Anti-Racist Books to Read and Reread

From the National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning comes a groundbreaking approach to understanding and uprooting racism and inequality in our society — and in ourselves. Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of anti-racist ideas — from the most basic concepts to visionary possibilities — that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their poisonous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves.

Heather McGhee, one of today’s most insightful and influential thinkers, focuses on the American economy — and the mystery of why it so often fails the American public. The Sum of Us offers a powerful exploration of inequality and the lesson that generations of Americans have failed to learn: Racism has a cost for everyone — not just for people of color. It is the common denominator of our most vexing public problems, the core dysfunction of our democracy, and constitutive of the spiritual and moral crises that grip us all. McGhee delivers a brilliant analysis of how we arrived here but also leaves us with a new vision for a future in which we finally realize that life can be more than a zero-sum game.

In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. In a letter to his son, Coates shares the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder.

Now a major motion picture starring Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx, Just Mercy is 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. One of Bryan Stevenson’s 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.

From the internationally recognized civil rights activist/organizer and host of the podcast Pod Save the People, this book is a meditation on resistance, justice, and freedom, and an intimate portrait of a movement from the front lines. Drawing from his own experiences as an activist, organizer, educator, and public official, DeRay Mckesson exhorts all Americans to work to dismantle the legacy of racism and to imagine the best of what is possible.

How do we talk about bias? How do we address racial disparities and inequities? What role do our institutions play in creating, maintaining, and magnifying those inequities? What role do we play? With a perspective that is at once scientific, investigative, and informed by personal experience, Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt offers us the language and courage we need to face one of the biggest and most troubling issues of our time. She exposes racial bias at all levels of society — in our neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and the criminal justice system. Yet she also offers us tools to address it. Racial bias is a problem that we all have a role to play in solving.

“We were eight years in power” was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a Black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America’s “first white president.”

In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Audre Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope.

A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation, gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement — and still lights the way to understanding race in America today.

Elaine Brown assumed her role as the first and only female leader of the Black Panther Party with these words: “I have all the guns and all the money. I can withstand challenge from without and from within. Am I right, Comrade?” It was August 1974. From a small Oakland-based cell, the Panthers had grown to become a revolutionary national organization, mobilizing Black communities and white supporters across the country — but relentlessly targeted by the police and the FBI, and increasingly riven by violence and strife within. How Brown came to a position of power over this paramilitary, male-dominated organization, and what she did with that power, is a riveting, unsparing account of self-discovery.

Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will touch hearts and change minds for as long as people read.

Each of these essays sets out to discover a new way of talking about race and of telling the truth as the author has lived it. “Blackness is an art, not a science. It is a paradox: intangible and visceral; a situation and a story. It is the thread that connects these essays, but its significance as an experience emerges randomly, unpredictably… Race is the story of my life, and therefore Black is the body of this book.”

Part manifesto, part history, part memoir, this book argues that we live in a country founded on a “value gap” — with white lives valued more than others — that still distorts our politics today. Whether discussing why all Americans have racial habits that reinforce inequality, why Black politics based on the civil rights era have reached a dead-end or why only remaking democracy from the ground up can bring real change, Glaude crystallizes the untenable position of Black America — and offers thoughts on a better way forward.

It is only by healing from injustices and dissolving our personal barriers to connection that we develop the ability to view others with compassion and to live in community with people of vastly different backgrounds and viewpoints. Incorporating mindfulness exercises, research, and Rhonda V. Magee’s hard-won insights, The Inner Work of Racial Justice offers a road map to a more peaceful world.

From the widely revered and legendary political activist and scholar Angela Davis comes a powerful study of the women’s liberation movement in the U.S., from abolitionist days to the present, that demonstrates how it has always been hampered by the racist and classist biases of its leaders.

Here is Toni Morrison in her own words: a rich gathering of her most important essays and speeches, spanning four decades. These pages give us her searing prayer for the dead of 9/11, her Nobel lecture on the power of language, her searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr., her heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. She looks deeply into the fault lines of culture and freedom: the foreigner, female empowerment, the press, money, “Black matter(s),” human rights, the artist in society, the Afro-American presence in American literature.

