Here are 100 books that Racism without Racists fans have personally recommended if you like
Racism without Racists.
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I was born and raised in Nyack, New York, and all of my degrees are from colleges and universities in New York. I have always been interested in race relations in America and understanding their causes and consequences. Hope and despair are two themes that run through the experiences of people of African ancestry in America. The books I selected include fiction and nonfiction works that highlight promises made and promises unfulfilled.
I think WEB DuBois is one of the greatest scholars ever to live. I recommend this book because DuBois eloquently tackles some of American society's greatest challenges. I like that DuBois is not satisfied with contemporary explanations about racial inequities. I am grateful to DuBois for encouraging American society to explore the roles of race and racism and explaining the experiences of people of African ancestry in America.
The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches is a 1903 work of American literature by W. E. B. Du Bois. It is a seminal work in the history of sociology and a cornerstone of African-American literature.
The book contains several essays on race, some of which had been published earlier in The Atlantic Monthly. To develop this work, Du Bois drew from his own experiences as an African American in American society. Outside of its notable relevance in African-American history, The Souls of Black Folk also holds an important place in social science as one of the early works…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I was born and raised in Nyack, New York, and all of my degrees are from colleges and universities in New York. I have always been interested in race relations in America and understanding their causes and consequences. Hope and despair are two themes that run through the experiences of people of African ancestry in America. The books I selected include fiction and nonfiction works that highlight promises made and promises unfulfilled.
I love Toni Morrison's works and consider her one of my favorite authors. I would argue, as others have, that Morrison is one of the greatest American writers ever. I appreciate that the characters in all of her books, including this one, are always dynamic. I also appreciate how Morrison shares the main characters' traumas, tragedies, and triumphs.
'Extravagantly beautiful... Enormously, achingly alive... A howl of love and rage, playful and funny as well as hard and bitter' New York Times
As young girls, Nel and Sula shared each other's secrets and dreams in the poor black mid-West of their childhood. Then Sula ran away to live her dreams and Nel got married.
Ten years later Sula returns and no one, least of all Nel, trusts her. Sula is a story of fear - the fear that traps us, justifying itself through perpetual myth and legend. Cast as a witch by the people who resent her strength, Sula…
I was born and raised in Nyack, New York, and all of my degrees are from colleges and universities in New York. I have always been interested in race relations in America and understanding their causes and consequences. Hope and despair are two themes that run through the experiences of people of African ancestry in America. The books I selected include fiction and nonfiction works that highlight promises made and promises unfulfilled.
I found this book to be life-changing. No good books have explained racial wealth inequality in America for years. This book changed that oversight. I love how the book calls upon its readers to think beyond income as a measure of economic equality and consider wealth. It plainly shows the causes and consequences of racial wealth inequality in America. I am glad that the book offers some recommendations for narrowing the gap but is also realistic about the related challenges.
The award-winning Black Wealth / White Wealth offers a powerful portrait of racial inequality based on an analysis of private wealth. Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro's groundbreaking research analyzes wealth - total assets and debts rather than income alone - to uncover deep and persistent racial inequality in America, and they show how public policies have failed to redress the problem.
First published in 1995, Black Wealth / White Wealth is considered a classic exploration of race and inequality. It provided, for the first time, systematic empirical evidence that explained the racial inequality gap between blacks and whites. The Tenth…
Everyday Medical Miracles
by
Joseph S. Sanfilippo (editor),
Frontiers of Women from the healthcare perspective. A compilation of 60 true short stories written by an extensive array of healthcare providers, physicians, and advanced practice providers.
All designed to give you, the reader, a glimpse into the day-to-day activities of all of us who provide your health care. Come…
I was born and raised in Nyack, New York, and all of my degrees are from colleges and universities in New York. I have always been interested in race relations in America and understanding their causes and consequences. Hope and despair are two themes that run through the experiences of people of African ancestry in America. The books I selected include fiction and nonfiction works that highlight promises made and promises unfulfilled.
I am so glad Dr. Glaude continues the tradition of encouraging Americans to hold a mirror up to themselves in Democracy in America and ask whether there is a gap between what we value as a society and how we treat people. I find the book very accessible to people from diverse backgrounds. This book is not written with scholars or college students in mind but for anyone who wants to understand better what democracy has, can, and could look like.
A powerful polemic on the state of black America that savages the idea of a post-racial society.
