So much of what I read and hear from white commentators about the Ferguson saga reflects a profound cluelessness to which I must, all too often, plead guilty. Although my politics have been exclusively left for 50 years, my world has been almost exclusively white. I guess that's been due mainly to where I was born, grew up and went to school. In my little, rural, upper-Midwest towns, there simply weren't any black folks. So while I've always empathized with African Americans for the staggering injustices they've suffered for centuries at the hands of folks who look and speak a lot like me, my genuine understanding of what it's like to be African-American is extremely dim at best.
There are obviously lots of good ways to address the kinds of white cluelessness that so many of us share, but here are a couple that should be both simple and immensely enjoyable.
(1) Walter Mosley's Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins mysteries (readily available through library systems everywhere as both print and audiobooks). Mosley's dad was African-American, so he presumably has an excellent idea whereof he speaks when he writes about race relations, and he writes about that a lot. Despite the fact that the Easy Rawlins mysteries are in many respects classic detective noirs (a la Hammett, Chandler, etc.) and therefore lots of fun and highly entertaining to read or listen to, they're also wide-ranging studies of mid 20th-century American race relations. As such, for me they've been not only supremely enjoyable but also most enlightening and thought-provoking.
If "Easy Rawlins" sounds familiar, it's because Denzel Washington portrayed Ezekiel in Devil in a Blue Dress, the 1995 movie made out of the first book in Mosley's series.
(2) Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. (Not to be confused with H.G. Wells' science fiction. Ellison's invisibility is the invisibility black folks face in the eyes of white folks who don't - and won't - see them at all.) I'll be honest: I'd probably never have experienced that great classic of American literature were it not for audiobooks. But I had the incredible good fortune of stumbling into a version of the audiobook (there are at least two or three, I think) read by Peter Francis James (whom many of us first heard years ago as Jacques Cousteau's narrator). I found both the book itself and James' reading to be good beyond belief. One of the most transcendental and powerful experiences of my life.
A few enjoyable books are obviously not going to overcome white America's profound ignorance about what it's like to be African-American ... but they couldn't hurt.