In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her — from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world’s most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it — in her own words and on her own terms.

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.

From the creator of Elle’s “Eric Reads the News,” a heartfelt and hilarious memoir-in-essays about growing up seeing the world differently, finding unexpected hope, and experiencing every awkward, extraordinary stumble along the way.

An inspiring collection of essays by Black women writers, curated by the founder of the popular book club Well-Read Black Girl, on the importance of recognizing ourselves in literature. As she has done with her book club–turned–online community, Well-Read Black Girl, Glory Edim, in this anthology, creates a space in which Black women’s writing, knowledge, and life experiences are lifted up, and shared with all readers who value the power of a story to help us understand the world and ourselves.

The compelling, inspiring, and comically sublime story of one man’s coming-of-age, set during the twilight of apartheid and the tumultuous days of freedom that followed. Trevor Noah’s stories weave together to form a moving and blisteringly funny portrait of a boy making his way through a damaged world in a dangerous time, armed only with a keen sense of humor and a mother’s unconventional, unconditional love.

In her searing collection of essays, Mikki Kendall takes aim at the legitimacy of the modern feminist movement, arguing that it has chronically failed to address the needs of all but a few women. Drawing on her own experiences with hunger, violence, and hypersexualization, along with incisive commentary on politics, pop culture, the stigma of mental health, Hood Feminism delivers an irrefutable indictment of a movement in flux.

In Ordinary Light, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith tells her remarkable story, giving us a quietly potent memoir that explores her coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter. Here is the story of a young artist struggling to fashion her own understanding of belief, loss, history, and what it means to be Black in America.

In 1994, Clemantine Wamariya and her fifteen-year-old sister, Claire, fled the Rwandan massacre and spent the next six years migrating through seven African countries, searching for safety — perpetually hungry, imprisoned, and abused, enduring and escaping refugee camps, finding unexpected kindness, witnessing inhuman cruelty. They did not know whether their parents were dead or alive. When Clemantine was twelve, she and her sister were granted refugee status in the United States; there, in Chicago, their lives diverged. In The Girl Who Smiled Beads, Clemantine provokes us to look beyond the label of “victim” and recognize the power of the imagination to transcend even the most profound injuries and aftershocks. Devastating yet beautiful, and bracingly original, it is a powerful testament to her commitment to constructing a life on her own terms.

A hilarious and timely essay collection about race, gender, and pop culture from comedy superstar and 2 Dope Queens podcaster Phoebe Robinson, You Can’t Touch My Hair examines our cultural climate and skewers our biases with humor and heart, cementing Robinson as an important voice that demands our attention.

From Samantha Irby — beloved author of New York Times bestseller We Are Never Meeting in Real Life and “And Just Like That…” writer — a rip-roaring, edgy, and unabashedly raunchy collection of hilarious essays that draw on the raw, hilarious particulars of Irby’s life. In Wow, No Thank You., Irby is at her most unflinching, riotous, and relatable.

From the author’s vivid childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 1950s, the nature of Audre Lorde’s work is cyclical. It especially speaks to the linkage of women who have shaped her. Lorde brings into play her craft of lush description and characterization. It keeps unfolding page after page.

The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell is a humorous, well-informed take on the world today, tackling a wide range of current and evergreen issues such as the 2016 election, race relations, fatherhood, the state of law enforcement today, comedians and superheroes, right-wing politics, failure, his interracial marriage, his upbringing by divorced and very strong-willed, race-conscious parents, his early days struggling to find his comedic voice, why he never felt at home in Black comedy circles, what it means to be a Black nerd, the balance between racism and feminism, and much, much more.

Gathering in one place for the first time previously unpublished work, as well as already classic essays, such as, “Joy,” and, “Find Your Beach,” Feel Free offers a survey of important recent events in culture and politics, as well as Smith’s own life. Equally at home in the world of good books and bad politics, Brooklyn-born rappers and the work of Swiss novelists, she is by turns wry, heartfelt, indignant, and incisive — and never any less than perfect company. This is literary journalism at its zenith.

