Here are 100 books that Blinded by Sight fans have personally recommended if you like
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After hearing scholars argue that the “Latinx” category is solely an ethnicity, not a race, I questioned my assumption that “Latinx” was a race—and this led me to ask, “What is race?” To answer this, I read extensively, reflecting on my education and experience as a high school Spanish teacher. At the time, I was also studying a bilingual education program, and I started noticing how the program socially constructed race and the Latinx racialized group. Now, as a UCLA professor researching and teaching about Latinx education, I’m sharing insights in my book, a book that helps readers rethink race and see how schools construct Latinidad.
This book is required reading for anyone wanting to understand how race operates in the U.S. as an ever-changing social construct.
While many people only read Chapter 4 (the one usually assigned in college courses), I urge you to read the whole book—it’s packed with insights that are often overlooked. One line that stopped me in my tracks was on page 111: “Once specific concepts of race are widely circulated and accepted as a social reality, racial difference is not dependent on visual observation alone.” That sentence reshaped how I thought about race in education and beyond.
Omi and Winant’s work is foundational, and it’s one I returned to while writing “How Schools Make Race” to grapple with the complexities of racial formation.
Twenty years since the publication of the Second Edition and more than thirty years since the publication of the original book, Racial Formation in the United States now arrives with each chapter radically revised and rewritten by authors Michael Omi and Howard Winant, but the overall purpose and vision of this classic remains the same: Omi and Winant provide an account of how concepts of race are created and transformed, how they become the focus of political conflict, and how they come to shape and permeate both identities and institutions. The steady journey of the U.S. toward a majority nonwhite…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
After hearing scholars argue that the “Latinx” category is solely an ethnicity, not a race, I questioned my assumption that “Latinx” was a race—and this led me to ask, “What is race?” To answer this, I read extensively, reflecting on my education and experience as a high school Spanish teacher. At the time, I was also studying a bilingual education program, and I started noticing how the program socially constructed race and the Latinx racialized group. Now, as a UCLA professor researching and teaching about Latinx education, I’m sharing insights in my book, a book that helps readers rethink race and see how schools construct Latinidad.
I picked up this book because I was struggling to make sense of the different ways race is theorized in education. Zeus Leonardo’s work blew me away—it’s like he handed me a map to navigate the complexities of race frameworks. He breaks down four major approaches, critiques their limitations, and then introduces his own concept of “race ambivalence,” which completely shifted my perspective.
What I love most is how Leonardo doesn’t just theorize; he challenges readers to think critically about how these frameworks play out in real life. This book isn’t just for educators—it’s for anyone who wants to understand the nuances of race in society. It’s a book I keep coming back to, and it’s one I always recommend to friends who are ready to dig deeper.
This is a comprehensive introduction to the main frameworks for thinking about, conducting research on, and teaching about race and racism in education. Renowned theoretician and philosopher Zeus Leonardo surveys the dominant race theories and, more specifically, focuses on those frameworks that are considered essential to cultivating a critical attitude toward race and racism. The book examines four frameworks: Critical Race Theory (CRT), Marxism, Whiteness Studies, and Cultural Studies, with a critique following each one in order to analyze its strengths and set its limits. The last chapter offers a theory of "race ambivalence," which combines aspects of all four…
After hearing scholars argue that the “Latinx” category is solely an ethnicity, not a race, I questioned my assumption that “Latinx” was a race—and this led me to ask, “What is race?” To answer this, I read extensively, reflecting on my education and experience as a high school Spanish teacher. At the time, I was also studying a bilingual education program, and I started noticing how the program socially constructed race and the Latinx racialized group. Now, as a UCLA professor researching and teaching about Latinx education, I’m sharing insights in my book, a book that helps readers rethink race and see how schools construct Latinidad.
This book taught me how the idea of “Hispanic” as a group was constructed—not as a natural category but as a deliberate effort by activists, bureaucrats, and the media. Cristina Mora’s research shows how power and influence created this category, challenging the assumption that commonality binds this group together.
Reading it helped me see that the creation of the Hispanic category is both intentional and ongoing, which deeply influenced how I think about race and racialization in my own work. If you’ve ever wondered how racial and ethnic categories come to be, this book is a must-read. It’s a powerful reminder that categories are not fixed but shaped by history, politics, and power.
