These books are listed in no particular order. Check them out as you feel led. We are adding more all the time; to add others that you have found interesting send to us including a brief description. And, of course, let us know if any no longer are relevant.

For a list of 100 Must-Read African-American Books go here

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Stop Asking People of Color to Explain Racism- Pick Up One of These Books Instead;  For  a reccommended book list from  Scary Mommy go here

White Utopias: The Religious Exoticism of Transformational Festivals

by Amanda J. Lucia

Transformational festivals, from Burning Man to Lightning in a Bottle, Bhakti Fest, and Wanderlust, are massive events that attract thousands of participants to sites around the world. In this groundbreaking book, Amanda J. Lucia shows how these festivals operate as religious institutions for “spiritual, but not religious” (SBNR) communities. Whereas previous research into SBNR practices and New Age religion has not addressed the predominantly white makeup of these communities, White Utopias examines the complicated, often contradictory relationships with race at these events, presenting an engrossing ethnography of SBNR practices. Lucia contends that participants create temporary utopias through their shared commitments to spiritual growth and human connection. But they also participate in religious exoticism by adopting Indigenous and Indic spiritualities, a practice that ultimately renders them exclusive, white utopias. Focusing on yoga’s role in disseminating SBNR values, Lucia offers new ways of comprehending transformational festivals as significant cultural phenomena.

The Demise of the Inhuman:   Afrocentricity, Modernism, and Postmodernism

by Ana Monteiro-Ferreira

Afrocentricity is the most intellectually dominant idea in the African world, one that is having a growing impact on social science discourse. This paradigm, philosophically rooted in African cultures and values, fundamentally challenges major epistemological traditions in Western thought, such as modernism and postmodernism, Marxism, existentialism, feminism, and postcolonialism. In The Demise of the Inhuman, Ana Monteiro-Ferreira reviews what Molefi Kete Asante has called the “infrastructures of dominance and privilege,” arguing that Western concepts such as individualism, colonialism, race and ethnicity, universalism, and progress, are insufficient to overcome various forms of oppression. Afrocentricity, she argues, can help lead us beyond Western structures of thought that have held sway since the early fifteenth century, towards a new epistemological framework that will enable a more human humanity.

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Afrocentricity and the Academy;  Essays on  Theory and Practice

by James L. Conyers Jr. (Editor)

Afrocentricity is a philosophical and theoretical perspective that emphasizes the study of Africans as subjects, not as objects, and is opposed to perspectives that attempt to marginalize African thought and experience. Afrocentricity became popular in the l980s as scores of African American and African scholars adopted an Afrocentric orientation to information. The editor of this collection argues that as scholars embark upon the 21st century, they can no longer be myopic in their perceptions and analyses of race. The seventeen essays examine a wide range of variations on the Afrocentric paradigm in the areas of history, literature, political science, philosophy, economics, women’s studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies and social policy. The essays, written by professors, librarians, students and others in higher education who have embraced the Afrocentric perspective, are divided into four sections: “Pedagogy and Implementation,” “Theoretical Assessment,” “Critical Analysis,” and “Pan Africanist Thought.”

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Afrocentric Thought and Praxis:  An Intellectual History

by Cecil Conteen Gray

This book aims to show that the intellectual and activist/transformationist tradition of African people all over the world is a composite one, which transcends geographical, religious, language, and other apparent differences. Furthermore, this book explains that this composite African intellectual and activist/transformationist tradition consists of a great and high standard. Gray’s primary intent is to clarify and define the history of African-centered thought and its external and internal praxis, thereby offering an evaluative and creative tool for codifying it to fit present and future directions. By functioning as an intellectual and practical bridge, this compelling book aims to assist African people in their historical-intellectual and practical-transformational journey from where they are to where they need to be and from current realms of humanness and harmony to ever higher and deeper realms of humanness and harmony. “Dr. Gray has provided an invaluable contribution to the continuing development of the field of Africana Studies. His comprehensive and lucid examination of Afrocentric thought and praxis not only demystifies the basic constructs undergirding the field, but also persuasively rebuts the criticisms offered by various Eurocentric writers. The synthesis of key concepts developed by various authors into ‘The Gray Template’ is a concrete example of the process of ‘discipline building.’ The instructional value of Gray’s work is significantly enhanced by the careful use of examples of Afrocentric praxis to complement the discussion of theoretical principles. This book is destined to become a standard in the field.” — James B. Stewart Professor of African and AfricanAmerican Studies Penn State University President, National Council for Black Studies “While the west celebrated the arrival of the second millennium on January 1, 2000, I celebrated with the Egyptians the coming of the seventh millennium at the great Giza Pyramids. The centralness of Africa and Africans living in those five ‘missing’ millennia of human history and human achievement has its uncompromising advocates brilliantly presented and explicated in Dr. Gray’s Afrocentric Thought and Praxis. This treatise comes at a time when so much of the Europe-apologia Black scholarship on Africa still confines itself to the Christian era. A must read, particularly for Africans throughout the Diaspora.” — David G. Du Bois President, W.E.B. Du Bois Foundation Amherst, Massachusetts

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The Whiteness of Wealth:  How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans—and How We Can Fix It

by Dorothy A. Brown

Dorothy A. Brown became a tax lawyer to get away from race. As a young black girl growing up in the South Bronx, she’d seen how racism limited the lives of her family and neighbors. Her law school classes offered a refreshing contrast: Tax law was about numbers, and the only color that mattered was green. But when Brown sat down to prepare tax returns for her parents, she found something strange: James and Dottie Brown, a plumber and a nurse, seemed to be paying an unusually high percentage of their income in taxes. When Brown became a law professor, she set out to understand why. In The Whiteness of Wealth, Brown draws on decades of cross-disciplinary research to show that tax law isn’t as color-blind as she’d once believed. She takes us into her adopted city of Atlanta, introducing us to families across the economic spectrum whose stories demonstrate how American tax law rewards the preferences and practices of white people while pushing black people further behind. From attending college to getting married to buying a home, black Americans find themselves at a financial disadvantage compared to their white peers. The results are an ever-increasing wealth gap and more black families shut out of the American dream. Solving the problem will require a wholesale rethinking of America’s tax code. But it will also require both black and white Americans to make different choices. This urgent, actionable book points the way forward.

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Better, not Bitter:  Living on Purpose in the Pursuit of Racial Justice

by Yusef Salaam

They didn’t know who they had. So begins Yusef Salaam telling his story. No one’s life is the sum of the worst things that happened to them, and during Yusef Salaam’s seven years of wrongful incarceration as one of the Central Park Five, he grew from child to man, and gained a spiritual perspective on life. Yusef learned that we’re all “born on purpose, with a purpose.” Despite having confronted the racist heart of America while being “run over by the spiked wheels of injustice,” Yusef channeled his energy and pain into something positive, not just for himself but for other marginalized people and communities. Better Not Bitter is the first time that one of the now Exonerated Five is telling his individual story, in his own words. Yusef writes his narrative: growing up Black in central Harlem in the ’80s, being raised by a strong, fierce mother and grandmother, his years of incarceration, his reentry, and exoneration. Yusef connects these stories to lessons and principles he learned that gave him the power to survive through the worst of life’s experiences. He inspires readers to accept their own path, to understand their own sense of purpose. With his intimate personal insights, Yusef unpacks the systems built and designed for profit and the oppression of Black and Brown people. He inspires readers to channel their fury into action, and through the spiritual, to turn that anger and trauma into a constructive force that lives alongside accountability and mobilizes change. This memoir is an inspiring story that grew out of one of the gravest miscarriages of justice, one that not only speaks to a moment in time or the rage-filled present, but reflects a 400-year history of a nation’s inability to be held accountable for its sins. Yusef Salaam’s message is vital for our times, a motivating resource for enacting change. Better, Not Bitter has the power to soothe, inspire and transform. It is a galvanizing call to action.

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 Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America

  by Ijeoma Oluo

After the election of Donald Trump, and the escalation of white male rage and increased hostility toward immigrants that came with him, New York Times-bestselling author Ijeoma Oluo found herself in conversation with Americans around the country, pondering one central question: How did we get here? In this ambitious survey of the last century of American history, Oluo answers that question by pinpointing white men’s deliberate efforts to subvert women, people of color, and the disenfranchised. Through research, interviews, and the powerful, personal writing for which she is celebrated, Oluo investigates the backstory of America’s growth, from immigrant migration to our national ethos around ingenuity, from the shaping of economic policy to the protection of sociopolitical movements that fortify male power. In the end, she shows how white men have long maintained a stranglehold on leadership and sorely undermined the pursuit of happiness for all.

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Pushout:  The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools

by Monique W. Morris

Fifteen-year-old Diamond stopped going to school the day she was expelled for lashing out at peers who constantly harassed and teased her for something everyone on the staff had missed: she was being trafficked for sex. After months on the run, she was arrested and sent to a detention center for violating a court order to attend school. Just 16 percent of female students in the USA, Black girls make up more than one-third of all girls with a school-related arrest. The first book to tell these untold stories, Pushout exposes a world of confined potential and supports the growing movement to address the policies, practices, and cultural illiteracy that push countless students out of school and into unhealthy, unstable, and often unsafe futures. For four years Monique W. Morris, author of Black Stats, chronicled the experiences of black girls across America whose intricate lives are misunderstood, highly judged—by teachers, administrators, and the justice system—and degraded by the very institutions charged with helping them flourish. Morris shows how, despite obstacles, stigmas, stereotypes, and despair, black girls still find ways to breathe remarkable dignity into their lives in classrooms, juvenile facilities, and beyond.

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The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War

by Jonathan Daniel Wells

We often think of slavery as a southern phenomenon, far removed from the booming cities of the North. But even though slavery had been outlawed in Gotham by the 1830s, Black New Yorkers were not safe. Not only was the city built on the backs of slaves; it was essential in keeping slavery and the slave trade alive.
In The Kidnapping Club, historian Jonathan Daniel Wells tells the story of the powerful network of judges, lawyers, and police officers who circumvented anti-slavery laws by sanctioning the kidnapping of free and fugitive African Americans. Nicknamed “The New York Kidnapping Club,” the group had the tacit support of institutions from Wall Street to Tammany Hall whose wealth depended on the Southern slave and cotton trade. But a small cohort of abolitionists, including Black journalist David Ruggles, organized tirelessly for the rights of Black New Yorkers, often risking their lives in the process.
Taking readers into the bustling streets and ports of America’s great Northern metropolis, The Kidnapping Club is a dramatic account of the ties between slavery and capitalism, the deeply corrupt roots of policing, and the strength of Black activism.

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The Invention of the White Race, Racial Oppression and Social Control, Volume One

Invention of the White Race, Volume 2: Racial Oppression and Social Control (The Invention of the White Race)

by Theodore W. Allen

Allen’s two-volume “The Invention of the White Race” (1994, 1997: Verso Books, new expanded edition 2012) with its focus on racial oppression and social control is one of the twentieth-century’s major contributions to historical understanding. It presents a full-scale challenge to what he refers to as “The Great White Assumption” — the unquestioning acceptance of the “white race” and “white” identity as skin color-based and natural attributes rather than as social and political constructions. Its thesis on the origin, nature, and maintenance of the “white race” and its understanding that racial slavery in the Anglo-American plantation colonies was capitalist and enslaved Black laborers were proletarians, contains the basis of a revolutionary approach to United States labor history.

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The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution
by Dan Hicks

Walk into any European museum today and you will see the curated spoils of Empire. They sit behind plate glass: dignified, tastefully lit. Accompanying pieces of card offer a name, date and place of origin. They do not mention that the objects are all stolen. Few artefacts embody this history of rapacious and extractive colonialism better than the Benin Bronzes – a collection of thousands of brass plaques and carved ivory tusks depicting the history of the Royal Court of the Obas of Benin City, Nigeria. Pillaged during a British naval attack in 1897, the loot was passed on to Queen Victoria, the British Museum and countless private collections. The story of the Benin Bronzes sits at the heart of a heated debate about cultural restitution, repatriation and the decolonisation of museums. In The Brutish Museums, Dan Hicks makes a powerful case for the urgent return of such objects, as part of a wider project of addressing the outstanding debt of colonialism.

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Fumbling Towards Repair. A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators
by Mariame Kaba,  Shira Hassan

Fumbling Toward Repair is a workbook by Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan that includes reflection questions, skill assessments, facilitation tips, helpful definitions, activities, and hard-learned lessons intended to support people who have taken on the coordination and facilitation of formal community accountability processes to address interpersonal harm & violence.  Mariame Kaba is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Mariame is also a co-organizer of the Just Practice Collaborative, a training and mentoring group focused on sustaining a community of practitioners that provide community-based accountability and support structures for all parties involved with incidents and patterns of sexual, domestic, relationship, and intimate community violence. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including The Nation Magazine, The Guardian, The Washington Post, In These Times, Teen Vogue, The New Inquiry and more. Mariame uses her extensive experience with issues of racial, gender and transformative justice to catalyze various projects. Shira Hassan is the former executive director of the Young Women’s Empowerment Project, an organizing and grassroots movement building project led by and for young people of color that have current or former experience in the sex trade and street economies. A lifelong harm reductionist and prison abolitionist, Shira has been working on community accountability for nearly 25 years and has helped young people of color start their own organizing projects across the country. Shira’s work has been discussed on National Public Radio, The New York Times, The Nation, In These Times, Bill Moyers, Scarleteen, Everyday Feminism, Bitch Media, TruthOut and Colorlines.

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The Condemnation of Blackness, Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America
by Khalil Muhammad

Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society. Following the 1890 census, the first to measure the generation of African Americans born after slavery, crime statistics, new migration and immigration trends, and symbolic references to America as the promised land of opportunity were woven into a cautionary tale about the exceptional threat black people posed to modern urban society. Excessive arrest rates and overrepresentation in northern prisons were seen by many whites–liberals and conservatives, northerners and southerners–as indisputable proof of blacks’ inferiority. In the heyday of “separate but equal,” what else but pathology could explain black failure in the “land of opportunity”? The idea of black criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban America, as were African Americans’ own ideas about race and crime. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.