America’s great promise of equality has always rung hollow in the ears of African Americans. But today the situation has grown even more dire. From the murders of black youth by the police, to the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, to the disaster visited upon poor and middle-class black families by the Great Recession, it is clear that black America faces an emergency—at the very moment the election of the first black president has prompted many to believe we’ve solved America’s race…
I go by the title AmericanStudier in my public scholarship and take that name very seriously. I believe nothing is more important for our future than better remembering our past and that pushing the nation toward its most inspiring ideals requires grappling with our hardest and most painful histories. On my AmericanStudies blog, in my Saturday Evening Post Considering History column, and in all my other scholarly, public, and social media content, I am committed to sharing our histories and stories, figures and works, voices, and writing in all forms and for all audiences. I hope you’ll join me in this work by reading and sharing these great books!
There have been Asian Americans for as long as there’s been an America, and indeed in places like California Asian communities were there before the United States was.
That’s just one of the countless surprising and crucial lessons that I first learned from Takaki’s sweeping and magisterial history of the U.S., and every time I dip back into this book, I learn something new about where we’ve been, who we are, and what we can be if we better remember all of our communities and stories.
I am inspired every day by what Takaki accomplished and shared and what his book helps us understand.
Ronald Takaki's "brilliant revisionist history of America" (Publishers Weekly) is a landmark work of American history retells American history from the bottom up, through the lives of many minorities - Native Americans, African Americans, Jewish Americans, Irish Americans, Asian Americans, Latino Americans, and others - who helped create this country's mighty economy and rich mosaic culture. A Different Mirror brilliantly illuminates our country's defining strengths as it reveals America as a nation peopled by the world.
I grew up in an immigrant household where success was defined by how much money you made and your individual progress. But I’ve always been fascinated by social change as the measure of collective success. As a former business journalist, I was most inspired by leaders who were creating opportunities for overlooked communities. I now advise organization leaders on how to create more inclusive and diverse organizations by rethinking the measure of success purely from the profit perspective. That’s why I wrote Inclusion on Purpose. These books have helped me transform my definition of success. I hope you’re catalyzed to action by these books!
At a time when so many of us feel helpless while navigating various social crises, Ijeoma’s latest book highlights amazing leaders who are literally creating revolutionary social change. She interviews leaders tackling issues from the prison industrial complex to how we spend money more intentionally.
After reading this book, I felt like I, too, could “be” a change. I felt inspired to believe that my success, and the success of the world, depends on the everyday revolutionary acts of anti-racism we can (and should) all commit to.
While I loved the interviews with each changemaker, it was reading how Ijeoma’s approach from pain and trauma to action evolved throughout the book that really drove the message home.
From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of So You Want to Talk About Race and Mediocre, an eye-opening and galvanizing look at the current state of anti-racist activism across America.
In the #1 New York Times bestseller So You Want To Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo offered a vital guide for how to talk about important issues of race and racism in society. In Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, she discussed the ways in which white male supremacy has had an impact on our systems, our culture, and our lives throughout American history. But…
Odette Lefebvre is a serial killer stalking the shadows of Nazi-occupied Paris and must confront both the evils of those she murders and the darkness of her own past.
This young woman's childhood trauma shapes her complex journey through World War II France, where she walks a razor's edge…
Errick Nunnally was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, and served one tour in the Marine Corps before deciding art school was a safer pursuit. He enjoys art, comics, and genre novels. A graphic designer, he has trained in Krav Maga and Muay Thai kickboxing. His work has appeared in several anthologies of speculative fiction. His work can be found in Apex Magazine, Fiyah Magazine, Galaxy’s Edge, Lamplight, Nightlight Podcast, and the novels, Lightning Wears a Red Cape, Blood for the Sun, and All the Dead Men.
Here is a book about history that is horrific, often referenced, and not as fully understood as it should be. It’s about entire towns erased from existence or whole segments of a population violently displaced in one night. Full of terrifying tales, the author began looking into the subject thinking there’d be several historical incidents and instead found too many to include in the book. It is a harrowing accounting of racial cleansing right here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. and a potent reminder of how this country operated well into the twentieth century. Again, this sort of thing is good background to inform my character’s current attitude and makes for ripe pickings in flashbacks or background stories.