How did Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Cubans become known as "Hispanics" and "Latinos" in the United States? How did several distinct cultures and nationalities become portrayed as one? Cristina Mora answers both these questions and details the scope of this phenomenon in Making Hispanics. She uses an organizational lens and traces how activists, bureaucrats, and media executives in the 1970s and '80s created a new identity category-and by doing so, permanently changed the racial and political landscape of the nation. Some argue that these cultures are fundamentally similar and that the Spanish language is a natural basis for a unified…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
After hearing scholars argue that the “Latinx” category is solely an ethnicity, not a race, I questioned my assumption that “Latinx” was a race—and this led me to ask, “What is race?” To answer this, I read extensively, reflecting on my education and experience as a high school Spanish teacher. At the time, I was also studying a bilingual education program, and I started noticing how the program socially constructed race and the Latinx racialized group. Now, as a UCLA professor researching and teaching about Latinx education, I’m sharing insights in my book, a book that helps readers rethink race and see how schools construct Latinidad.
Laura Gómez’s work has been foundational to my thinking about race and the Latinx community. While I also love her book Inventing Latinos, I chose Manifest Destinies because it directly answers a question one of my students once asked me: “Is Mexican American a race?”
This book is a powerful account of how the "Mexican American” racial category was created through historical and legal processes, conquest, and social struggle. When I read it, I was struck by how Gómez provides the foundation for understanding the origins of what we now call the Latinx category. If you want to understand the roots of the Latinx racial category in the U.S., this book is essential.
An essential resource for understanding the complex history of Mexican Americans and racial classification in the United States
Manifest Destinies tells the story of the original Mexican Americans-the people living in northern Mexico in 1846 during the onset of the Mexican American War. The war abruptly came to an end two years later, and 115,000 Mexicans became American citizens overnight. Yet their status as full-fledged Americans was tenuous at best. Due to a variety of legal and political maneuvers, Mexican Americans were largely confined to a second class status. How did this categorization occur, and what are the implications for…
I’m that infamous medievalist who wrote the big book on medieval race. It took 20 years of thinking and research, and a whole lot of writing, but now people are convinced that there was, indeed, such a thing as race and racism between the 11th and 15th centuries in the West (aka Christendom/Europe). I'm Perceval Professor of English and Comparative Literature, with a joint appointment in Middle Eastern studies and Women’s studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
If you’re curious about what the ancient Greeks and Romans thought about their neighbors—Persians, Egyptians, etc.— you’ll want to read this book from cover to cover. It’s smart, learned, and doesn’t shy away from hard truths. After you read it, you’ll also want to read Benjamin Isaac’s The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity, David M. Goldenberg’s The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and The Origins of Racism in the West, edited by Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler.
How do different cultures think about race? In the modern era, racial distinctiveness has been assessed primarily in terms of a person's physical appearance. But it was not always so. As Denise McCoskey shows, the ancient Greeks and Romans did not use skin colour as the basis for categorising ethnic disparity. The colour of one's skin lies at the foundation of racial variability today because it was used during the heyday of European exploration and colonialism to construct a hierarchy of civilizations and then justify slavery and other forms of economic exploitation. Assumptions about race thus have to take into…
Studying anthropology and biology in the 1970s, I was in the perfect position to understand why race was not genetic. From that time on, I wanted everyone to know what race was and was not. But here we a half century later and most individuals in the US – and the world – still believe that race is a valid way to divide individuals into biological groups, and worse, that race, rather than racism, explains differences in life circumstances. As a professor and president of the American Anthropological Association I have taught courses and helped with documentaries, museum exhibits, websites, articles, and books to dispel consequential myth about race and genetics.
In 1939 it was well-accepted that Europe was home to many different races. Jacobson tells the story of how, after the Holocaust, different ethnic and national groups slowly because members of the “Caucasian” or White race. Jacobson uses a variety of sources, including those from popular culture to tell the story of how these marginal groups, such as the Irish, Poles, Italians, and of course Ashkenazi Jews, became honorary white. This is a highly readable book about the history of racism against some ethnic Europeans. More so, it is an important book for showing how racial categories change through time and how being white is neither stable nor a given. Rather, it is a club that policies entry.
America's racial odyssey is the subject of this remarkable work of historical imagination. Matthew Frye Jacobson argues that race resides not in nature but in the contingencies of politics and culture. In ever-changing racial categories we glimpse the competing theories of history and collective destiny by which power has been organized and contested in the United States. Capturing the excitement of the new field of "whiteness studies" and linking it to traditional historical inquiry, Jacobson shows that in this nation of immigrants "race" has been at the core of civic assimilation: ethnic minorities in becoming American were re-racialized to become…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
Every author writing about race and tax in the United States uses my article with William Whitford, “A Black Critique of the Internal Revenue Code.” Using census data, Bill and I showed that blacks and whites who earn the same income, live in the same geographic areas, have the same education and marital status, pay different amounts of federal income tax because of the race and wealth disparities outlined in Race and Wealth Disparities: A Multidisciplinary Discourse edited by Beverly Moran.