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The Color of Money:  Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap
by Mehrsa Baradaran

When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, the black community owned less than one percent of the United States’ total wealth. More than 150 years later, that number has barely budged. The Color of Money pursues the persistence of this racial wealth gap by focusing on the generators of wealth in the black community: black banks. Studying these institutions over time, Mehrsa Baradaran challenges the myth that black communities could ever accumulate wealth in a segregated economy. Instead, housing segregation, racism, and Jim Crow credit policies created an inescapable, but hard to detect, economic trap for black communities and their banks. The catch-22 of black banking is that the very institutions needed to help communities escape the deep poverty caused by discrimination and segregation inevitably became victims of that same poverty. Not only could black banks not “control the black dollar” due to the dynamics of bank depositing and lending but they drained black capital into white banks, leaving the black economy with the scraps.

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Weapons of Whiteness: Exposing the Master’s Tools Behind the Mask of Anti-Blackness
by Catrice M. Jackson

Black people. We are inside a burning house, and white terrorism set the fire. It wants to destroy and annihilate us, and not only are we preventing fellow Black people from escaping the ferocious blaze, we are also using Weapons of WhitenessTM against each other to defame, exclude, and destroy one another. Toxic whiteness is so virulent it will still kill Black people even when the hosts die. We must stop transmitting this terror. In this book, you will learn what the Weapons of Whiteness are, their menacing motives, and how they allow you to weaponize your hierarchical privileges to harm and traumatize Black people. You’ll also learn how to resist the seductive lies of whiteness, how to stop chasing fool’s gold, and how to escape the treacherous cycle of anti-black violence. We are in a violently abusive relationship with whiteness, and this book will share strategies on how to release yourself from the grueling grip of this trauma bond. You will learn how to resist the temptation to weaponize your internalized oppression, and how we can:•Be in community with and love each other even if we dislike one another, so we can live free and die trying. •Do no harm and take no shit while refusing to pick up the master’s tools of terror. •Focus on healing and liberation instead of fighting each other over the puppet master’s fool’s gold. •Set boundaries and act with a spirit of accountability and love to amplify racial justice and Black love. •Agree to disagree without demonizing one another, so we can work toward collective healing and liberation. It’s time to heal from and stop stoking the fire of toxic whiteness. You can do all these things. We can do all these things. And we must. We must live free and die trying. This is our collective work to do with accountability and love, so let’s get busy and get to work until we take our last breath.

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 For White Folks that Teach in the Hood…and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagory, and Urban Education
by Christopher Edmin

Drawing on his own experience of feeling undervalued and invisible in classrooms as a young man of color and merging his experiences with more than a decade of teaching and researching in urban America, award-winning educator Christopher Emdin offers a new lens on an approach to teaching and learning in urban schools. He begins by taking to task the perception of urban youth of color as unteachable, and he challenges educators to embrace and respect each student’s culture and to reimagine the classroom as a site where roles are reversed and students become the experts in their own learning. Putting forth his theory of Reality Pedagogy, Emdin provides practical tools to unleash the brilliance and eagerness of youth and educators alike—both of whom have been typecast and stymied by outdated modes of thinking about urban education. With this fresh and engaging new pedagogical vision, Emdin demonstrates the importance of creating a family structure and building communities within the classroom, using culturally relevant strategies like hip-hop music and call-and-response, and connecting the experiences of urban youth to indigenous populations globally. Merging real stories with theory, research, and practice, Emdin demonstrates how by implementing the “Seven C’s” of reality pedagogy in their own classrooms, urban youth of color benefit from truly transformative education.

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Beyond Ally: The Pursuit of Racial Justice
by Dr. Maysa Akbar 

Doing anti-racist work can be profoundly transformational for White people. Not only does it allow them to live their values of justice and equality, but it also helps develop skills like listening, sharing power, and working through conflict.Now more than ever, humanity must bridge the racial divides that exist within our society. Dr. Maysa Akbar, a race-based trauma expert, and originator of the Urban Trauma® framework, deftly delineates what the allyship process is for White people to align themselves with people of color through the lens of a person of color. Dr. Akbar illuminates the concept of White Privilege, the societal barrier which breeds and sustains racism, formulated by generations of oppression. She redefines previous frameworks of allyship, and through her new identity model of allyship, she constructs a much-needed pathway towards race-based rectification for White people.We are facing a global tipping point with regard to racism. To be successful, White people must provide support in the right way. This book not only educates on how we got here but also shows how we address it and fix it moving forward.

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Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity
by Marc Lamont Hill

For over a decade, educators have looked to capitalize on the appeal of hip-hop culture, sampling its language, techniques, and styles as a way of reaching out to students. But beyond a fashionable hipness, what does hip-hop have to offer our schools? In this revelatory new book, Marc Lamont Hill shows how a serious engagement with hip-hop culture can affect classroom life in extraordinary ways. Based on his experience teaching a hip-hop-centered English literature course in a Philadelphia high school, and drawing from a range of theories on youth culture, identity, and educational processes, Hill offers a compelling case for the power of hip-hop in the classroom. In addition to driving up attendance and test performance, Hill shows how hip-hop-based educational settings enable students and teachers to renegotiate their classroom identities in complex, contradictory, and often unpredictable ways.

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Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World
by  Katherine Gerbner

Could slaves become Christian? If so, did their conversion lead to freedom? If not, then how could perpetual enslavement be justified? In Christian Slavery, Katharine Gerbner contends that religion was fundamental to the development of both slavery and race in the Protestant Atlantic world. Slave owners in the Caribbean and elsewhere established governments and legal codes based on an ideology of “Protestant Supremacy,” which excluded the majority of enslaved men and women from Christian communities. For slaveholders, Christianity was a sign of freedom, and most believed that slaves should not be eligible for conversion. When Protestant missionaries arrived in the plantation colonies intending to convert enslaved Africans to Christianity in the 1670s, they were appalled that most slave owners rejected the prospect of slave conversion. Slaveholders regularly attacked missionaries, both verbally and physically, and blamed the evangelizing newcomers for slave rebellions. In response, Quaker, Anglican, and Moravian missionaries articulated a vision of “Christian Slavery,” arguing that Christianity would make slaves hardworking and loyal.

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They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South
by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

A bold and searing investigation into the role of white women in the American slave economy. Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South’s slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave-owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave-owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America.

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Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
by Safiya Umoja Noble (Author)

Run a Google search for “black girls” – what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls,” the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why black women are so sassy” or “why black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society. In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.

Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online. As search engines and their related companies grow in importance – operating as a source for email, a major vehicle for primary and secondary school learning, and beyond – understanding and reversing these disquieting trends and discriminatory practices is of utmost importance.

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Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundatiojs of a Movement
by Angela Y. Davis  (Author)

In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world. Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today’s struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement. She highlights connections and analyzes today’s struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine. Facing a world of outrageous injustice, Davis challenges us to imagine and build the movement for human liberation. And in doing so, she reminds us that “Freedom is a constant struggle.”

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Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment
by Angela J. Davis  (Editor)

Policing the Black Man explores and critiques the many ways the criminal justice system impacts the lives of African American boys and men at every stage of the criminal process from arrest through sentencing. Essays range from an explication of the historical roots of racism in the criminal justice system to an examination of modern-day police killings of unarmed black men. The co-authors discuss and explain racial profiling, the power and discretion of police and prosecutors, the role of implicit bias, the racial impact of police and prosecutorial decisions, the disproportionate imprisonment of black men, the collateral consequences of mass incarceration, and the Supreme Court’s failure to provide meaningful remedies for the injustices in the criminal justice system. Policing the Black Man is an enlightening must-read for anyone interested in the critical issues of race and justice in America. A comprehensive, readable analysis of the key issues of the BlackLivesMatter movement, this thought-provoking and compelling anthology features essays by some of the nation’s most influential and respected criminal justice experts and legal scholars. Contributing authors include Bryan Stevenson (Director of the Equal Justice Institute, NYU Law Professor, and author of New York Times bestseller Just Mercy), Sherrilyn Ifill (President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), Jeremy Travis (President of John Jay College of Criminal Justice), and many others.

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Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?: Police Violence and Resistance in the United States
by Maya Schenwar

What is the reality of policing in the United States? Do the police keep anyone safe and secure other than the very wealthy? How do recent police killings of young black people in the United States fit into the historical and global context of anti-blackness? This collection of reports and essays (the first collaboration between Truthout and Haymarket Books) explores police violence against black, brown, indigenous and other marginalized communities, miscarriages of justice, and failures of token accountability and reform measures. It also makes a compelling and provocative argument against calling the police.

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On the Other Side of Freeedom: The Case for Hope
by DeRay McKesson (Author)

In August of 2014, twenty-nine-year-old activist DeRay Mckesson stood with hundreds of others on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to push a message of justice and accountability. These protests, and others like them in cities across the country, resulted in the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. Now, in his first book, Mckesson lays out the intellectual, pragmatic political framework for a new liberation movement. Continuing a conversation about activism, resistance, and justice that embraces our nation’s complex history, he dissects how deliberate oppression persists, how racial injustice strips our lives of promise, and how technology has added a new dimension to mass action and social change. He argues that our best efforts to combat injustice have been stunted by the belief that racism’s wounds are history, and suggests that intellectual purity has curtailed optimistic realism. The book offers a new framework and language for understanding the nature of oppression. With it, we can begin charting a course to dismantle the obvious and subtle structures that limit freedom.

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From #blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation
by Keeanga- Yamahtta Taylor

The eruption of mass protests in the wake of the police murders of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York City have challenged the impunity with which officers of the law carry out violence against Black people and punctured the illusion of a postracial America. The Black Lives Matter movement has awakened a new generation of activists.
In this stirring and insightful analysis, activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and Black unemployment. In this context, she argues that this new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for Black liberation.

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How Nonviolence Protects the State
by Peter Gelderloos

Since the civil rights era, the doctrine of nonviolence has enjoyed near-universal acceptance by the US Left. Today protest is often shaped by cooperation with state authorities—even organizers of rallies against police brutality apply for police permits, and anti-imperialists usually stop short of supporting self-defense and armed resistance. How Nonviolence Protects the State challenges the belief that nonviolence is the only way to fight for a better world. In a call bound to stir controversy and lively debate, Peter Gelderloos invites activists to consider diverse tactics, passionately arguing that exclusive nonviolence often acts to reinforce the same structures of oppression that activists seek to overthrow. Contemporary movements for social change face plenty of difficult questions, but sometimes matters of strategy and tactics receive low priority. Many North American activists fail to scrutinize the role of nonviolence, never posing essential questions:
• Is nonviolence effective at ending systems of oppression?
• Does nonviolence intersect with white privilege and the dominance of North over South?

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Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter
by Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton (Editors)

Policing has become one of the urgent issues of our time, the target of dramatic movements and front-page coverage from coast to coast in the United States, and, indeed, across the world. Now a star-studded, wide-ranging collection of writers and activists offers a global response, describing ongoing struggles over policing from New York to Ferguson to Los Angeles, as well as London, Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg, and Mexico City.  This book, combining first-hand accounts from organizers with the research of eminent scholars and contributions by leading artists, traces the global rise of the “broken-windows” style of policing, first established in New York City under Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, a doctrine that has vastly increased and broadened police power and contributed to the contemporary crisis of policing that has been sparked by notorious incidents of police brutality and killings. With contributions from Black Lives Matter cofounder Patrisse Cullors, Ferguson activist and St. Louis University law professor Justin Hansford, scholars Vijay Prashad and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Pakistani writer and politician Hamid Khan, and many more.

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Reclaiming Our Space: How Black Feminists Are Changing theWorld from the Tweets to the Streets
by Feminista Jones (Author)

In Reclaiming Our Space, social worker, activist, and cultural commentator Feminista Jones explores how Black women are changing culture, society, and the landscape of feminism by building digital communities and using social media as powerful platforms. As Jones reveals, some of the best-loved devices of our shared social media language are a result of Black women’s innovations, from well-known movement-building hashtags (#BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, and #BlackGirlMagic) to the now ubiquitous use of threaded tweets as a marketing and storytelling tool. For some, these online dialogues provide an introduction to the work of Black feminist icons like Angela Davis, Barbara Smith, bell hooks, and the women of the Combahee River Collective. For others, this discourse provides a platform for continuing their feminist activism and scholarship in a new, interactive way. Complex conversations around race, class, and gender that have been happening behind the closed doors of academia for decades are now becoming part of the wider cultural vernacular–one pithy tweet at a time. With these important online conversations, not only are Black women influencing popular culture and creating sociopolitical movements; they are also galvanizing a new generation to learn and engage in Black feminist thought and theory, and inspiring change in communities around them.

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Citizen: An American Lyric 
by Claudia Rankine (Author)

A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine’s long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric.
Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named “post-race” society.

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Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own
by Eddie S. Glaude (Author)

We live, according to Eddie S. Glaude Jr., in a moment when the struggles of Black Lives Matter and the attempt to achieve a new America have been challenged by the election of Donald Trump, a president whose victory represents yet another failure of America to face the lies it tells itself about race. From Charlottesville to the policies of child separation at the border, his administration turned its back on the promise of Obama’s presidency and refused to embrace a vision of the country shorn of the insidious belief that white people matter more than others.

We have been here before: For James Baldwin, these after timescame in the wake of the civil rights movement, when a similar attempt to compel a national confrontation with the truth was answered with the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In these years, spanning from the publication of The Fire Next Time in 1963 to that of No Name in the Street in 1972, Baldwin transformed into a more overtly political writer, a change that came at great professional and personal cost. But from that journey, Baldwin emerged with a sense of renewed purpose about the necessity of pushing forward in the face of disillusionment and despair.