Leave now, or die!" Those words-or ones just as ominous-have echoed through the past hundred years of American history, heralding a very unnatural disaster-a wave of racial cleansing that wiped out or drove away black populations from counties across the nation. While we have long known about horrific episodes of lynching in the South, this story of racial cleansing has remained almost entirely unknown. These expulsions, always swift and often violent, were extraordinarily widespread in the period between Reconstruction and the Depression era. In the heart of the Midwest and the Deep South, whites rose up in rage, fear, and…
I grew up in New York City listening to my parents’ stories of extreme hardship and suffering during the Nazi occupation of their native Greece—and the courageous resistance they and many Greeks mounted. I’m outraged by the unfairness of extreme poverty in the midst of plenty and motivated to fight for economic justice. In the early 1980s, as homelessness was first becoming a crisis, I got involved in legal advocacy to address it, first as a volunteer lawyer and then as a full-time advocate. I believe housing is a human right and that no one should be homeless in a country as rich as the US.
This was an eye-opening book for me. It makes clear that the US government has pursued a deliberate policy of racism in housing: it’s no accident that housing insecurity generally—and homelessness specifically—so disproportionately affects Black Americans.
It showed me that the deliberate policy choices I had witnessed first-hand that caused and exacerbated homelessness were part of larger systemic problems not just of poverty and inequality but also racial discrimination. As a lawyer, the focus on legal stories appealed to me, but it’s written in a way that I think will engage anyone interested in basic questions of social justice.
Widely heralded as a "masterful" (The Washington Post) and "essential" (Slate) history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law offers "the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation" (William Julius Wilson). Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced…
As a product of a Methodist preacher and a public school teacher, I learned about community early on. Church basements and living rooms were where I first saw what it means to show up for one another. My grandmother's faith steadied our family in uncertain times, and those lessons shaped me. In my career, I've had the privilege of working in South Africa, organizing in communities across the country, and serving in the White House. Each experience deepened my understanding of how fragile—and how powerful—our institutions can be. I’m drawn to books that wrestle with how we hold community together because I’ve learned that communities don’t hold themselves. We choose whether they endure.
I grew up with his voice reverberating in our home and in my ears. The question he asks in this book—chaos or community—never felt theoretical to me. It felt like a choice we were living inside of.
I return to this book over and over because it reminds me that community is not automatic. It requires courage, sacrifice, and structure. More than half a century later, the questions he posed still confront us — as urgent now as then.
The final book by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in which we find we an acute analysis of American race relations and the state of the movement after a decade of civil rights efforts.
"In this book—his last grand expression of his vision—he put forward his most prophetic challenge to powers that be and his most progressive program for the wretched of the earth."—Cornel West
In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., isolated himself, rented a house in Jamaica with no telephone,, and labored over his final manuscript. In this significantly prophetic work, we find King’s acute analysis of American…
Can a free-spirited country girl navigate the world of intrigue, illicit affairs, and power-mongering that is the court of Louis XIV—the Sun King--and still keep her head?
France, 1670. Sixteen-year-old Sylvienne d’Aubert receives an invitation to attend the court of King Louis XIV. She eagerly accepts, unaware of her mother’s…
The children and young people who call the U.S. home are increasingly diverse on almost every imaginable identifier. Over the past decade, educators have grown more committed to meeting the distinct needs and potential of every child. This list of books provides insights into why people are so virulently opposed to Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI).
As educational equity researchers and professors, we believe that understanding the recent attacks on DEI is important because it gives readers insights into the longer tradition of opposition to civil rights, equality, and justice for all people. If we can understand the past, we can be prepared to not repeat it.
In 2020, Christopher Rufo launched a media campaign to discredit the rising wave of racial consciousness, honest conversations about U.S. racism, and broad political, business, and education commitments to creating a more racially equitable society.
To do that, he lumped all attempts at making racial progress under the broad umbrella of Critical Race Theory. Unfortunately, he never provided his audience with a truthful explanation of what Critical Race Theory is all about.
Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well is an essential Critical Race Theory book. It uses historical fiction and satirical allegories to help readers understand that racism is an integral feature of American history and life and that most attempts to eradicate racism, however well-intentioned, do little to make society a better place for people who are not white.
The noted civil rights activist uses allegory and historical example to present a radical vision of the persistence of racism in America. These essays shed light on some of the most perplexing and vexing issues of our day: affirmative action, the disparity between civil rights law and reality, the racist outbursts of some black leaders, the temptation toward violent retaliation, and much more.
