100 Books Like Don't Label Me

The Oxford (and, later, Cambridge) literature scholar looks out at the shifting cultural landscape of post-war Britain in the late 1940s and prophesies the postmodern future we now inhabit. It is one of Lewis’s lesser-known volumes (he is the author of the Chronicles of Narnia and bestselling religious books such as Mere Christianity) and one of the shortest.

But this book packs a powerful punch that I have used in teaching law students about our culture three generations after Lewis wrote it. Why are people so confused about morality today and yet so strident in their opinions? Lewis helped me see why, as few others have.

This is a book, but it was also a fabulous TV series. I first read the book when I was trying to make a living as a freelance writer. I couldn’t afford to buy it, so I went to a different bookstore every day and read it through. (I have since bought myself a copy.)

Hughes traces the art of the 20th century following movements like Cubism and Dadaism. I found this book so engrossing because Hughes really takes on the idea that this art was made by people who thought it could change the world, that it could shape the world. Even if we’re not so sure of the function of art in our own time, it is exhilarating to read about the art that was created with such fervour. 

Political scientists don’t always write with verve and insight, but the late Glenn Tinder did. This book takes the ever-challenging theme of liberty and shows me how to understand it as more than an Independence Day slogan.

Tinder provoked me to consider how my freedom should be about more than me but used instead to assist others less resourced than I am. I found this book a refreshing change from the selfish agenda of so many authors writing about liberty and freedom without also considering responsibility and community.

This Black American scholar courageously confronts some of the myths that continue to dominate higher education in the United States (and, I daresay, here in Canada as well). He shows how even well-meaning programs of affirmative action and lofty ideals of justice and equality sometimes show up as heavy-handed enforcement of the preferred ideals of the controlling academic elites.

I myself have run afoul of those elites on occasion, and Yancey’s calm, well-evidenced scholarship confirms my bitter experience. He exposes the iron grip of political correctness on campus and offers reasonable, practical advice as to how to negotiate it—for professors and students alike. 

This book came out a few months before mine, and I thought it landed as the first book written by theologically conservative people taking Critical Race Theory seriously as a lens and analytical tool without getting hung up on it as a worldview.

They look through an intensely biblical lens themselves and see CRT for what it is: a way of interpreting racial power dynamics in a broken world. I don’t think it a stretch to suggest they get us to look at CRT through Jesus’ eyes, placing it in a biblical context large enough to grasp not only what theorists want us to see but also helping us transcend their usually limited secular answers and solutions.

I thought it successfully combined both the academic and the pastoral—rare in books like this—and helped me think about the implications of looking at the world through a lens I don’t normally have… show more.

Muhammad’s study of ideas and discourse about real and imagined crime among African Americans is a touchstone for anyone seeking to understand this history.

He has painstakingly assembled the intellectual, pseudo-scientific, and popular conversations Americans had about the subject from the end of slavery until well into the 20th century.

This work has been particularly important for me because he brings our attention to the urban North and the use of census data, statistics, eugenics, etc., to condemn blackness as a dangerous threat to be contained.

There is no way to truthfully understand race and crime in America without consulting this essential text. 

The fact that African-American men are funneled through the justice system at rates that dwarf every other demographic does not reflect a flaw in the system. Rather, it is the system, functioning as designed. With that revolutionary thesis, Michelle Alexander upended everything I thought I understood about race and crime. 

In this ground-breaking volume, she dared me to see what was right before my eyes all the time: not simply that criminal justice in this country is deeply unfair but rather that it functions as a way of re-imposing upon black men a defacto Jim Crow sixty years after the original was sent slinking away into the dustbin of history.

When I read Gilbert King’s story of the ruination of four Black men based on charges they raped a white woman in the 1950s, I had to check King’s background. He won my admiration for going from small-town newspapers and photography work to tell this epic story of Thurgood Marshall-style justice.  

The story itself will rip you apart as the Southern sheriff “interrogates” these men in inhumane ways. I live just an hour’s drive from where this all went down and I am so grateful to King for helping me better understand the depths of our warped system of justice. The fact the book won a Pulitzer shouldn’t be a surprise. The fact that it led the town of Groveland to posthumously exonerate the men should be one. 

For months, Asian women in Oakland, CA, reported a nonstop stream of harassment and muggings by local youth. The problem: their harassers were Black. In a lineup, the women couldn't identify their attackers, and they walked free. To counter this, women in the community received cross-racial training...which failed. The robberies stopped when cameras were installed and the police didn't need a victim to ID anymore. Eberhardt’s book is full of gems like this, smart snippets of life, and the innate biases that run it. This smart examination of cognitive biases goes further than pointing out how racial biases influence criminal justice — it also offers some solutions, especially for unconscious prejudices. These take the form of unconscious bias training, and forcing people to deal with uncomfortable subjects.

People often believe that algorithms are neutral. This book does a wonderful job of showing that this is a wrong belief. Through numerous examples it reveals how algorithms perpetuate and sometimes intensify racial and gender stereotypes.

I found this book to be very thought-provoking, particularly when it comes to the power of algorithms to deepen social inequalities. It presents a major problem that we increasingly face today, as people rely on AI algorithms, but it also offers some possible remedies through education and legislation.