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The Fire Next Time
by James Baldwin (Author)

A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two “letters,” written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as “sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle…all presented in searing, brilliant prose,” The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.

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 Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America
by Jennifer Harvey (Author)

With a foreword by Tim Wise, Raising White Kids is for families, churches, educators, and communities who want to equip their children to be active and able participants in a society that is becoming one of the most racially diverse in the world while remaining full of racial tensions. For white people who are committed to equity and justice, living in a nation that remains racially unjust and deeply segregated creates unique conundrums. These conundrums begin early in life and impact the racial development of white children in powerful ways. What can we do within our homes, communities and schools? Should we teach our children to be “colorblind”? Or, should we teach them to notice race? What roles do we want to equip them to play in addressing racism when they encounter it? What strategies will help our children learn to function well in a diverse nation? Talking about race means naming the reality of white privilege and hierarchy. How do we talk about race honestly, then, without making our children feel bad about being white? Most importantly, how do we do any of this in age-appropriate ways?

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When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele (Authors)

Raised by a single mother in an impoverished neighborhood in Los Angeles, Patrisse Khan-Cullors experienced firsthand the prejudice and persecution Black Americans endure at the hands of law enforcement. For Patrisse, the most vulnerable people in the country are Black people. Deliberately and ruthlessly targeted by a criminal justice system serving a white privilege agenda, Black people are subjected to unjustifiable racial profiling and police brutality. In 2013, when Trayvon Martin’s killer went free, Patrisse’s outrage led her to co-found Black Lives Matter with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi.
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Are Prisons Obsolete? 
by Angela Y. Davis (Author)

With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable. In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for “decarceration”, and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.

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They Can’t Kill Us All: The Story of the Struggle for Black Lives
by Wesley Lowery (Author)

In over a year of on-the-ground reportage, Washington Postwriter Wesley Lowery traveled across the US to uncover life inside the most heavily policed, if otherwise neglected, corners of America today. In an effort to grasp the scale of the response to Michael Brown’s death and understand the magnitude of the problem police violence represents, Lowery conducted hundreds of interviews with the families of victims of police brutality, as well as with local activists working to stop it. Lowery investigates the cumulative effect of decades of racially biased policing in segregated neighborhoods with constant discrimination, failing schools, crumbling infrastructure and too few jobs. Offering a historically informed look at the standoff between the police and those they are sworn to protect, They Can’t Kill Us Alldemonstrates that civil unrest is just one tool of resistance in the broader struggle for justice. And at the end of President Obama’s tenure, it grapples with a worrying and largely unexamined aspect of his legacy: the failure to deliver tangible security and opportunity to the marginalised Americans most in need of it.

The End of Policing
by Alex S. Vitale (Author)

The problem is not overpolicing, it is policing itself. Recent years have seen an explosion of protest against police brutality and repression. Among activists, journalists and politicians, the conversation about how to respond and improve policing has focused on accountability, diversity, training, and community relations. Unfortunately, these reforms will not produce results, either alone or in combination. The core of the problem must be addressed: the nature of modern policing itself. This book attempts to spark public discussion by revealing the tainted origins of modern policing as a tool of social control. It shows how the expansion of police authority is inconsistent with community empowerment, social justice—even public safety. Drawing on groundbreaking research from across the world, and covering virtually every area in the increasingly broad range of police work, Alex Vitale demonstrates how law enforcement has come to exacerbate the very problems it is supposed to solve.

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Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own
By Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
In the story of Baldwin’s crucible, Glaude suggests, we can find hope and guidance through our own after times, this Trumpian era of shattered promises and white retrenchment. Mixing biography—drawn partially from newly uncovered interviews—with history, memoir, and trenchant analysis of our current moment, Begin Again is Glaude’s endeavor, following Baldwin, to bear witness to the difficult truth of race in America today.

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Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements
by Charlotte Carruthers (Author)

Appearing on The Roots’ annual list, in 2017, as one of the most influential young African Americans, Carruthers–at age 32–is among a handful of high profile activists. Her debut book upends mainstream ideas about race, class and gender and sets forth a radically inclusive path to collective liberation. Her inclusive story about Black struggle draws on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions including the Haitian Revolution, U.S. Civil Rights, and Black and LGBTQ Feminist Movements. Bold and honest, Unapologetic is an inside look from an on-the-ground activist and movement leader about how to move people from the margins to the center of political strategy and practice.

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White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
by Robin J. DiAngelo (Author), Michael Eric Dyson (Foreword)

Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’ (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.
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I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made For Whiteness
by Austin Channing Brown (Author)

From a powerful new voice on racial justice, an eye-opening account of growing up Black, Christian, and female in middle-class white America. Austin Channing Brown’s first encounter with a racialized America came at age 7, when she discovered her parents named her Austin to deceive future employers into thinking she was a white man.

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The Warmth of Other Suns
by Isabel Wilkerson (Author)

In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life.
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“All the Real Indians Died Off”: And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans 
by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Author), Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Author)

Scholars and activists Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker tackle a wide range of myths about Native American culture and history that have misinformed generations. Tracing how these ideas evolved, and drawing from history, the authors disrupt long-held and enduring myths such as:

“Columbus Discovered America”
“Thanksgiving Proves the Indians Welcomed Pilgrims”
“Indians Were Savage and Warlike”
“Europeans Brought Civilization to Backward Indians”
“The United States Did Not Have a Policy of Genocide”
“Sports Mascots Honor Native Americans”
“Most Indians Are on Government Welfare”
“Indian Casinos Make Them All Rich”
“Indians Are Naturally Predisposed to Alcohol”

Each chapter deftly shows how these myths are rooted in the fears and prejudice of European settlers and in the larger political agendas of a settler state aimed at acquiring Indigenous land and tied to narratives of erasure and disappearance.
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How to be an Antiracist
by Ibram X. Kendi (Author)

Ibram X. Kendi’s concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America–but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. In How to be an Antiracist, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it.
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Waking Up White: and Finding Myself in the Story of Race
by Debby Irving (Author)

Waking Up White is the book Irving wishes someone had handed her decades ago. By sharing her sometimes cringe-worthy struggle to understand racism and racial tensions, she offers a fresh perspective on bias, stereotypes, manners, and tolerance. As Irving unpacks her own long-held beliefs about colorblindness, being a good person, and wanting to help people of color, she reveals how each of these well-intentioned.
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Birth of a White Nation: The Invention of White People and Its Relevance Today
by Jacqueline Battalora (Author)

Birth of a White Nation is a fascinating new book on race in America that begins with an exploration of the moment in time when “white people,” as a separate and distinct group of humanity, were invented through legislation and the enactment of laws.

The book provides a thorough examination of the underlying reasons as well as the ways in which “white people” were created. It also explains how the creation of this distinction divided laborers and ultimately served the interests of the elite. The book goes on to examine how foundational law and policy in the U.S. were used to institutionalize the practice of “white people” holding positions of power. Finally, the book demonstrates how the social construction and legal enactment of “white people” has ultimately compromised the humanity of those so labeled.
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Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond
by Marc Lamont Hill (Author)

This is a book about what it means to be Nobody in twenty-first-century America.
To be Nobody is to be vulnerable. In the most basic sense, all of us are vulnerable; to be human is to be susceptible to misfortune, violence, illness, and death. The role of government, however, is to offer forms of protection that enhance our lives and shield our bodies from foreseeable and preventable dangers. Unfortunately, for many citizens—particularly those marked as poor, Black, Brown, immigrant, queer, or trans—State power has only increased their vulnerability, making their lives more rather than less unsafe.

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Dismantling the Racism Machine: A Manual and Toolbox
By Karen Gaffney (Author)

Her book, Dismantling the Racism Machine: A Manual and Toolbox, will be available in November 2017 from Routledge.
This book serves as an accessible, introductory, and interdisciplinary guide to race and racism, with tools for action aimed at students, educators, and the general public.

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Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America
by Michael Eric Dys (Author)

“One of the most frank and searing discussions on race … a deeply serious, urgent book, which should take its place in the tradition of Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and King’s Why We Can’t Wait.” ―The New York Times Book Review

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Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape
by Lauret Savoy (Author)

One life-defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent’s past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her—paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land—lie largely eroded and lost.
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Between the World and Me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Author)

Coates describes his observations and the evolution of his thinking on race, from Malcolm X to his conclusion that race itself is a fabrication, elemental to the concept of American (white) exceptionalism. Ferguson, Trayvon Martin, and South Carolina are not bumps on the road of progress and harmony, but the results of a systemized, ubiquitous threat to “black bodies” in the form of slavery, police brutality, and mass incarceration.

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Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow: an organizing guide
by Daniel Hunter (Author)

Expanding on the call to action in Michelle Alexander’s acclaimed best-seller, The New Jim Crow, this accessible organizing guide puts tools in your hands to help you and your group understand how to make meaningful, effective change

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Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism
Cindy Milstein (Editor)

Taking Sides is a critical response to divisive debates within current movements against police violence and white supremacy, especially since Michael Brown’s murder. These sharp interventions ask activists to avoid easy—and safe—answers and take on the hard work of building real grassroots solidarity across racial lines.

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White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son
by Tim Wise (Author)

In White Like Me, Tim Wise offers a highly personal examination of the ways in which racial privilege shapes the lives of most white Americans, overtly racist or not, to the detriment of people of color, themselves, and society. The book shows the breadth and depth of the phenomenon within institutions such as education, employment, housing, criminal justice, and healthcare.

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The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege
by Robert Jensen (Author)

For those who choose to take the trip, Professor Jensen has charted a course, in plain English, and with few pretensions, to fuller understanding of the depth of the scars that American racism has left on our humanity. It has infected our individual and collective psyches with a disease that is difficult to overcome: the disease of color prejudice, white privilege, white supremacy, white superiority, and white racism.

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Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice
by Paul Kivel (Author)

Uprooting Racism talks bout racism without rhetoric or attack. Speaking as a white to fellow whites, Kivel shares stories, suggestions, advice, exercises and approaches for working together to fight racism. He does this while discussing the timely issues of affirmative action, immigration, institutional racism, anti-Semitism, humor, political correctness and the meaning of whiteness. And he covers the different forms of racial injustice faced by Latinos, such as Asian Americans, African Americans, Native-Americans, and Jews.
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Overcoming Our Racism: The Journey to Liberation
by Derald Wing Sue (Author)

Derald Wing Sue, a highly-regarded academic and author, helps readers understand and combat racism in themselves. It defines racism not only as extreme acts of hatred, but as “any attitude, action or institutional structure or social policy that subordinates a person or group because of their color.” This landmark work offers an antidote to this pervasive social problem.

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The Skin We’re In: Teaching Our Teens To Be Emotionally Strong, Socially Smart, and Spiritually Connected Ward
by Jane Victoria (Author)

“How can we best help our youth to be strong, self-confidant and resilient? How can we fortify them to resist racism…?” In order to find practicable answers to these pressing questions, Ward, an education professor at Simmons College in Boston, interviewed dozens of African-American parents and children about their views on such topics as school, friends, racism, opportunity and money.

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It’s the Little Things: Everyday Interactions That Anger, Annoy, and Divide the Races
by Lena Williams (Author)

Never mind the subject of affirmative action, there are a myriad of everyday misunderstandings that occur between black and white Americans that roil race relations. Williams, a reporter for the New York Times, speaks from experience about a range of annoying to dangerous incidences that are caused by the lack of understanding between the races.

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Killing Rage: Ending Racism
by Bell Hooks (Author)

Throughout the 23 essays, Hooks seeks a way out of the cycle of racism. A provocative voice seeking wisdom in the din, she boldly asserts “this nation can be transformed… we can resist racism and in the act of resistance recover ourselves and be renewed.”

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Dismantling Racism: The Continuing Challenge to White America
by Joseph Barndt (Author)

Racism has reemerged, dramatically and forcefully. All of us — people of color and white people alike — are damaged by its debilitating effects. In this book, the author addresses the “majority,” the white race in the United States. Racism permeates the individual attitudes and behavior of white people, but even more seriously, it permeates public systems, institutions, and culture. (Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-first Century Challenge to White America)

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There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America 
by Vincent Harding (Author)

From an unflinchingly black perspective, Harding writes of the struggle of heroic African americans to achieve freedom from slavery. Index; photographs.

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The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks
by Randall Robinson (Author)

Juxtaposing domestic racism with the sufferings of people abroad, he contends that America’s dubious foreign policy initiatives in Cuba and throughout the black world should be mitigated through debt relief. Methodically tackling one issue at a time, Robinson suggests the creation of a trust to assist in the educational and economic empowerment of African-Americans. Whether readers agree or disagree with his views, Robinson has made a definitive step in presenting these controversial and still unresolved issues.

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Race Matters
by Cornel West (Author)

West’s book proved to be a bold attack on racism and racist institutions, and did provide some interesting directions for change.

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The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty
by Vine Deloria, Jr. (Author) and Clifford M. Lytle (Author)

It is a blow-by-blow historical account, perhaps unique in the literature, which may be the only way to show the full complexity of American Indian relations with federal and state governments. This makes it possible in two brilliant concluding chapters to clarify current Indian points of view and to build onto initiatives that Indians have already taken to suggest which of these might be most useful for them to pursue. The unheeded message has been clear throughout history, but now we see how—if we let Indians do it their own way—they might, more quickly than we have imagined, rebuild their communities.”

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Black Wealth / White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality
by Melvin Oliver (Author)

This book challenges the assertions that the failure of black entrepreneurship is rooted in a poor work ethic and an inability to defer gratification. Oliver and Shapiro are not asking for ‘special privileges’ for black people. They are calling for a level playing field.”