Critical Race Theory: An Introduction gives an overview of the authors who work in critical race theory and the problems they address. It is a classic put together by two of the most important authors in the field. A terrific way to ground yourself in the literature.
Updated to include the Black Lives Matter movement, the presidency of Barack Obama, the rise of hate speech on the Internet, and more
Since the publication of the first edition of Critical Race Theory in 2001, the United States has lived through two economic downturns, an outbreak of terrorism, and the onset of an epidemic of hate directed against immigrants, especially undocumented Latinos and Middle Eastern people. On a more hopeful note, the country elected and re-elected its first black president and has witnessed the impressive advance of gay rights.
As a field, critical race theory has taken note of…
I’ve been a liberal all my life: I went to my first protest march by myself when I was 13 and cast my first vote for George McGovern. I’ve also been an academic most of my life, studying and teaching at multiple colleges and universities. Over the last decade I’ve watched the animating principles of both academia and liberalism – the spirit of free inquiry and the willingness to debate ideas – descend into an authoritarian conformism that brooks no dissent. I hope that these books can persuade people to fight against these trends before it’s too late: “Do not go gentle into that good night; Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”
This book persuaded me that the “woke” movement (which McWhorter calls “Third Wave antiracism”) is not a political movement but a religion in the fullest sense of the term.
It has articles of faith and a common language, and it goes after heretics with the vengeance of the Spanish Inquisition. Since it’s a religion we can’t defeat it with arguments or reason. It’s also dangerous; as McWhorter writes: “Make no mistake: these people are coming after your kids.”
But he isn’t fatalistic or pessimistic. He gives specific, sensible suggestions for defeating the new religion andfor better ways of moving forward on racial equality. Two things make this book unique: McWhorter’s writing is a joy to read, and because he’s Black and politically liberal, he can’t be easily dismissed.
People of good will on both the left and the right are secretly asking themselves the same question: how has the conversation on race gone so crazy?
Bestselling author and acclaimed linguist John McWhorter argues that an illiberal neoracism, disguised as antiracism, is hurting black communities and weakening the social fabric.
We're told to read books and listen to music by people of colour but that wearing certain clothes is 'appropriation.' We hear that being white automatically gives you privilege and that being black makes you a victim. We want to speak up but fear we'll be seen as unwoke,…
As both an author and a teacher, I’ve been using Howard Zinn’s iconic book for over 20 years. I have found it to be an effective counterweight to more orthodox texts, as well as a credible platform for stimulating discussion. In writing my own “guide” to U.S. history, I always kept Zinn in mind. While we may not always agree, the dissonance is something I’m certain Howard Zinn would appreciate. He was unafraid to "engage" with his subject matter and his readers. This is an inspiration.
Coates’s semi-autobiographical examination of life for black men in American society, and more broadly in American history, is an education. Like Zinn, Coates calls America on the hypocrisy inherent in its highest ideals and its most cherished conceits.
As Coates himself later said about Zinn, "He knocked me on my ass." The two - while not always on the same page in their critical examinations of the American experiment, are clearly kindred spirits. They both want America to do better and clearly believe it can do better if it is honest about itself - but will it be? This is the question left ominously dangling by both Zinn and Coates.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT
Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” (Rolling Stone)
NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN •…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I was weaned on Cuban stories by my Havana-born mother and first visited the island in 1998. Since then, I earned a PhD in history from the Graduate Center, City University of New York–where I studied twentieth-century Cuban politics. While conducting research in Havana and Miami, I confirmed that legends were imbibed with the same fervor as café cubano.All histories are marked by tall tales, but Cubans are governed by theirs, inside and out, more than most.
This is only a biography in the loosest sense, one of Afro-Cubans from the year slavery was abolished until an ugly racial massacre that claimed thousands of innocent victims. In 1892, José Martí famously declared that “There is no racial hatred because there are no races.” The following year he wrongly predicted that “In Cuba, there will never be a racial war.” Cuba’s independence myth was founded on the idea that there would be no white or black Cubans, only Cubans. Yet in 1912, two Afro-Cuban politicians, Pedro Ivonet and Evaristo Estenoz, both veterans of Cuba’s independence struggle, some of their followers, and thousands of Afro-Cubans in the wrong place at the wrong time, were massacred in a frenzy of racial hatred.
In Our Rightful Share , Aline Helg examines the issue of race in Cuban society, politics, and ideology during the island's transition from a Spanish colony to an independent state. She challenges Cuba's well-established myth of racial equality and shows that racism is deeply rooted in Cuban creole society. Helg argues that despite Cuba's abolition of slavery in 1886 and its winning of independence in 1902, Afro-Cubans remained marginalized in all aspects of society. After the wars for independence, in which they fought en masse, Afro-Cubans demanded change politically by forming the first national black party in the Western Hemisphere.…
