will fix. Its something an anti-racist reading group can help facilitate. To make change, people will need to leave the warm uteri of their reading circles and put their knowledge into bold, concrete action.

We have definitely seen a surge of interest in group reading for our anti-racist titles, Sanj Kharbanda, sales and marketing director at Beacon Press, told HuffPost. Beacon publishes numerous anti-racism books, including White Fragility and Flemings How to Be Less Stupid About Race. He noted that this interest came from traditional book groups as well as clubs newly formed to discuss race. Churches, universities and bookstores have launched anti-racist book clubs (often virtual, in deference to social distancing measures); friends are organizing reading groups among their social circles.

Though its impossible to know exactly who is joining these groups, or even how widespread they are, it seems likely that those turning to literary discussion are disproportionately people who already participate in book clubs: mostly women , mostly well-educated , and mostly in their 30s or older. What could be more natural for a white woman who already belongs to a book club with her friends to ask that How to Be an Antiracist be the focus of next months meeting, or to start a spinoff group?

A lot of people, a lot of college-educated women, seem to be attacking this problem from the books angle. What if I amass a lot of books this has to be a way in, Mang said. Theyre realizing that, now is a time that I need to be reading.