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The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide
by Rose M Brewer (Author), Rebecca Adamson (Author), Barbara Robles (Author), Betsy Leondar-Wright (Author), Meizhu Lui (Editor)

For every dollar owned by the average white family in the United States, the average family of color has less than a dime. Why do people of color have so little wealth? The Color of Wealth lays bare a dirty secret: for centuries, people of color have been barred by laws and by discrimination from participating in government wealth-building programs that benefit white Americans.

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The Wisdom to Know the Difference: When to Make a Change—and When to Let Go
by Quaker Eileen Flanagan (Author)

Listening to our inner voice about change or no change.

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The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
by Michelle Alexander (Author)

Sometimes startling data about our society’s way of dealing with young African American men. “Must read” for Friends concerned about this growing problem and those not certain that racial discrimination persists.

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The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
by Isabel Wilkerson (Author)

What many people don’t know about the decades-long migration of African Americans fleeing the South in search of a better life. How their journeys have altered our cities, our country, and ourselves.

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Colorblind: The Rise of Post-racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equality
by Tim Wise (Author)

If you haven’t read Tim Wise yet, this is a great start. You will learn why he says “Retreat from Racial Equality.”

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Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship: Quakers, African Americans and the Myth of Racial Justice
by Friends Donna McDaniel (Author) and Vanessa Julye (Author)

Don’t forget this Quaker best-seller. Join the more than two thousand Friends and others who have read or maybe are just now reading this book.

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Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America
By Helen Thorpe (Author), a Quaker and wife of the Colorado governor.

The struggle with identity for children of Mexican parents.

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White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism
by Paula S. Rothenberg (Author)

In White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Race, Rothenberg has compiled and reduced some very important and complex discussions on whiteness from a variety of social contexts. In White Privilege, whiteness is traced from it’s multiple origins and entry points giving a basic understanding on how whiteness developed as a social construct, what whiteness has meant to numerous people, how various Others have become white, and how whiteness is navigated and construed by people of color.

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Enter the River: Healing Steps from White Privilege Toward Racial Reconciliation
by Tobin Miller Shearer (Author) and Jody Miller Shearer (Author)

Jody writes out of his experience especially to other White Christians in America, giving Biblical, historical, personal, and and social reasons to examine racism and work for reconciliation.

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The Constraint of Race: Legacies of White Skin Privilege in America
by Linda Faye Williams (Author)

“There can be little genuine progress in solving the so-called race problem or in creating the kind of social citizenship all Americans deserve unless and until continuing white skin privilege is openly acknowledged and addressed. In effect, the problem of the twenty-first century is not the color line but finding a way to successfully challenge whiteness as ideology and reality.”

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Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology
by Margaret L. Andersen (Author) and Patricia Hill Collins (Author)

The book also provides conceptual grounding in understanding race, class, and gender; has a strong historical and sociological perspective; and is further strengthened by conceptual introductions by the authors. (contains Peggy McIntosh “White Privilege, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”)

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Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege 
by Shannon Sullivan (Author)

Revealing Whiteness explores how white privilege operates as an unseen, invisible, and unquestioned norm in society today. In this personal and selfsearching book, Shannon Sullivan interrogates her own whiteness and how being white has affected her. By looking closely at the subtleties of white domination, she issues a call for other white people to own up to their unspoken privilege and confront environments that condone or perpetuate.

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 Everyday Forms of Whiteness: Understanding Race in a ‘Post-Racial’ World (Perspectives on a Multiracial America)
by Melanie E. L. (Author) and Joe R. Feagin

This book goes deep into the inner workings of white racial identity. Bush spent five years collecting and documenting perspectives of white students on inequality and found their perceptions of and rationalizations about equality have little basis in reality.

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Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons
by Jane Lazarre (Author)

A heartfelt exploration of ethnicity and its implications in America. Novelist Lazarre (Worlds Beyond My Control, 1991, etc.) turns to autobiography in this account of interracial marriage and motherhood. “I have spent most of my adult life,” she writes, “living in a Black family, raising Black sons, forming my most intimate relationships with African Americans, learning their culture,” and yet, as her sons have grown to adulthood, she finds herself feeling always the outsider, however well accepted.

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White Men Challenging Racism: 35 Personal Stories
by Cooper Thompson (Author), Harry Brod (Editor), Emmett Schaeffer (Editor)

Thompson and the other authors spent six years interviewing 35 white men with a range of ages and backgrounds and from across the U.S. for these first-person narratives on racism as a central theme in their lives. The subjects are men–some well known, others obscure–who have spent their lives combating racism and social injustice via community organizing, teaching.

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Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?
by Beverly Daniel Tatum (Author)

Students are in the process of establishing and affirming their racial identity. As Tatum sees it, blacks must secure a racial identity free of negative stereotypes. The challenge to whites, on which she expounds, is to give up the privilege that their skin color affords and to work actively to combat injustice in society.

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The Hidden Wound
by Wendell Berry (Author)

This is an exploration of the way in which racism is a disaster for white people. He writes beautifully and movingly about the self interest of white people to end racism and the deep life changes necessary to do it.

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Race: The History Of An Idea In America
by Thomas F. Gossett

When Thomas Gossett’s Race: The History of an Idea in America appeared in 1963, it explored the impact of race theory on American letters in a way that anticipated the investigation of race and culture being conducted today. Bold, rigorous, and broad in scope, Gossett’s book quickly established itself as a critical resource to younger scholars seeking a candid, theoretically sophisticated treatment of race in American cultural history.
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Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
by Martin Luther King Jr. (Author)

In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., isolated himself from the demands of the civil rights movement, rented a house in Jamaica with no telephone, and labored over his final manuscript. In this prophetic work, which has been unavailable for more than ten years, he lays out his thoughts, plans, and dreams for America’s future, including the need for better jobs, higher wages, decent housing, and quality education.
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Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
by Audre Lorde (Author)

She is a fiercely intelligent writer, addressing racism, sexism, and heterosexism from the heart of her individual experience as an African-American, lesbian poet/warrior. Audre Lorde demonstrates how each of us must speak for and from our most intimate knowledge, yet simultaneously extend the boundaries around ourselves to include the “outsider,” to include more than we have been, more than we thought we could imagine.

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I’m Chocolate, You’re Vanilla: Raising Healthy Black and Biracial Children in a Race-Conscious World
by Marguerite Wright (Author)

In her book, Marguarite Wright uses a wealth of examples from her work with children and families and offers a creative array of suggestions and strategies for raising health black and biracial children.

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Learning to Be White: Money, Race, and God in America
by Thandeka (Author)

The author puts forth a novel and plausible thesis regarding the impact of a racist society on the majority race. (Although currently seems to have had a change of prespective)

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And Don’t Call Me a Racist
by Ella Mazel (Author)

A treasury of quotes on the past, present, and future of the color line in America, arranged and presented to provide insight you may not realized.

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An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
by Rozanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Author)

The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples.
Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history.
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The Making of Asian America: A History
by Erika Lee (Author)

In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But as award-winning historian Erika Lee reminds us, Asian Americans also have deep roots in the country. The Making of Asian America tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present-day.
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So You Want to Talk about Race
by Ijeoma Oluo (Author)

In this breakout book, Ijeoma Oluo explores the complex reality of today’s racial landscape–from white privilege and police brutality to systemic discrimination and the Black Lives Matter movement–offering straightforward clarity that readers need to contribute to the dismantling of the racial divide.
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An African and Latinx History of the United States
by Paul Ortiz

Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged revisionist history, arguing that Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa–otherwise known as “The Global South”–were crucial to the development of America as we know it. Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress, as exalted by widely-taught formulations like “Manifest Destiny” and “Jacksonian Democracy,” and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms American history into one of the working class organizing themselves against imperialism.
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The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America
by Andres Resendez (Author)

Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in his myth-shattering The Other Slavery, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret.
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Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor
by Layla F. Saad (Author)

Me and White Supremacy teaches readers how to dismantle the privilege within themselves so that they can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on people of colour, and in turn, help other white people do better, too.
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The Invention of the White Race: Racial Opression and Social Control, Volume I
The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America, Volume 2
by Theodore W. Allen (Author)

Volume One of this two-volume work attempts to escape the “white blind spot” which has distorted consecutive studies of the issue. It does so by looking in the mirror of Irish history for a definition of racial oppression and for an explanation of that phenomenon in terms of social control, free from the absurdities of classification by skin color.

In this second volume of his acclaimed study of the origins of racial oppression, Theodore Allen explores the ways in which African bond-laborers were turned into chattel slaves and were differentiated from their fellow proletarians of European origin.

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The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
by Edward E. Baptist (Author)

As historian Edward Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy. Until the Civil War, Baptist explains, the most important American economic innovations were ways to make slavery ever more profitable.

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Empire of Cotton: A Global History
by Alfred A. Knopf (Author)

Cotton is so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible, yet understanding its history is key to understanding the origins of modern capitalism. Sven Beckert’s rich, fascinating book tells the story of how, in a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful statesmen recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to change the world.

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The Hidden Rules of Race: Barriers to an Inclusive Economy
by Andrea Flynn, Susan R. Holmburg, Dorian T. Warren, and Felicia J. Wong (Authors)

Why do black families own less than white families? Why does school segregation persist decades after Brown v. Board of Education? Why is it harder for black adults to vote than for white adults? Will addressing economic inequality solve racial and gender inequality as well? This book answers all of these questions and more by revealing the hidden rules of race that create barriers to inclusion today. While many Americans are familiar with the histories of slavery and Jim Crow, we often don’t understand how the rules of those eras undergird today’s economy, reproducing the same racial inequities 150 years after the end of slavery and 50 years after the banning of Jim Crow segregation laws.

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Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (American Crossroads #21)
by Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Author)

Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called “the biggest prison building project in the history of the world.” Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces, ranging from global to local, conjoined to produce the prison boom.  In an informed and impassioned account, Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how the expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity. Detailing crises that hit California’s economy with particular ferocity, she argues that defeats of radical struggles, weakening of labor, and shifting patterns of capital investment have been key conditions for prison growth. The results—a vast and expensive prison system, a huge number of incarcerated young people of color, and the increase in punitive justice such as the “three strikes” law—pose profound and troubling questions for the future of California, the United States, and the world. Golden Gulag provides a rich context for this complex dilemma, and at the same time challenges many cherished assumptions about who benefits and who suffers from the state’s commitment to prison expansion.

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The Autobiography of Malcolm X
by MalcolmX, with Alex Haley (Authors)

Through a life of passion and struggle, Malcolm X became one of the most influential figures of the 20th Century. In this riveting account, he tells of his journey from a prison cell to Mecca, describing his transition from hoodlum to Muslim minister. Here, the man who called himself “the angriest Black man in America” relates how his conversion to true Islam helped him confront his rage and recognize the brotherhood of all mankind.
An established classic of modern America, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” was hailed by the New York Times as “Extraordinary. A brilliant, painful, important book.” Still extraordinary, still important, this electrifying story has transformed Malcom X’s life into his legacy. The strength of his words, the power of his ideas continue to resonate more than a generation after they first appeared.

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Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
by Bryan Stevenson

A powerful true story about the potential for mercy to redeem us, and a clarion call to fix our broken system of justice—from one of the most brilliant and influential lawyers of our time. Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn’t commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship—and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever.

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Assata: An Autobiography 
by Assata Shakur (Author)

On May 2, 1973, Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard) lay in a hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while local, state, and federal police attempted to question her about the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that had claimed the life of a white state trooper. Long a target of J. Edgar Hoover’s campaign to defame, infiltrate, and criminalize Black nationalist organizations and their leaders, Shakur was incarcerated for four years prior to her conviction on flimsy evidence in 1977 as an accomplice to murder. This intensely personal and political autobiography belies the fearsome image of JoAnne Chesimard long projected by the media and the state. With wit and candor, Assata Shakur recounts the experiences that led her to a life of activism and portrays the strengths, weaknesses, and eventual demise of Black and White revolutionary groups at the hand of government officials. The result is a signal contribution to the literature about growing up Black in America that has already taken its place alongside The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the works of Maya Angelou.Two years after her conviction, Assata Shakur escaped from prison. She was given political asylum by Cuba, where she now resides.

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The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
by Richard Rothstein (Author)

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation—that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de juresegregation—the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments—that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day. Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as “brilliant” (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de juresegregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north.

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Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race
by Reni Eddo-Lodge (Author)

In 2014, award-winning journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote about her frustration with the way that discussions of race and racism in Britain were being led by those who weren’t affected by it. She posted a piece on her blog, entitled: ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race’ that led to this book. Exploring issues from eradicated black history to the political purpose of white dominance, whitewashed feminism to the inextricable link between class and race, Reni Eddo-Lodge offers a timely and essential new framework for how to see, acknowledge and counter racism. It is a searing, illuminating, absolutely necessary exploration of what it is to be a person of colour in Britain today.

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White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
by Carol Anderson (Author)

From the Civil War to our combustible present, acclaimed historian Carol Anderson reframes our continuing conversation about race, chronicling the powerful forces opposed to black progress in America. As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as “black rage,” historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable op-ed in the Washington Post showing that this was, instead, “white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames,” she writes, “everyone had ignored the kindling.” Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow; the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House.

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Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side
by Eve L. Ewing (Author)

“Failing schools. Underprivileged schools. Just plain badschools.” That’s how Eve L. Ewing opens Ghosts in the Schoolyard: describing Chicago Public Schools from the outside. The way politicians and pundits and parents of kids who attend other schools talk about them, with a mix of pity and contempt.
But Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures—they’re an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together. Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closings. Pitched simultaneously as a solution to a budget problem, a response to declining enrollments, and a chance to purge bad schools that were dragging down the whole system, the plan was met with a roar of protest from parents, students, and teachers. But if these schools were so bad, why did people care so much about keeping them open, to the point that some would even go on a hunger strike?

