Here are 100 books that Working Toward Whiteness fans have personally recommended if you like
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America is the greatest ideal in history: “all men are created equal…” Sadly, Americans have never quite lived up to America. Only twice (Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement) have they even tried. As a black man, I live daily with the fruit of that failure, so I have an obvious personal investment in the subject. But I’m also drawn intellectually by an appalled fascination with the idea that any human beings can believe themselves superior by dint of their paint job or religion, or sex organs, or how they choose to use said sex organs. Why are we like this? That question has long vexed my reading and writing.
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.
In a bold and innovative argument, a rising legal star shows readers how the mass incarceration of a disproportionate number of black men amounts to a devastating system of racial control. This is a terrifying reality that exists in the UK as much as in the US. Despite the triumphant dismantling of the Jim Crow laws, the system that once forced African-Americans into a segregated second-class citizenship still haunts and the criminal justice system still unfairly targets black men and deprives an entire segment of the population of their basic rights.
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…
America is the greatest ideal in history: “all men are created equal…” Sadly, Americans have never quite lived up to America. Only twice (Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement) have they even tried. As a black man, I live daily with the fruit of that failure, so I have an obvious personal investment in the subject. But I’m also drawn intellectually by an appalled fascination with the idea that any human beings can believe themselves superior by dint of their paint job or religion, or sex organs, or how they choose to use said sex organs. Why are we like this? That question has long vexed my reading and writing.
There are other books on African-American history, some arguably even more authoritative. But this was the only one that felt to me as if the writer had dipped his pen in fire.
Lerone Bennett, Jr., traces African-American passages from the great kingdoms of early Africa through the 1619 encounter with Jamestown settlers that changed everything, up until (depending on which edition you read) about the middle 1980s and does so with a fierce moral urgency and poetic passion that drew me into the story and, more to the point, that implanted the story into me.
Traces black history from its origins in western Africa, through the transatlantic journey and slavery, the Reconstruction period, the Jim Crow era, and the civil rights movement, to life in the 1990s. Reprint. 35,000 first printing. $20,000 ad/promo.
America is the greatest ideal in history: “all men are created equal…” Sadly, Americans have never quite lived up to America. Only twice (Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement) have they even tried. As a black man, I live daily with the fruit of that failure, so I have an obvious personal investment in the subject. But I’m also drawn intellectually by an appalled fascination with the idea that any human beings can believe themselves superior by dint of their paint job or religion, or sex organs, or how they choose to use said sex organs. Why are we like this? That question has long vexed my reading and writing.
This book breaks my heart. It covers the African-American experience in the postbellum years and into the early 20th Century. This was a time when the country might have chosen–and fleetingly seemed as if it would choose–to finally live up to its founding ideals.
Instead, the country chose another path, and Leon F. Litwack chronicles that path–mob violence, electoral intimidation, and official government indifference–in brutal color and unsparing detail. This is one of those books that makes me think of what might have been.
A searing history of life under Jim Crow that recalls the bloodiest and most repressive period in the history of race relations in the United States—and the painful record of discrimination that haunts us to this day. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Been in the Storm So Long.
"The stain of Jim Crow runs deep in 20th-century America.... Its effects remain the nation's most pressing business. Trouble in Mind is an absolutely essential account of its dreadful history and calamitous legacy." —The Washington Post
In April 1899, Black laborer Sam Hose killed his white boss in self-defense. Wrongly accused…
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…
America is the greatest ideal in history: “all men are created equal…” Sadly, Americans have never quite lived up to America. Only twice (Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement) have they even tried. As a black man, I live daily with the fruit of that failure, so I have an obvious personal investment in the subject. But I’m also drawn intellectually by an appalled fascination with the idea that any human beings can believe themselves superior by dint of their paint job or religion, or sex organs, or how they choose to use said sex organs. Why are we like this? That question has long vexed my reading and writing.
My God, the way this man writes. There is an unforced elegance to his sentence structure and word choice that never fails to leave me with my metaphoric mouth agape, whether I’m nodding along with his arguments or, as sometimes happens, debating with him in my head.
Either way, Ta-Nehisi Coates is a clear-eyed and unsentimental observer of the hypocrisies, betrayals, and stubborn resilience that have characterized the African-American sojourn.
'I've been wondering who might fill the intellectual void after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates' Toni Morrison
'Searing. One of the foremost essayists on race in the West... [He] is responsible for some of the most important writing about what it is to be black in America today' Nikesh Shukla, editor of The Good Immigrant
An essential account of modern America, from Obama to Trump, from black lives matter to white supremacists rising - by the bestselling author of Between the World and Me
Obama's presidency was a watershed moment in American…
By Laura Hooton, Paul Spickard, and Francisco BeltránAuthor
Why are we passionate about this?
Paul Spickard wrote the first edition of Almost All Aliens. He invited Francisco Beltrán and Laura Hooton, who worked under Dr. Spickard at UC Santa Barbara, to co-author the second edition after working as research assistants and providing suggestions for the second edition. We are all historians of race, ethnicity, immigration, colonialism, and identity, and in our other works and teaching we each think about these topics in different ways. We did the same for this list—this is a list of five books that talk about topics that are important to Almost All Aliens and approaches that have been influential in how we think about the topic.
This book offers a great introduction to readers on the connection between race and immigration in the United States. Erika Lee shows how race has shaped understandings of identity, citizenship, and belonging from the colonial era to the present. She argues there is an often racialized definition of America and Americanness, which has led to the marginalization and exclusion of immigrants from all corners of the globe throughout United States history.
This definitive history of American xenophobia is "essential reading for anyone who wants to build a more inclusive society" (Ibram X. Kendi, New York Times-bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist).
The United States is known as a nation of immigrants. But it is also a nation of xenophobia. In America for Americans, Erika Lee shows that an irrational fear, hatred, and hostility toward immigrants has been a defining feature of our nation from the colonial era to the Trump era. Benjamin Franklin ridiculed Germans for their "strange and foreign ways." Americans' anxiety over Irish Catholics turned xenophobia into…
I lived in sixteen places by the time I was twenty-two. A peripatetic youth may teach you that different is interesting, that stereotypes don’t hold, that the emperor has no clothes. When I moved South and worked as a journalist, I found black elders’ stories so different from the official stories of white authorities. Horrified that these men and women would die with their heroism untold, I interviewed more than 150 black activists for Stories of Struggle. I want to know what is missing; I want it found. Like a detective, an anthropologist, a scientist, and yes, a journalist, I want to know, and I want others to know.
The History of White People tracks the creation of race as a fact, rather than an idea or social construct, and of Anglo-Saxon whiteness, for the free male, as a promise of power and supremacy.
Nell Irvin Painter, a Princeton professor of American history, emerita, begins with Greek historians and Roman conquerors BCE, who thought not of race but of place, the highlands and lowlands shaping appearance and temperament.
Along the way, Rome’s scrubbed-up copies of Greek statuary become the ideal for beauty, and skin colors and skull measurements become a way to rank superiority. Painter traces the United States’ enslavement of Africans, slaughter of Native Americans, eugenics, endorsement of male brutality (Ralph Waldo Emerson! Teddy Roosevelt!), and race-oriented immigration control: all play a role in whiteness.
Telling perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history, eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter guides us through more than two thousand years of Western civilization, illuminating not only the invention of race but also the frequent praise of "whiteness" for economic, scientific, and political ends. A story filled with towering historical figures, The History of White People closes a huge gap in literature that has long focused on the non-white and forcefully reminds us that the concept of "race" is an all-too-human invention whose meaning, importance, and reality have changed as it has been driven by a long and…
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…
By Laura Hooton, Paul Spickard, and Francisco BeltránAuthor
Why are we passionate about this?
Paul Spickard wrote the first edition of Almost All Aliens. He invited Francisco Beltrán and Laura Hooton, who worked under Dr. Spickard at UC Santa Barbara, to co-author the second edition after working as research assistants and providing suggestions for the second edition. We are all historians of race, ethnicity, immigration, colonialism, and identity, and in our other works and teaching we each think about these topics in different ways. We did the same for this list—this is a list of five books that talk about topics that are important to Almost All Aliens and approaches that have been influential in how we think about the topic.
A focused examination of the relation between race and immigration in the United States, Natalia Molina looks at the effect of racialized immigration views and policies on Mexican migrants during the first half of the twentieth century. Her theory of racial scripts, she argues, is the product of race-based views of American identity. A must-read for scholars of immigration and race, especially for understanding how racialization of one group can occur and impact others across United States history.
