RESOURCES

Recommended Readings

Ibram X. Kendi’s Recommendations’s Collection

BIOLOGY

Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

Dorothy Roberts

No book destabilized my fraught notions of racial distinction and hierarchy—the belief that each race had different genes, diseases and natural abilities—more than this vigorous critique of the “biopolitics of race.” Roberts, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, shows unequivocally that all people are indeed created equal, despite political and economic special interests that keep trying to persuade us otherwise. New Press, 2011

ETHNICITY

West Indian Immigrants: A Black Success Story?

Suzanne Model

Some of the same forces have led Americans to believe that the recent success of black immigrants from the Caribbean proves either that racism does not exist or that the gap between African-Americans and other groups in income and wealth is their own fault. But Model’s meticulous study, emphasizing the self-selecting nature of the West Indians who emigrate to the United States, argues otherwise, showing me, a native of racially diverse New York City, how such notions—the foundation of ethnic racism—are unsupported by the facts. Russell Sage Foundation, 2008

BODY
The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America
Khalil Gibran Muhammad

“Black” and “criminal” are as wedded in America as “star” and “spangled.” Muhammad’s book traces these ideas to the late 19th century, when racist policies led to the disproportionate arrest and incarceration of blacks, igniting urban whites’ fears and bequeathing tenaciously racist stereotypes. Harvard University, 2010

CULTURE
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston

Of course, the black body exists within a wider black culture—one Hurston portrayed with grace and insight in this seminal novel. She defies racist Americans who would standardize the cultures of white people or sanitize, eroticize, erase or assimilate those of blacks. 1937

BEHAVIOR
The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain
Langston Hughes

“We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,” Hughes wrote nearly 100 years ago. “We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.” We are all imperfectly human, and these imperfections are also markers of human equality.

COLOR
The Blacker the Berry
Wallace Thurman

Beautiful and hard-working black people come in all shades. If dark people have less it is not because they are less, a moral eloquently conveyed in these two classic novels, stirring explorations of colorism. 1970 | 1929

WHITENESS
Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland
Jonathan M. Metzl

Malcolm X began by adoring whiteness, grew to hate white people and, ultimately, despised the false concept of white superiority—a killer of people of color. And not only them: low- and middle-income white people too, as Metzl’s timely book shows, with its look at Trump-era policies that have unraveled the Affordable Care Act and contributed to rising gun suicide rates and lowered life expectancies. 1965

The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Malcolm X and Alex Haley

BLACKNESS
Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America
James Forman Jr.

Just as Metzl explains how seemingly pro-white policies are killing whites, Forman explains how blacks themselves abetted the mass incarceration of other blacks, beginning in the 1970s. Amid rising crime rates, black mayors, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs embraced tough-on-crime policies that they promoted as problack with tragic consequences for black America. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017 (Read the review.)

SPACES
Waiting ’til The Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America
Peniel E. Joseph

As racial capitalism deprives black communities of resources, assimilationists ignore or gentrify these same spaces in the name of “development” and “integration.” To be antiracist is not only to promote equity among racial groups, but also among their spaces, something the black power movement of the 1960s and 1970s understood well, as Joseph’s chronicle makes clear. Holt, 2006

GENDER
How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective Edited
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor