Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority

Bad Feminist

Roxane Gay · 360 pages

A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched young cultural observers of her generation, Roxane Gay. "Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool, but it is pink, all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink. I read Vogue, and I'm not doing it ironically, though it might seem that way. I once l

Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

bell hooks · 205 pages

A world renowned author, scholar, public intellectual, and activist, bell hooks was 19 years old when she wrote *Ain't I a Woman* (published ten years later). It was her first book, and one of the first published by South End Press, an independent, np, collectively-organized publisher dedicated to advancing movements for radical social change.

Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America

Melissa V. Harris-Perry · 378 pages

Jezebel's sexual lasciviousness, Mammy's devotion, and Sapphire's outspoken anger -- these are among the most persistent stereotypes that black women encounter in contemporary American life. Hurtful and dishonest, such representations force African American women to navigate a virtual crooked room that shames them and shapes their experiences as citizens. Many respond by assuming a mantle of stren

Black Like Me

John Howard Griffin · 190 pages

Publisher's description: Studs Terkel tells us in his Foreword to the definitive Griffin Estate Edition of Black Like Me: "This is a contemporary book, you bet." Indeed, Black Like Me remains required reading in thousands of high schools and colleges for this very reason. Regardless of how much progress has been made in eliminating outright racism from American life, Black Like Me endures as a gre

Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People about Race

Reni Eddo-Lodge · 272 pages

In 2014, award-winning journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote on her blog about her frustration with the way that discussions of race and racism in Britain were being led by those who weren't affected by it. Her words hit a nerve. The post went viral and comments flooded in from others desperate to speak up about their own experiences. Galvanised, she decided to dig into the source of these feelings. Ex

A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America

Ronald Takaki · 508 pages

Chronicles the history of America, from colonization to the 1992 Los Angeles riots, from a multicultural point of view.

Yellow: Race In America Beyond Black And White

Frank H. Wu · 400 pages

In the tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois, Cornel West, and other public intellectuals who confronted the "color line" of the twentieth century, journalist, law professor, and activist Frank H. Wu offers a unique perspective on how changing ideas of racial identity will affect race relations in the new century.Often provocative and always thoughtful, this book addresses some of the most controversial c

Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment

Patricia Hill Collins · 283 pages

In spite of the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual tradition that is not widely known. In Black Feminist Thought, originally published in 1990, Patricia Hill Collins set out to explore the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals and writers, both within the academy and without. Here Collins provides an interpretive f

The Souls of Black Folk

W.E.B. Du Bois · 192 pages

Du Bois' 1903 collection of essays is a thoughtful, articulate exploration of the moral and intellectual issues surrounding the perception of blacks within American society.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Michelle Alexander · 301 pages

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a 2010 book by Michelle Alexander, a civil rights litigator and legal scholar. The book discusses race-related issues specific to African-American males and mass incarceration in the United States, but Alexander noted that the discrimination faced by African-American males is prevalent among other minorities and socio-economicall

The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness

Paul Gilroy · 261 pages

"Afrocentrism. Eurocentrism. Caribbean Studies. British Studies. To the forces of cultural nationalism hunkered down in their camps, this bold book sounds a liberating call. There is, Paul Gilroy tells us, a culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but all of these at once, a black Atlantic culture whose themes and techniques transcend ethnicity and nationality to

How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America

Moustafa Bayoumi · 290 pages

The story of how young Arab and Muslim Americans are forging lives for themselves in a country that often mistakes them for the enemy.

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

Nikole Hannah-Jones · 590 pages

The Mismeasure of Man

Stephen Jay Gould · 432 pages

When published in 1981, The Mismeasure of Man was immediately hailed as a masterwork, the ringing answer to those who would classify people, rank them according to their supposed genetic gifts and limits. And yet the idea of innate limits - of biology as destiny - dies hard, as witness the attention devoted to The Bell Curve, whose arguments are here so effectively anticipated and thoroughly unde

Negroland

Margo Jefferson · 256 pages

Born in upper-crust black Chicago—her father was for years head of pediatrics at Provident, at the time the nation’s oldest black hospital; her mother was a socialite—Margo Jefferson has spent most of her life among (call them what you will) the colored aristocracy, the colored elite, the blue-vein society. Since the nineteenth century they have stood apart, these inhabitants of Negroland, “a smal

Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America

Tanner Colby · 307 pages

“Tanner Colby woke up one day and realized that he didn’t know any black people – his friends, former classmates, coworkers, acquaintances, just about everyone he knew and interacted with was white. And this lopsided state of affairs, as he soon discovered, was hardly unique. Pressing those friends and coworkers about their own lives, he found the same thing to be true again and again: even with a

Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness? What it Means to Be Black Now

Toure · 251 pages

In the age of Obama, racial attitudes have become more complicated and nuanced than ever before. Inspired by a president who is unlike any Black man ever seen on our national stage, we are searching for new ways of understanding Blackness. In this book, the author, a commentator and journalist tackles what it means to be Black in America today. He begins by examining the concept of "Post-Blackness

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates · 155 pages

An Amazon Best Book of July 2015: Readers of his work in The Atlantic and elsewhere know Ta-Nehisi Coates for his thoughtful and influential writing on race in America. Written as a series of letters to his teenaged son, his new memoir, Between the World and Me, walks us through the course of his life, from the tough neighborhoods of Baltimore in his youth, to Howard University—which Coates dubs “

So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color

Caro De Robertis · 304 pages

Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans

Dan Baum · 311 pages

The hidden history of a haunted and beloved city told through the intersecting lives of nine remarkable characters After Hurricane Katrina, Dan Baum moved to New Orleans to write about the city's response to the disaster for The New Yorker. He quickly realized that Katrina was not the most interesting thing about New Orleans, not by a long shot. The most interesting question, which struck him as h

How the Irish Became White

Noel Ignatiev · 274 pages

How the Irish Became White explodes a number of myths surrounding race in our society. Focusing on how the Irish were assimilated as "whites" in America, Noel Ignatiev uncovers the roots of conflict between Irish Americans and African Americans and draws a powerful connection between Irish "success" in nineteenth-century American society and their embrace of white supremacy. - Jacket flap.

Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education

Mychal Denzel Smith · 240 pages

"A prominent journalist and contributing writer to The Nation magazine describes his education and the experiences of black masculinity against a backdrop of the Obama administration, the death of Trayvon Martin, the career of LeBron James and other pivotal influences that have shaped race relations in today's America,"--NoveList. How do you learn to be a black man in America? For young black men

The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race

Clint Smith · 240 pages

White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son

Tim Wise · 199 pages

A personal examination of the way in which racial privilege shapes the lives of white Americans in every realm of daily life.