How Race Is Made in America examines Mexican Americans--from 1924, when American law drastically reduced immigration into the United States, to 1965, when many quotas were abolished--to understand how broad themes of race and citizenship are constructed. These years shaped the emergence of what Natalia Molina describes as an immigration regime, which defined the racial categories that continue to influence perceptions in the United States about Mexican Americans, race, and ethnicity. Molina demonstrates that despite the multiplicity of influences that help shape our concept of race, common themes prevail. Examining legal, political, social, and cultural sources related to immigration, she…
As a refugee myself, I was attracted to read about the lives and experiences of other refugees, not merely those from my own community or background, but especially those from other backgrounds–which is probably reflected in the books that I’ve chosen for my list.
I so easily identified with the lead character, Salim, who is caught between two cultures–his country of origin, Zanzibar, and his adopted country, England.
The author provides detailed and satisfying descriptions of Zanzibar in the 1960s and of London in the 1990s, portraying effectively how he is pulled by both and yet part of both. He confronts the vexed questions of ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Where is home?’
The colourful description of life in a Zanzibar village is delightful, reminding me so much of Mombasa, where I was born, especially as both places share the language, Kiswahili–which I still remember!
By the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature
'The elegance and control of Gurnah's writing, and his understanding of how quietly and slowly and repeatedly a heart can break, make this a deeply rewarding novel' Kamila Shamsie, Guardian
________________________
For seven-year-old Salim, the pillars upholding his small universe - his indifferent father, his adored uncle, his treasured books, the daily routines of government school and Koran lessons - seem unshakeable.
But it is the 1970s, and the winds of change are blowing through Zanzibar: suddenly Salim's father is gone, and the island convulses with violence and corruption the…
My love for wildlife has produced several award-winning nonfiction books about animals for children (bats, lizards, dragonflies, hummingbirds, and more). To observe wildlife, I travel often to wild areas, such as the Amazon, Galapagos Island, the Pantanal. A former full professor at Miami Dade College, I taught Creative Writing, English Composition, and Survey of Children’s Literature and was an adviser to the college’s award-winning literary magazine. My children’s nonfiction picture books about wild animals have won several awards: Silver Eureka for nonfiction, Silver Nautilus, two Bronze Florida Book Awards, and a Purple Dragonfly honor. Born in Brazil, I have lived in Miami for most of my life.
This past year, I have been fascinated by butterflies, and especially the monarchs and their utterly magnificent flights of migration. But there are other books about monarch butterflies, so why this one? It is a story, fictitious admittedly, about how a group of children with passion and love for nature and butterflies face a growing problem using grassroots activism. It is based on what children and communities are doing to help butterflies all over the country and on the real issue of the decline of the monarch butterfly. It is sure to inspire the budding environmental activist.
Butterflies Belong Here is a powerful story of everyday activism and hope.
In this moving story of community conservation, a girl finds a home in a new place and a way to help other small travelers.
This book is about the real change children can make in conservation and advocacy-in this case, focusing on beautiful monarch butterflies.
* From Deborah Hopkinson and Meilo So, the acclaimed team behind Follow the Moon Home
* An empowering, classroom-ready read
* The protagonist is a girl whose family has recently immigrated to the United States.
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…
The refugee story is deeply rooted in my family, as my (great-/) grandparents fled Europe for a safer life in America. I grew up listening to their stories of escape and trying to integrate in their new land. Human rights were also a focus of my graduate studies – and later in founding the Human Rights Watch Committee NL and joining the Save the Children Board of Trustees. I am a writer and poet, Board member, and former strategy consultant who always wanted to write refugee stories for children. Their stories are difficult. But children should understand that although the world is not always safe or fair, there is always hope.
A non-fiction picture book that reads like poetry, this gorgeous book describes the author’s own journey from Mexico to the U.S. with her young son. The illustrations are as poetic as the language, which infuses English with Spanish words, simple words with more challenging ones, and words of pain with those of pride, resilience, and creativity. The book explores not only the refugee’s journey, but also, and most especially, the challenges and small victories of integrating and trying to make a new life in a new land. I also love the central role that books, words, and libraries play in paving the way toward this new life. Language is power, but it is also magic.
4
authors picked
Dreamers
as one of their favorite books, and they share
why you should read it.
This book is for kids age
4,
5,
6, and
7.
What is this book about?
We are resilience. We are hope. We are dreamers.
Yuyi Morales brought her hopes, her passion, her strength, and her stories with her, when she came to the United States in 1994 with her infant son. She left behind nearly everything she owned, but she didn't come empty-handed.
Dreamers is a celebration of making your home with the things you always carry: your resilience, your dreams, your hopes and history. It's the story of finding your way in a new place, of navigating an unfamiliar world and finding the best parts of it. In dark times, it's a promise that…