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1919
by Eve L. Ewing (Author)

Poetic reflections on race, class, violence, segregation, and the hidden histories that shape our divided urban landscapes. The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots that comprised the “Red Summer” of violence across the nation’s cities, is an event that has shaped the last century but is widely unknown. In 1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event—which lasted eight days and resulted in thirty-eight deaths and almost 500 injuries—through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city. Ewing uses speculative and Afrofuturist lenses to recast history, and illuminates the thin line between the past and the present.

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Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty
by Dorothy Roberts (Author)

This is a no-holds-barred response to the liberal and conservative retreat from an assertive, activist, and socially transformative civil rights agenda of recent years–using a black feminist lens and the issue of  the impact of recent legislation, social policy, and welfare “reform” on black women’s–especially poor black women’s–control over their bodies’ autonomy and their freedom to bear and raise children with respect and dignity in a society whose white mainstream is determined to demonize, even criminalize their lives.   It gives its readers a cogent legal and historical argument for a radically new , and socially transformative, definition of  “liberty” and “equality” for the American polity from a black feminist perspective.

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Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower
by Brittney Cooper (Author)

Far too often, Black women’s anger has been caricatured into an ugly and destructive force that threatens the civility and social fabric of American democracy. But Cooper shows us that there is more to the story than that. Black women’s eloquent rage is what makes Serena Williams such a powerful tennis player. It’s what makes Beyoncé’s girl power anthems resonate so hard. It’s what makes Michelle Obama an icon. Eloquent rage keeps us all honest and accountable. It reminds women that they don’t have to settle for less. When Cooper learned of her grandmother’s eloquent rage about love, sex, and marriage in an epic and hilarious front-porch confrontation, her life was changed. And it took another intervention, this time staged by one of her homegirls, to turn Brittney into the fierce feminist she is today. In Brittney Cooper’s world, neither mean girls nor fuckboys ever win. But homegirls emerge as heroes. This book argues that ultimately feminism, friendship, and faith in one’s own superpowers are all we really need to turn things right side up again.

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Black on Both Sides
by C. Riley Snorton (Author)

The story of Christine Jorgensen, America’s first prominent transsexual, famously narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives—ones lived by African Americans such as Lucy Hicks Anderson and James McHarris. Their erasure from trans history masks the profound ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence.

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Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?
by Mumia Abu-Jamal (Author)

In December 1981, Mumia Abu Jamal was shot and beaten into unconsciousness by Philadelphia police. He awoke to find himself shackled to a hospital bed, accused of killing a cop. He was convicted and sentenced to death in a trial that Amnesty International has denounced as failing to meet the minimum standards of judicial fairness. In Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?, Mumia gives voice to the many people of color who have fallen to police bullets or racist abuse, and offers the post-Ferguson generation advice on how to address police abuse in the United States. This collection of his radio commentaries on the topic features an in-depth essay written especially for this book to examine the history of policing in America, with its origins in the white slave patrols of the antebellum South and an explicit mission to terrorize the country’s black population. Applying a personal, historical, and political lens, Mumia provides a righteously angry and calmly principled radical black perspective on how racist violence is tearing our country apart and what must be done to turn things around.

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Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter
by Tebama Lopez Bunyasi, Candis Watts Smith (Editors)

When #BlackLivesMatter went viral in 2013, it shed a light on the urgent, daily struggles of black Americans to combat racial injustice. The message resonated with millions across the country. Yet many of our political, social, and economic institutions are still embedded with racist policies and practices that devalue black lives. Stay Woke directly addresses these stark injustices and builds on the lessons of racial inequality and intersectionality the Black Lives Matter movement has challenged its fellow citizens to learn. In this essential primer, Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith inspire readers to address the pressing issues of racial inequality, and provide a basic toolkit that will equip readers to become knowledgeable participants in public debate, activism, and politics.

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Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces
by Radley Balko (Author)

The last days of colonialism taught America’s revolutionaries that soldiers in the streets bring conflict and tyranny. As a result, our country has generally worked to keep the military out of law enforcement. But according to investigative reporter Radley Balko, over the last several decades, America’s cops have increasingly come to resemble ground troops. The consequences have been dire: the home is no longer a place of sanctuary, the Fourth Amendment has been gutted, and police today have been conditioned to see the citizens they serve as an other—an enemy. Today’s armored-up policemen are a far cry from the constables of early America. The unrest of the 1960s brought about the invention of the SWAT unit—which in turn led to the debut of military tactics in the ranks of police officers. Nixon’s War on Drugs, Reagan’s War on Poverty, Clinton’s COPS program, the post–9/11 security state under Bush and Obama: by degrees, each of these innovations expanded and empowered police forces, always at the expense of civil liberties. And these are just four among a slew of reckless programs.
In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Balko shows how politicians’ ill-considered policies and relentless declarations of war against vague enemies like crime, drugs, and terror have blurred the distinction between cop and soldier. His fascinating, frightening narrative shows how over a generation, a creeping battlefield mentality has isolated and alienated American police officers and put them on a collision course with the values of a free society.

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Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America
by W. Caleb McDaniel (Author)

Born into slavery, in 1848 Henrietta Wood was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed by her owner. In 1855, a Kentucky businessman named Zebulon Ward colluded with Wood’s employer, abducted her, and sold her back into bondage. She remained enslaved through the Civil War, and for two years after it had ended. In 1867, she obtained her freedom for a second time and returned to Cincinnati, where she sued Ward for damages. Astonishingly, after ten years of litigation, Wood won her case: in 1878, a Federal jury awarded her $2,500. The decision stuck on appeal. More important than the amount—the largest to date ever awarded by an American court as restitution for slavery—was the fact that any money was awarded at all. Against all odds, Wood had triumphed over Ward, who had become a prison warden, amassing wealth off the labor of convicts who were former slaves. Wood went on to live until 1912. McDaniel’s book tells an epic tale, that of a black woman who struggled against a monolithic system of oppression and achieved more than merely a moral victory over it. Above all, Sweet Taste of Liberty is a tribute to and a portrait of an extraordinary individual.

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As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation
by Zoe Samudzi and William C. Anderson (Authors)

These books are listed in no particular order. Check them out as you feel led. We are adding more all the time; to add others that you have found interesting send to us including a brief description. And, of course, let us know if any no longer are relevant.

For a list of 100 Must-Read African-American Books go here

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Stop Asking People of Color to Explain Racism- Pick Up One of These Books Instead;  For  a reccommended book list from  Scary Mommy go here

Fumbling Towards Repair. A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators
by Mariame Kaba,  Shira Hassan

Fumbling Toward Repair is a workbook by Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan that includes reflection questions, skill assessments, facilitation tips, helpful definitions, activities, and hard-learned lessons intended to support people who have taken on the coordination and facilitation of formal community accountability processes to address interpersonal harm & violence.  Mariame Kaba is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Mariame is also a co-organizer of the Just Practice Collaborative, a training and mentoring group focused on sustaining a community of practitioners that provide community-based accountability and support structures for all parties involved with incidents and patterns of sexual, domestic, relationship, and intimate community violence. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including The Nation Magazine, The Guardian, The Washington Post, In These Times, Teen Vogue, The New Inquiry and more. Mariame uses her extensive experience with issues of racial, gender and transformative justice to catalyze various projects. Shira Hassan is the former executive director of the Young Women’s Empowerment Project, an organizing and grassroots movement building project led by and for young people of color that have current or former experience in the sex trade and street economies. A lifelong harm reductionist and prison abolitionist, Shira has been working on community accountability for nearly 25 years and has helped young people of color start their own organizing projects across the country. Shira’s work has been discussed on National Public Radio, The New York Times, The Nation, In These Times, Bill Moyers, Scarleteen, Everyday Feminism, Bitch Media, TruthOut and Colorlines

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The Condemnation of Blackness, Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America
by Khalil Muhammad

Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society. Following the 1890 census, the first to measure the generation of African Americans born after slavery, crime statistics, new migration and immigration trends, and symbolic references to America as the promised land of opportunity were woven into a cautionary tale about the exceptional threat black people posed to modern urban society. Excessive arrest rates and overrepresentation in northern prisons were seen by many whites–liberals and conservatives, northerners and southerners–as indisputable proof of blacks’ inferiority. In the heyday of “separate but equal,” what else but pathology could explain black failure in the “land of opportunity”? The idea of black criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban America, as were African Americans’ own ideas about race and crime. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.

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The Color of Money:  Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap
by Mehrsa Baradaran

When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, the black community owned less than one percent of the United States’ total wealth. More than 150 years later, that number has barely budged. The Color of Money pursues the persistence of this racial wealth gap by focusing on the generators of wealth in the black community: black banks. Studying these institutions over time, Mehrsa Baradaran challenges the myth that black communities could ever accumulate wealth in a segregated economy. Instead, housing segregation, racism, and Jim Crow credit policies created an inescapable, but hard to detect, economic trap for black communities and their banks. The catch-22 of black banking is that the very institutions needed to help communities escape the deep poverty caused by discrimination and segregation inevitably became victims of that same poverty. Not only could black banks not “control the black dollar” due to the dynamics of bank depositing and lending but they drained black capital into white banks, leaving the black economy with the scraps.

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Weapons of Whiteness: Exposing the Master’s Tools Behind the Mask of Anti-Blackness
by Catrice M. Jackson

Black people. We are inside a burning house, and white terrorism set the fire. It wants to destroy and annihilate us, and not only are we preventing fellow Black people from escaping the ferocious blaze, we are also using Weapons of WhitenessTM against each other to defame, exclude, and destroy one another. Toxic whiteness is so virulent it will still kill Black people even when the hosts die. We must stop transmitting this terror. In this book, you will learn what the Weapons of Whiteness are, their menacing motives, and how they allow you to weaponize your hierarchical privileges to harm and traumatize Black people. You’ll also learn how to resist the seductive lies of whiteness, how to stop chasing fool’s gold, and how to escape the treacherous cycle of anti-black violence. We are in a violently abusive relationship with whiteness, and this book will share strategies on how to release yourself from the grueling grip of this trauma bond. You will learn how to resist the temptation to weaponize your internalized oppression, and how we can:•Be in community with and love each other even if we dislike one another, so we can live free and die trying. •Do no harm and take no shit while refusing to pick up the master’s tools of terror. •Focus on healing and liberation instead of fighting each other over the puppet master’s fool’s gold. •Set boundaries and act with a spirit of accountability and love to amplify racial justice and Black love. •Agree to disagree without demonizing one another, so we can work toward collective healing and liberation. It’s time to heal from and stop stoking the fire of toxic whiteness. You can do all these things. We can do all these things. And we must. We must live free and die trying. This is our collective work to do with accountability and love, so let’s get busy and get to work until we take our last breath.

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 For White Folks that Teach in the Hood…and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagory, and Urban Education
by Christopher Edmin

Drawing on his own experience of feeling undervalued and invisible in classrooms as a young man of color and merging his experiences with more than a decade of teaching and researching in urban America, award-winning educator Christopher Emdin offers a new lens on an approach to teaching and learning in urban schools. He begins by taking to task the perception of urban youth of color as unteachable, and he challenges educators to embrace and respect each student’s culture and to reimagine the classroom as a site where roles are reversed and students become the experts in their own learning. Putting forth his theory of Reality Pedagogy, Emdin provides practical tools to unleash the brilliance and eagerness of youth and educators alike—both of whom have been typecast and stymied by outdated modes of thinking about urban education. With this fresh and engaging new pedagogical vision, Emdin demonstrates the importance of creating a family structure and building communities within the classroom, using culturally relevant strategies like hip-hop music and call-and-response, and connecting the experiences of urban youth to indigenous populations globally. Merging real stories with theory, research, and practice, Emdin demonstrates how by implementing the “Seven C’s” of reality pedagogy in their own classrooms, urban youth of color benefit from truly transformative education.

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Beyond Ally: The Pursuit of Racial Justice
by Dr. Maysa Akbar 

Doing anti-racist work can be profoundly transformational for White people. Not only does it allow them to live their values of justice and equality, but it also helps develop skills like listening, sharing power, and working through conflict.Now more than ever, humanity must bridge the racial divides that exist within our society. Dr. Maysa Akbar, a race-based trauma expert, and originator of the Urban Trauma® framework, deftly delineates what the allyship process is for White people to align themselves with people of color through the lens of a person of color. Dr. Akbar illuminates the concept of White Privilege, the societal barrier which breeds and sustains racism, formulated by generations of oppression. She redefines previous frameworks of allyship, and through her new identity model of allyship, she constructs a much-needed pathway towards race-based rectification for White people.We are facing a global tipping point with regard to racism. To be successful, White people must provide support in the right way. This book not only educates on how we got here but also shows how we address it and fix it moving forward.

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Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity
by Marc Lamont Hill

For over a decade, educators have looked to capitalize on the appeal of hip-hop culture, sampling its language, techniques, and styles as a way of reaching out to students. But beyond a fashionable hipness, what does hip-hop have to offer our schools? In this revelatory new book, Marc Lamont Hill shows how a serious engagement with hip-hop culture can affect classroom life in extraordinary ways. Based on his experience teaching a hip-hop-centered English literature course in a Philadelphia high school, and drawing from a range of theories on youth culture, identity, and educational processes, Hill offers a compelling case for the power of hip-hop in the classroom. In addition to driving up attendance and test performance, Hill shows how hip-hop-based educational settings enable students and teachers to renegotiate their classroom identities in complex, contradictory, and often unpredictable ways.

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Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic Word  
by  Katherine Gerbner

Could slaves become Christian? If so, did their conversion lead to freedom? If not, then how could perpetual enslavement be justified? In Christian Slavery, Katharine Gerbner contends that religion was fundamental to the development of both slavery and race in the Protestant Atlantic world. Slave owners in the Caribbean and elsewhere established governments and legal codes based on an ideology of “Protestant Supremacy,” which excluded the majority of enslaved men and women from Christian communities. For slaveholders, Christianity was a sign of freedom, and most believed that slaves should not be eligible for conversion. When Protestant missionaries arrived in the plantation colonies intending to convert enslaved Africans to Christianity in the 1670s, they were appalled that most slave owners rejected the prospect of slave conversion. Slaveholders regularly attacked missionaries, both verbally and physically, and blamed the evangelizing newcomers for slave rebellions. In response, Quaker, Anglican, and Moravian missionaries articulated a vision of “Christian Slavery,” arguing that Christianity would make slaves hardworking and loyal.

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They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South
by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

A bold and searing investigation into the role of white women in the American slave economy. Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South’s slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave-owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave-owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America.

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Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
by Safiya Umoja Noble (Author)

Run a Google search for “black girls” – what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls,” the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why black women are so sassy” or “why black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society. In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.

Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online. As search engines and their related companies grow in importance – operating as a source for email, a major vehicle for primary and secondary school learning, and beyond – understanding and reversing these disquieting trends and discriminatory practices is of utmost importance.

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Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundatiojs of a Movement
by Angela Y. Davis  (Author)

In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world. Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today’s struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement. She highlights connections and analyzes today’s struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine. Facing a world of outrageous injustice, Davis challenges us to imagine and build the movement for human liberation. And in doing so, she reminds us that “Freedom is a constant struggle.”

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Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment
by Angela J. Davis  (Editor)

Policing the Black Man explores and critiques the many ways the criminal justice system impacts the lives of African American boys and men at every stage of the criminal process from arrest through sentencing. Essays range from an explication of the historical roots of racism in the criminal justice system to an examination of modern-day police killings of unarmed black men. The co-authors discuss and explain racial profiling, the power and discretion of police and prosecutors, the role of implicit bias, the racial impact of police and prosecutorial decisions, the disproportionate imprisonment of black men, the collateral consequences of mass incarceration, and the Supreme Court’s failure to provide meaningful remedies for the injustices in the criminal justice system. Policing the Black Man is an enlightening must-read for anyone interested in the critical issues of race and justice in America. A comprehensive, readable analysis of the key issues of the BlackLivesMatter movement, this thought-provoking and compelling anthology features essays by some of the nation’s most influential and respected criminal justice experts and legal scholars. Contributing authors include Bryan Stevenson (Director of the Equal Justice Institute, NYU Law Professor, and author of New York Times bestseller Just Mercy), Sherrilyn Ifill (President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), Jeremy Travis (President of John Jay College of Criminal Justice), and many others.

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Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?: Police Violence and Resistance in the United States
by Maya Schenwar

What is the reality of policing in the United States? Do the police keep anyone safe and secure other than the very wealthy? How do recent police killings of young black people in the United States fit into the historical and global context of anti-blackness? This collection of reports and essays (the first collaboration between Truthout and Haymarket Books) explores police violence against black, brown, indigenous and other marginalized communities, miscarriages of justice, and failures of token accountability and reform measures. It also makes a compelling and provocative argument against calling the police.

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On the Other Side of Freeedom: The Case for Hope
by DeRay McKesson (Author)

In August of 2014, twenty-nine-year-old activist DeRay Mckesson stood with hundreds of others on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to push a message of justice and accountability. These protests, and others like them in cities across the country, resulted in the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. Now, in his first book, Mckesson lays out the intellectual, pragmatic political framework for a new liberation movement. Continuing a conversation about activism, resistance, and justice that embraces our nation’s complex history, he dissects how deliberate oppression persists, how racial injustice strips our lives of promise, and how technology has added a new dimension to mass action and social change. He argues that our best efforts to combat injustice have been stunted by the belief that racism’s wounds are history, and suggests that intellectual purity has curtailed optimistic realism. The book offers a new framework and language for understanding the nature of oppression. With it, we can begin charting a course to dismantle the obvious and subtle structures that limit freedom.

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From #blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation
by Keeanga- Yamahtta Taylor

The eruption of mass protests in the wake of the police murders of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York City have challenged the impunity with which officers of the law carry out violence against Black people and punctured the illusion of a postracial America. The Black Lives Matter movement has awakened a new generation of activists.
In this stirring and insightful analysis, activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and Black unemployment. In this context, she argues that this new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for Black liberation.

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How Nonviolence Protects the State
by Peter Gelderloos

Since the civil rights era, the doctrine of nonviolence has enjoyed near-universal acceptance by the US Left. Today protest is often shaped by cooperation with state authorities—even organizers of rallies against police brutality apply for police permits, and anti-imperialists usually stop short of supporting self-defense and armed resistance. How Nonviolence Protects the State challenges the belief that nonviolence is the only way to fight for a better world. In a call bound to stir controversy and lively debate, Peter Gelderloos invites activists to consider diverse tactics, passionately arguing that exclusive nonviolence often acts to reinforce the same structures of oppression that activists seek to overthrow. Contemporary movements for social change face plenty of difficult questions, but sometimes matters of strategy and tactics receive low priority. Many North American activists fail to scrutinize the role of nonviolence, never posing essential questions:
• Is nonviolence effective at ending systems of oppression?
• Does nonviolence intersect with white privilege and the dominance of North over South?

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Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter
by Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton (Editors)

Policing has become one of the urgent issues of our time, the target of dramatic movements and front-page coverage from coast to coast in the United States, and, indeed, across the world. Now a star-studded, wide-ranging collection of writers and activists offers a global response, describing ongoing struggles over policing from New York to Ferguson to Los Angeles, as well as London, Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg, and Mexico City.  This book, combining first-hand accounts from organizers with the research of eminent scholars and contributions by leading artists, traces the global rise of the “broken-windows” style of policing, first established in New York City under Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, a doctrine that has vastly increased and broadened police power and contributed to the contemporary crisis of policing that has been sparked by notorious incidents of police brutality and killings. With contributions from Black Lives Matter cofounder Patrisse Cullors, Ferguson activist and St. Louis University law professor Justin Hansford, scholars Vijay Prashad and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Pakistani writer and politician Hamid Khan, and many more.

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Reclaiming Our Space: How Black Feminists Are Changing theWorld from the Tweets to the Streets
by Feminista Jones (Author)

In Reclaiming Our Space, social worker, activist, and cultural commentator Feminista Jones explores how Black women are changing culture, society, and the landscape of feminism by building digital communities and using social media as powerful platforms. As Jones reveals, some of the best-loved devices of our shared social media language are a result of Black women’s innovations, from well-known movement-building hashtags (#BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, and #BlackGirlMagic) to the now ubiquitous use of threaded tweets as a marketing and storytelling tool. For some, these online dialogues provide an introduction to the work of Black feminist icons like Angela Davis, Barbara Smith, bell hooks, and the women of the Combahee River Collective. For others, this discourse provides a platform for continuing their feminist activism and scholarship in a new, interactive way. Complex conversations around race, class, and gender that have been happening behind the closed doors of academia for decades are now becoming part of the wider cultural vernacular–one pithy tweet at a time. With these important online conversations, not only are Black women influencing popular culture and creating sociopolitical movements; they are also galvanizing a new generation to learn and engage in Black feminist thought and theory, and inspiring change in communities around them.

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Citizen: An American Lyric 
by Claudia Rankine (Author)

A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine’s long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric.
Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named “post-race” society.

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Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own
by Eddie S. Glaude (Author)

We live, according to Eddie S. Glaude Jr., in a moment when the struggles of Black Lives Matter and the attempt to achieve a new America have been challenged by the election of Donald Trump, a president whose victory represents yet another failure of America to face the lies it tells itself about race. From Charlottesville to the policies of child separation at the border, his administration turned its back on the promise of Obama’s presidency and refused to embrace a vision of the country shorn of the insidious belief that white people matter more than others.

We have been here before: For James Baldwin, these after timescame in the wake of the civil rights movement, when a similar attempt to compel a national confrontation with the truth was answered with the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In these years, spanning from the publication of The Fire Next Time in 1963 to that of No Name in the Street in 1972, Baldwin transformed into a more overtly political writer, a change that came at great professional and personal cost. But from that journey, Baldwin emerged with a sense of renewed purpose about the necessity of pushing forward in the face of disillusionment and despair.

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The Fire Next Time
by James Baldwin (Author)

A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two “letters,” written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as “sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle…all presented in searing, brilliant prose,” The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.

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 Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America
by Jennifer Harvey (Author)

With a foreword by Tim Wise, Raising White Kids is for families, churches, educators, and communities who want to equip their children to be active and able participants in a society that is becoming one of the most racially diverse in the world while remaining full of racial tensions. For white people who are committed to equity and justice, living in a nation that remains racially unjust and deeply segregated creates unique conundrums. These conundrums begin early in life and impact the racial development of white children in powerful ways. What can we do within our homes, communities and schools? Should we teach our children to be “colorblind”? Or, should we teach them to notice race? What roles do we want to equip them to play in addressing racism when they encounter it? What strategies will help our children learn to function well in a diverse nation? Talking about race means naming the reality of white privilege and hierarchy. How do we talk about race honestly, then, without making our children feel bad about being white? Most importantly, how do we do any of this in age-appropriate ways?

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When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele (Authors)

Raised by a single mother in an impoverished neighborhood in Los Angeles, Patrisse Khan-Cullors experienced firsthand the prejudice and persecution Black Americans endure at the hands of law enforcement. For Patrisse, the most vulnerable people in the country are Black people. Deliberately and ruthlessly targeted by a criminal justice system serving a white privilege agenda, Black people are subjected to unjustifiable racial profiling and police brutality. In 2013, when Trayvon Martin’s killer went free, Patrisse’s outrage led her to co-found Black Lives Matter with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi.
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Are Prisons Obsolete? 
by Angela Y. Davis (Author)

With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable. In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for “decarceration”, and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.

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They Can’t Kill Us All: The Story of the Struggle for Black Lives
by Wesley Lowery (Author)

In over a year of on-the-ground reportage, Washington Postwriter Wesley Lowery traveled across the US to uncover life inside the most heavily policed, if otherwise neglected, corners of America today. In an effort to grasp the scale of the response to Michael Brown’s death and understand the magnitude of the problem police violence represents, Lowery conducted hundreds of interviews with the families of victims of police brutality, as well as with local activists working to stop it. Lowery investigates the cumulative effect of decades of racially biased policing in segregated neighborhoods with constant discrimination, failing schools, crumbling infrastructure and too few jobs. Offering a historically informed look at the standoff between the police and those they are sworn to protect, They Can’t Kill Us Alldemonstrates that civil unrest is just one tool of resistance in the broader struggle for justice. And at the end of President Obama’s tenure, it grapples with a worrying and largely unexamined aspect of his legacy: the failure to deliver tangible security and opportunity to the marginalised Americans most in need of it.

The End of Policing
by Alex S. Vitale (Author)

The problem is not overpolicing, it is policing itself. Recent years have seen an explosion of protest against police brutality and repression. Among activists, journalists and politicians, the conversation about how to respond and improve policing has focused on accountability, diversity, training, and community relations. Unfortunately, these reforms will not produce results, either alone or in combination. The core of the problem must be addressed: the nature of modern policing itself. This book attempts to spark public discussion by revealing the tainted origins of modern policing as a tool of social control. It shows how the expansion of police authority is inconsistent with community empowerment, social justice—even public safety. Drawing on groundbreaking research from across the world, and covering virtually every area in the increasingly broad range of police work, Alex Vitale demonstrates how law enforcement has come to exacerbate the very problems it is supposed to solve.

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Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own
By Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
In the story of Baldwin’s crucible, Glaude suggests, we can find hope and guidance through our own after times, this Trumpian era of shattered promises and white retrenchment. Mixing biography—drawn partially from newly uncovered interviews—with history, memoir, and trenchant analysis of our current moment, Begin Again is Glaude’s endeavor, following Baldwin, to bear witness to the difficult truth of race in America today.

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Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements
by Charlotte Carruthers (Author)

Appearing on The Roots’ annual list, in 2017, as one of the most influential young African Americans, Carruthers–at age 32–is among a handful of high profile activists. Her debut book upends mainstream ideas about race, class and gender and sets forth a radically inclusive path to collective liberation. Her inclusive story about Black struggle draws on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions including the Haitian Revolution, U.S. Civil Rights, and Black and LGBTQ Feminist Movements. Bold and honest, Unapologetic is an inside look from an on-the-ground activist and movement leader about how to move people from the margins to the center of political strategy and practice.

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White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
by Robin J. DiAngelo (Author), Michael Eric Dyson (Foreword)

Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’ (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.
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I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made For Whiteness
by Austin Channing Brown (Author)

From a powerful new voice on racial justice, an eye-opening account of growing up Black, Christian, and female in middle-class white America. Austin Channing Brown’s first encounter with a racialized America came at age 7, when she discovered her parents named her Austin to deceive future employers into thinking she was a white man.

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The Warmth of Other Suns
by Isabel Wilkerson (Author)

In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life.
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“All the Real Indians Died Off”: And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans 
by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Author), Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Author)

Scholars and activists Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker tackle a wide range of myths about Native American culture and history that have misinformed generations. Tracing how these ideas evolved, and drawing from history, the authors disrupt long-held and enduring myths such as:

“Columbus Discovered America”
“Thanksgiving Proves the Indians Welcomed Pilgrims”
“Indians Were Savage and Warlike”
“Europeans Brought Civilization to Backward Indians”
“The United States Did Not Have a Policy of Genocide”
“Sports Mascots Honor Native Americans”
“Most Indians Are on Government Welfare”
“Indian Casinos Make Them All Rich”
“Indians Are Naturally Predisposed to Alcohol”

Each chapter deftly shows how these myths are rooted in the fears and prejudice of European settlers and in the larger political agendas of a settler state aimed at acquiring Indigenous land and tied to narratives of erasure and disappearance.
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How to be an Antiracist
by Ibram X. Kendi (Author)

Ibram X. Kendi’s concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America–but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. In How to be an Antiracist, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it.
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Waking Up White: and Finding Myself in the Story of Race
by Debby Irving (Author)

Waking Up White is the book Irving wishes someone had handed her decades ago. By sharing her sometimes cringe-worthy struggle to understand racism and racial tensions, she offers a fresh perspective on bias, stereotypes, manners, and tolerance. As Irving unpacks her own long-held beliefs about colorblindness, being a good person, and wanting to help people of color, she reveals how each of these well-intentioned.
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Birth of a White Nation: The Invention of White People and Its Relevance Today
by Jacqueline Battalora (Author)

Birth of a White Nation is a fascinating new book on race in America that begins with an exploration of the moment in time when “white people,” as a separate and distinct group of humanity, were invented through legislation and the enactment of laws.

The book provides a thorough examination of the underlying reasons as well as the ways in which “white people” were created. It also explains how the creation of this distinction divided laborers and ultimately served the interests of the elite. The book goes on to examine how foundational law and policy in the U.S. were used to institutionalize the practice of “white people” holding positions of power. Finally, the book demonstrates how the social construction and legal enactment of “white people” has ultimately compromised the humanity of those so labeled.
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Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond
by Marc Lamont Hill (Author)

This is a book about what it means to be Nobody in twenty-first-century America.
To be Nobody is to be vulnerable. In the most basic sense, all of us are vulnerable; to be human is to be susceptible to misfortune, violence, illness, and death. The role of government, however, is to offer forms of protection that enhance our lives and shield our bodies from foreseeable and preventable dangers. Unfortunately, for many citizens—particularly those marked as poor, Black, Brown, immigrant, queer, or trans—State power has only increased their vulnerability, making their lives more rather than less unsafe.

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Dismantling the Racism Machine: A Manual and Toolbox
By Karen Gaffney (Author)

Her book, Dismantling the Racism Machine: A Manual and Toolbox, will be available in November 2017 from Routledge.
This book serves as an accessible, introductory, and interdisciplinary guide to race and racism, with tools for action aimed at students, educators, and the general public.

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Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America
by Michael Eric Dys (Author)

“One of the most frank and searing discussions on race … a deeply serious, urgent book, which should take its place in the tradition of Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and King’s Why We Can’t Wait.” ―The New York Times Book Review

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Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape
by Lauret Savoy (Author)

One life-defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent’s past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her—paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land—lie largely eroded and lost.
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Between the World and Me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Author)

Coates describes his observations and the evolution of his thinking on race, from Malcolm X to his conclusion that race itself is a fabrication, elemental to the concept of American (white) exceptionalism. Ferguson, Trayvon Martin, and South Carolina are not bumps on the road of progress and harmony, but the results of a systemized, ubiquitous threat to “black bodies” in the form of slavery, police brutality, and mass incarceration.

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Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow: an organizing guide
by Daniel Hunter (Author)

Expanding on the call to action in Michelle Alexander’s acclaimed best-seller, The New Jim Crow, this accessible organizing guide puts tools in your hands to help you and your group understand how to make meaningful, effective change

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Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism
Cindy Milstein (Editor)

Taking Sides is a critical response to divisive debates within current movements against police violence and white supremacy, especially since Michael Brown’s murder. These sharp interventions ask activists to avoid easy—and safe—answers and take on the hard work of building real grassroots solidarity across racial lines.

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White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son
by Tim Wise (Author)

In White Like Me, Tim Wise offers a highly personal examination of the ways in which racial privilege shapes the lives of most white Americans, overtly racist or not, to the detriment of people of color, themselves, and society. The book shows the breadth and depth of the phenomenon within institutions such as education, employment, housing, criminal justice, and healthcare.

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The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege
by Robert Jensen (Author)

For those who choose to take the trip, Professor Jensen has charted a course, in plain English, and with few pretensions, to fuller understanding of the depth of the scars that American racism has left on our humanity. It has infected our individual and collective psyches with a disease that is difficult to overcome: the disease of color prejudice, white privilege, white supremacy, white superiority, and white racism.

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Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice
by Paul Kivel (Author)

Uprooting Racism talks bout racism without rhetoric or attack. Speaking as a white to fellow whites, Kivel shares stories, suggestions, advice, exercises and approaches for working together to fight racism. He does this while discussing the timely issues of affirmative action, immigration, institutional racism, anti-Semitism, humor, political correctness and the meaning of whiteness. And he covers the different forms of racial injustice faced by Latinos, such as Asian Americans, African Americans, Native-Americans, and Jews.
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Overcoming Our Racism: The Journey to Liberation
by Derald Wing Sue (Author)

Derald Wing Sue, a highly-regarded academic and author, helps readers understand and combat racism in themselves. It defines racism not only as extreme acts of hatred, but as “any attitude, action or institutional structure or social policy that subordinates a person or group because of their color.” This landmark work offers an antidote to this pervasive social problem.

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The Skin We’re In: Teaching Our Teens To Be Emotionally Strong, Socially Smart, and Spiritually Connected Ward
by Jane Victoria (Author)

“How can we best help our youth to be strong, self-confidant and resilient? How can we fortify them to resist racism…?” In order to find practicable answers to these pressing questions, Ward, an education professor at Simmons College in Boston, interviewed dozens of African-American parents and children about their views on such topics as school, friends, racism, opportunity and money.

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It’s the Little Things: Everyday Interactions That Anger, Annoy, and Divide the Races
by Lena Williams (Author)

Never mind the subject of affirmative action, there are a myriad of everyday misunderstandings that occur between black and white Americans that roil race relations. Williams, a reporter for the New York Times, speaks from experience about a range of annoying to dangerous incidences that are caused by the lack of understanding between the races.

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Killing Rage: Ending Racism
by Bell Hooks (Author)

Throughout the 23 essays, Hooks seeks a way out of the cycle of racism. A provocative voice seeking wisdom in the din, she boldly asserts “this nation can be transformed… we can resist racism and in the act of resistance recover ourselves and be renewed.”

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Dismantling Racism: The Continuing Challenge to White America
by Joseph Barndt (Author)

Racism has reemerged, dramatically and forcefully. All of us — people of color and white people alike — are damaged by its debilitating effects. In this book, the author addresses the “majority,” the white race in the United States. Racism permeates the individual attitudes and behavior of white people, but even more seriously, it permeates public systems, institutions, and culture. (Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-first Century Challenge to White America)

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There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America 
by Vincent Harding (Author)

From an unflinchingly black perspective, Harding writes of the struggle of heroic African americans to achieve freedom from slavery. Index; photographs.

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The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks
by Randall Robinson (Author)

Juxtaposing domestic racism with the sufferings of people abroad, he contends that America’s dubious foreign policy initiatives in Cuba and throughout the black world should be mitigated through debt relief. Methodically tackling one issue at a time, Robinson suggests the creation of a trust to assist in the educational and economic empowerment of African-Americans. Whether readers agree or disagree with his views, Robinson has made a definitive step in presenting these controversial and still unresolved issues.

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Race Matters
by Cornel West (Author)

West’s book proved to be a bold attack on racism and racist institutions, and did provide some interesting directions for change.

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The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty
by Vine Deloria, Jr. (Author) and Clifford M. Lytle (Author)

It is a blow-by-blow historical account, perhaps unique in the literature, which may be the only way to show the full complexity of American Indian relations with federal and state governments. This makes it possible in two brilliant concluding chapters to clarify current Indian points of view and to build onto initiatives that Indians have already taken to suggest which of these might be most useful for them to pursue. The unheeded message has been clear throughout history, but now we see how—if we let Indians do it their own way—they might, more quickly than we have imagined, rebuild their communities.”

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Black Wealth / White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality
by Melvin Oliver (Author)

This book challenges the assertions that the failure of black entrepreneurship is rooted in a poor work ethic and an inability to defer gratification. Oliver and Shapiro are not asking for ‘special privileges’ for black people. They are calling for a level playing field.”

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The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide
by Rose M Brewer (Author), Rebecca Adamson (Author), Barbara Robles (Author), Betsy Leondar-Wright (Author), Meizhu Lui (Editor)

For every dollar owned by the average white family in the United States, the average family of color has less than a dime. Why do people of color have so little wealth? The Color of Wealth lays bare a dirty secret: for centuries, people of color have been barred by laws and by discrimination from participating in government wealth-building programs that benefit white Americans.

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The Wisdom to Know the Difference: When to Make a Change—and When to Let Go
by Quaker Eileen Flanagan (Author)

Listening to our inner voice about change or no change.

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The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
by Michelle Alexander (Author)

Sometimes startling data about our society’s way of dealing with young African American men. “Must read” for Friends concerned about this growing problem and those not certain that racial discrimination persists.

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The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
by Isabel Wilkerson (Author)

What many people don’t know about the decades-long migration of African Americans fleeing the South in search of a better life. How their journeys have altered our cities, our country, and ourselves.

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Colorblind: The Rise of Post-racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equality
by Tim Wise (Author)

If you haven’t read Tim Wise yet, this is a great start. You will learn why he says “Retreat from Racial Equality.”

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Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship: Quakers, African Americans and the Myth of Racial Justice
by Friends Donna McDaniel (Author) and Vanessa Julye (Author)

Don’t forget this Quaker best-seller. Join the more than two thousand Friends and others who have read or maybe are just now reading this book.

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Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America
By Helen Thorpe (Author), a Quaker and wife of the Colorado governor.

The struggle with identity for children of Mexican parents.

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White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism
by Paula S. Rothenberg (Author)

In White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Race, Rothenberg has compiled and reduced some very important and complex discussions on whiteness from a variety of social contexts. In White Privilege, whiteness is traced from it’s multiple origins and entry points giving a basic understanding on how whiteness developed as a social construct, what whiteness has meant to numerous people, how various Others have become white, and how whiteness is navigated and construed by people of color.

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Enter the River: Healing Steps from White Privilege Toward Racial Reconciliation
by Tobin Miller Shearer (Author) and Jody Miller Shearer (Author)

Jody writes out of his experience especially to other White Christians in America, giving Biblical, historical, personal, and and social reasons to examine racism and work for reconciliation.

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The Constraint of Race: Legacies of White Skin Privilege in America
by Linda Faye Williams (Author)

“There can be little genuine progress in solving the so-called race problem or in creating the kind of social citizenship all Americans deserve unless and until continuing white skin privilege is openly acknowledged and addressed. In effect, the problem of the twenty-first century is not the color line but finding a way to successfully challenge whiteness as ideology and reality.”

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Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology
by Margaret L. Andersen (Author) and Patricia Hill Collins (Author)

The book also provides conceptual grounding in understanding race, class, and gender; has a strong historical and sociological perspective; and is further strengthened by conceptual introductions by the authors. (contains Peggy McIntosh “White Privilege, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”)

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Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege 
by Shannon Sullivan (Author)

Revealing Whiteness explores how white privilege operates as an unseen, invisible, and unquestioned norm in society today. In this personal and selfsearching book, Shannon Sullivan interrogates her own whiteness and how being white has affected her. By looking closely at the subtleties of white domination, she issues a call for other white people to own up to their unspoken privilege and confront environments that condone or perpetuate.

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 Everyday Forms of Whiteness: Understanding Race in a ‘Post-Racial’ World (Perspectives on a Multiracial America)
by Melanie E. L. (Author) and Joe R. Feagin

This book goes deep into the inner workings of white racial identity. Bush spent five years collecting and documenting perspectives of white students on inequality and found their perceptions of and rationalizations about equality have little basis in reality.

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Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons
by Jane Lazarre (Author)

A heartfelt exploration of ethnicity and its implications in America. Novelist Lazarre (Worlds Beyond My Control, 1991, etc.) turns to autobiography in this account of interracial marriage and motherhood. “I have spent most of my adult life,” she writes, “living in a Black family, raising Black sons, forming my most intimate relationships with African Americans, learning their culture,” and yet, as her sons have grown to adulthood, she finds herself feeling always the outsider, however well accepted.

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White Men Challenging Racism: 35 Personal Stories
by Cooper Thompson (Author), Harry Brod (Editor), Emmett Schaeffer (Editor)

Thompson and the other authors spent six years interviewing 35 white men with a range of ages and backgrounds and from across the U.S. for these first-person narratives on racism as a central theme in their lives. The subjects are men–some well known, others obscure–who have spent their lives combating racism and social injustice via community organizing, teaching.

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Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?
by Beverly Daniel Tatum (Author)

Students are in the process of establishing and affirming their racial identity. As Tatum sees it, blacks must secure a racial identity free of negative stereotypes. The challenge to whites, on which she expounds, is to give up the privilege that their skin color affords and to work actively to combat injustice in society.

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The Hidden Wound
by Wendell Berry (Author)

This is an exploration of the way in which racism is a disaster for white people. He writes beautifully and movingly about the self interest of white people to end racism and the deep life changes necessary to do it.

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Race: The History Of An Idea In America
by Thomas F. Gossett

When Thomas Gossett’s Race: The History of an Idea in America appeared in 1963, it explored the impact of race theory on American letters in a way that anticipated the investigation of race and culture being conducted today. Bold, rigorous, and broad in scope, Gossett’s book quickly established itself as a critical resource to younger scholars seeking a candid, theoretically sophisticated treatment of race in American cultural history.
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Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
by Martin Luther King Jr. (Author)

In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., isolated himself from the demands of the civil rights movement, rented a house in Jamaica with no telephone, and labored over his final manuscript. In this prophetic work, which has been unavailable for more than ten years, he lays out his thoughts, plans, and dreams for America’s future, including the need for better jobs, higher wages, decent housing, and quality education.
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Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
by Audre Lorde (Author)

She is a fiercely intelligent writer, addressing racism, sexism, and heterosexism from the heart of her individual experience as an African-American, lesbian poet/warrior. Audre Lorde demonstrates how each of us must speak for and from our most intimate knowledge, yet simultaneously extend the boundaries around ourselves to include the “outsider,” to include more than we have been, more than we thought we could imagine.

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I’m Chocolate, You’re Vanilla: Raising Healthy Black and Biracial Children in a Race-Conscious World
by Marguerite Wright (Author)

In her book, Marguarite Wright uses a wealth of examples from her work with children and families and offers a creative array of suggestions and strategies for raising health black and biracial children.

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Learning to Be White: Money, Race, and God in America
by Thandeka (Author)

The author puts forth a novel and plausible thesis regarding the impact of a racist society on the majority race. (Although currently seems to have had a change of prespective)

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And Don’t Call Me a Racist
by Ella Mazel (Author)

A treasury of quotes on the past, present, and future of the color line in America, arranged and presented to provide insight you may not realized.

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An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
by Rozanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Author)

The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples.
Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history.
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The Making of Asian America: A History
by Erika Lee (Author)

In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But as award-winning historian Erika Lee reminds us, Asian Americans also have deep roots in the country. The Making of Asian America tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present-day.
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So You Want to Talk about Race
by Ijeoma Oluo (Author)

In this breakout book, Ijeoma Oluo explores the complex reality of today’s racial landscape–from white privilege and police brutality to systemic discrimination and the Black Lives Matter movement–offering straightforward clarity that readers need to contribute to the dismantling of the racial divide.
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An African and Latinx History of the United States
by Paul Ortiz

Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged revisionist history, arguing that Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa–otherwise known as “The Global South”–were crucial to the development of America as we know it. Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress, as exalted by widely-taught formulations like “Manifest Destiny” and “Jacksonian Democracy,” and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms American history into one of the working class organizing themselves against imperialism.
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The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America
by Andres Resendez (Author)

Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in his myth-shattering The Other Slavery, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret.
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Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor
by Layla F. Saad (Author)

Me and White Supremacy teaches readers how to dismantle the privilege within themselves so that they can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on people of colour, and in turn, help other white people do better, too.
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The Invention of the White Race: Racial Opression and Social Control, Volume I
The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America, Volume 2
by Theodore W. Allen (Author)

Volume One of this two-volume work attempts to escape the “white blind spot” which has distorted consecutive studies of the issue. It does so by looking in the mirror of Irish history for a definition of racial oppression and for an explanation of that phenomenon in terms of social control, free from the absurdities of classification by skin color.

In this second volume of his acclaimed study of the origins of racial oppression, Theodore Allen explores the ways in which African bond-laborers were turned into chattel slaves and were differentiated from their fellow proletarians of European origin.

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The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
by Edward E. Baptist (Author)

As historian Edward Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy. Until the Civil War, Baptist explains, the most important American economic innovations were ways to make slavery ever more profitable.

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Empire of Cotton: A Global History
by Alfred A. Knopf (Author)

Cotton is so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible, yet understanding its history is key to understanding the origins of modern capitalism. Sven Beckert’s rich, fascinating book tells the story of how, in a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful statesmen recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to change the world.

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The Hidden Rules of Race: Barriers to an Inclusive Economy
by Andrea Flynn, Susuan R. Holmburg, Dorian T. Warren, and Felicia J. Wong (Authors)

Why do black families own less than white families? Why does school segregation persist decades after Brown v. Board of Education? Why is it harder for black adults to vote than for white adults? Will addressing economic inequality solve racial and gender inequality as well? This book answers all of these questions and more by revealing the hidden rules of race that create barriers to inclusion today. While many Americans are familiar with the histories of slavery and Jim Crow, we often don’t understand how the rules of those eras undergird today’s economy, reproducing the same racial inequities 150 years after the end of slavery and 50 years after the banning of Jim Crow segregation laws.

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Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (American Crossroads #21)
by Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Author)

Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called “the biggest prison building project in the history of the world.” Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces, ranging from global to local, conjoined to produce the prison boom.  In an informed and impassioned account, Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how the expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity. Detailing crises that hit California’s economy with particular ferocity, she argues that defeats of radical struggles, weakening of labor, and shifting patterns of capital investment have been key conditions for prison growth. The results—a vast and expensive prison system, a huge number of incarcerated young people of color, and the increase in punitive justice such as the “three strikes” law—pose profound and troubling questions for the future of California, the United States, and the world. Golden Gulag provides a rich context for this complex dilemma, and at the same time challenges many cherished assumptions about who benefits and who suffers from the state’s commitment to prison expansion.

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The Autobiography of Malcolm X
by MalcolmX, with Alex Haley (Authors)

Through a life of passion and struggle, Malcolm X became one of the most influential figures of the 20th Century. In this riveting account, he tells of his journey from a prison cell to Mecca, describing his transition from hoodlum to Muslim minister. Here, the man who called himself “the angriest Black man in America” relates how his conversion to true Islam helped him confront his rage and recognize the brotherhood of all mankind.
An established classic of modern America, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” was hailed by the New York Times as “Extraordinary. A brilliant, painful, important book.” Still extraordinary, still important, this electrifying story has transformed Malcom X’s life into his legacy. The strength of his words, the power of his ideas continue to resonate more than a generation after they first appeared.

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Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
by Bryan Stevenson

A powerful true story about the potential for mercy to redeem us, and a clarion call to fix our broken system of justice—from one of the most brilliant and influential lawyers of our time. Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn’t commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship—and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever.

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Assata: An Autobiography 
by Assata Shakur (Author)

On May 2, 1973, Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard) lay in a hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while local, state, and federal police attempted to question her about the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that had claimed the life of a white state trooper. Long a target of J. Edgar Hoover’s campaign to defame, infiltrate, and criminalize Black nationalist organizations and their leaders, Shakur was incarcerated for four years prior to her conviction on flimsy evidence in 1977 as an accomplice to murder. This intensely personal and political autobiography belies the fearsome image of JoAnne Chesimard long projected by the media and the state. With wit and candor, Assata Shakur recounts the experiences that led her to a life of activism and portrays the strengths, weaknesses, and eventual demise of Black and White revolutionary groups at the hand of government officials. The result is a signal contribution to the literature about growing up Black in America that has already taken its place alongside The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the works of Maya Angelou.Two years after her conviction, Assata Shakur escaped from prison. She was given political asylum by Cuba, where she now resides.

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The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
by Richard Rothstein (Author)

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation—that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de juresegregation—the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments—that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day. Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as “brilliant” (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de juresegregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north.

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Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race
by Reni Eddo-Lodge (Author)

In 2014, award-winning journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote about her frustration with the way that discussions of race and racism in Britain were being led by those who weren’t affected by it. She posted a piece on her blog, entitled: ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race’ that led to this book. Exploring issues from eradicated black history to the political purpose of white dominance, whitewashed feminism to the inextricable link between class and race, Reni Eddo-Lodge offers a timely and essential new framework for how to see, acknowledge and counter racism. It is a searing, illuminating, absolutely necessary exploration of what it is to be a person of colour in Britain today.

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White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
by Carol Anderson (Author)

From the Civil War to our combustible present, acclaimed historian Carol Anderson reframes our continuing conversation about race, chronicling the powerful forces opposed to black progress in America. As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as “black rage,” historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable op-ed in the Washington Post showing that this was, instead, “white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames,” she writes, “everyone had ignored the kindling.” Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow; the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House.

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Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side
by Eve L. Ewing (Author)

“Failing schools. Underprivileged schools. Just plain badschools.” That’s how Eve L. Ewing opens Ghosts in the Schoolyard: describing Chicago Public Schools from the outside. The way politicians and pundits and parents of kids who attend other schools talk about them, with a mix of pity and contempt.
But Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures—they’re an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together. Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closings. Pitched simultaneously as a solution to a budget problem, a response to declining enrollments, and a chance to purge bad schools that were dragging down the whole system, the plan was met with a roar of protest from parents, students, and teachers. But if these schools were so bad, why did people care so much about keeping them open, to the point that some would even go on a hunger strike?

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1919
by Eve L. Ewing (Author)

Poetic reflections on race, class, violence, segregation, and the hidden histories that shape our divided urban landscapes. The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots that comprised the “Red Summer” of violence across the nation’s cities, is an event that has shaped the last century but is widely unknown. In 1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event—which lasted eight days and resulted in thirty-eight deaths and almost 500 injuries—through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city. Ewing uses speculative and Afrofuturist lenses to recast history, and illuminates the thin line between the past and the present.

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Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty
by Dorothy Roberts (Author)

This is a no-holds-barred response to the liberal and conservative retreat from an assertive, activist, and socially transformative civil rights agenda of recent years–using a black feminist lens and the issue of  the impact of recent legislation, social policy, and welfare “reform” on black women’s–especially poor black women’s–control over their bodies’ autonomy and their freedom to bear and raise children with respect and dignity in a society whose white mainstream is determined to demonize, even criminalize their lives.   It gives its readers a cogent legal and historical argument for a radically new , and socially transformative, definition of  “liberty” and “equality” for the American polity from a black feminist perspective.

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Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower
by Brittney Cooper (Author)

Far too often, Black women’s anger has been caricatured into an ugly and destructive force that threatens the civility and social fabric of American democracy. But Cooper shows us that there is more to the story than that. Black women’s eloquent rage is what makes Serena Williams such a powerful tennis player. It’s what makes Beyoncé’s girl power anthems resonate so hard. It’s what makes Michelle Obama an icon. Eloquent rage keeps us all honest and accountable. It reminds women that they don’t have to settle for less. When Cooper learned of her grandmother’s eloquent rage about love, sex, and marriage in an epic and hilarious front-porch confrontation, her life was changed. And it took another intervention, this time staged by one of her homegirls, to turn Brittney into the fierce feminist she is today. In Brittney Cooper’s world, neither mean girls nor fuckboys ever win. But homegirls emerge as heroes. This book argues that ultimately feminism, friendship, and faith in one’s own superpowers are all we really need to turn things right side up again.

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Black on Both Sides
by C. Riley Snorton (Author)

The story of Christine Jorgensen, America’s first prominent transsexual, famously narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives—ones lived by African Americans such as Lucy Hicks Anderson and James McHarris. Their erasure from trans history masks the profound ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence.

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Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?
by Mumia Abu-Jamal (Author)

In December 1981, Mumia Abu Jamal was shot and beaten into unconsciousness by Philadelphia police. He awoke to find himself shackled to a hospital bed, accused of killing a cop. He was convicted and sentenced to death in a trial that Amnesty International has denounced as failing to meet the minimum standards of judicial fairness. In Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?, Mumia gives voice to the many people of color who have fallen to police bullets or racist abuse, and offers the post-Ferguson generation advice on how to address police abuse in the United States. This collection of his radio commentaries on the topic features an in-depth essay written especially for this book to examine the history of policing in America, with its origins in the white slave patrols of the antebellum South and an explicit mission to terrorize the country’s black population. Applying a personal, historical, and political lens, Mumia provides a righteously angry and calmly principled radical black perspective on how racist violence is tearing our country apart and what must be done to turn things around.

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Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter
by Tebama Lopez Bunyasi, Candis Watts Smith (Editors)

When #BlackLivesMatter went viral in 2013, it shed a light on the urgent, daily struggles of black Americans to combat racial injustice. The message resonated with millions across the country. Yet many of our political, social, and economic institutions are still embedded with racist policies and practices that devalue black lives. Stay Woke directly addresses these stark injustices and builds on the lessons of racial inequality and intersectionality the Black Lives Matter movement has challenged its fellow citizens to learn. In this essential primer, Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith inspire readers to address the pressing issues of racial inequality, and provide a basic toolkit that will equip readers to become knowledgeable participants in public debate, activism, and politics.

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Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces
by Radley Balko (Author)

The last days of colonialism taught America’s revolutionaries that soldiers in the streets bring conflict and tyranny. As a result, our country has generally worked to keep the military out of law enforcement. But according to investigative reporter Radley Balko, over the last several decades, America’s cops have increasingly come to resemble ground troops. The consequences have been dire: the home is no longer a place of sanctuary, the Fourth Amendment has been gutted, and police today have been conditioned to see the citizens they serve as an other—an enemy. Today’s armored-up policemen are a far cry from the constables of early America. The unrest of the 1960s brought about the invention of the SWAT unit—which in turn led to the debut of military tactics in the ranks of police officers. Nixon’s War on Drugs, Reagan’s War on Poverty, Clinton’s COPS program, the post–9/11 security state under Bush and Obama: by degrees, each of these innovations expanded and empowered police forces, always at the expense of civil liberties. And these are just four among a slew of reckless programs.
In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Balko shows how politicians’ ill-considered policies and relentless declarations of war against vague enemies like crime, drugs, and terror have blurred the distinction between cop and soldier. His fascinating, frightening narrative shows how over a generation, a creeping battlefield mentality has isolated and alienated American police officers and put them on a collision course with the values of a free society.

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Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America
by W. Caleb McDaniel (Author)

Born into slavery, in 1848 Henrietta Wood was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed by her owner. In 1855, a Kentucky businessman named Zebulon Ward colluded with Wood’s employer, abducted her, and sold her back into bondage. She remained enslaved through the Civil War, and for two years after it had ended. In 1867, she obtained her freedom for a second time and returned to Cincinnati, where she sued Ward for damages. Astonishingly, after ten years of litigation, Wood won her case: in 1878, a Federal jury awarded her $2,500. The decision stuck on appeal. More important than the amount—the largest to date ever awarded by an American court as restitution for slavery—was the fact that any money was awarded at all. Against all odds, Wood had triumphed over Ward, who had become a prison warden, amassing wealth off the labor of convicts who were former slaves. Wood went on to live until 1912. McDaniel’s book tells an epic tale, that of a black woman who struggled against a monolithic system of oppression and achieved more than merely a moral victory over it. Above all, Sweet Taste of Liberty is a tribute to and a portrait of an extraordinary individual.

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As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation
by Zoe Samudzi and William C. Anderson (Authors)