These thirty-two taut poems and poetic sequences, including an oratorio based on Mississippi “barkeep, activist, waiter” Booker Wright that was performed at Carnegie Hall and the vibrant sonnet cycle “De La Soul Is Dead,” about the days when hip-hop was growing up (“we were Black then, not yet / African American”), remind us that Blackness and brownness tell an ongoing story. A testament to Young’s own — and our collective — experience, Brown offers beautiful, sustained harmonies from a poet whose wisdom deepens with time.

From navigating the oft-competing worlds of religion and desire, to balancing society’s expectations with the raw experience of being a woman in the world; from detailing the experiences of growing up as a first-generation Black British woman, to working through situations of dependence and abuse; from finding solace in the echoing caverns of depression and loss, to exploring the vulnerability and redemption in falling in love, each of the raw and immediate poems in Yrsa Daley-Ward’s bone resonates to the core of what it means to be human.

From the pages of Vogue to the runways of Paris, this deeply revealing memoir by the late legendary style icon captures the fashion world from the inside out, in its most glamorous and most cutthroat moments. The Chiffon Trenches offers a candid look at the who’s who of the last fifty years of fashion. At once ruthless and empathetic, this engaging memoir tells with raw honesty the story of how André not only survived the brutal style landscape but thrived — despite racism, illicit rumors, and all the other challenges of this notoriously cutthroat industry — to become one of the most renowned voices and faces in fashion.

Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child’s soul as she searches for her place in the world. Woodson’s eloquent poetry also reflects the joy of finding her voice through writing stories, despite the fact that she struggled with reading as a child. Her love of stories inspired her and stayed with her, creating the first sparks of the gifted writer she was to become.

Jacqueline Woodson’s first middle-grade novel since National Book Award winner Brown Girl Dreaming celebrates the healing that can occur when a group of students shares their stories. It all starts when six kids have to meet for a weekly chat — by themselves, with no adults to listen in. There, in the room they soon dub the ARTT Room (short for “A Room to Talk”), they discover it’s safe to talk about what’s bothering them. When the six are together, they can express the feelings and fears they have to hide from the rest of the world. And together, they can grow braver and more ready for the rest of their lives.

Justyce McAllister is a good kid, an honor student, and always there to help a friend — but none of that matters to the police officer who just put him in handcuffs. Despite leaving his rough neighborhood behind, he can’t escape the scorn of his former peers or the ridicule of his new classmates. Justyce looks to the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for answers. But do they hold up anymore? He starts a journal to Dr. King to find out. But when Justyce goes driving with his best friend, Manny, windows rolled down, music turned way up, they spark the fury of a white off-duty cop beside them. Words fly. Shots are fired. Justyce and Manny are caught in the crosshairs. And in the media fallout, it’s Justyce who is under attack.

Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in. Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison’s virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterized her writing.

The bestselling novel from the award-winning author of We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele. The story of two Nigerians making their way in the U.S. and the UK, raising universal questions of race and belonging, the overseas experience for the African diaspora, and the search for identity and a home.

As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman’s will to escape the horrors of bondage — and a powerful meditation on the history we all share.

Homegoing follows the parallel paths of sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi’s extraordinary novel illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed — and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation.

The first novel by a previously unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a Black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of “the Brotherhood”, and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.

In this bravura follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning New York Times bestseller The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.

This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children — the violent and capricious separation of families — and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today’s most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer is a propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen.

With piercing humor, exacting dialogue, and a beautiful sense of place, Regina Porter’s debut is both an intimate family portrait and a sweeping exploration of what it means to be American today. American history comes to vivid, engaging life in this tale of two interconnected families (one white, one Black) that spans from the 1950s to Barack Obama’s first year as president.

From The New York Times-bestselling author of The Mothers, a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one Black and one white.

The visionary author’s masterpiece pulls us — along with her Black female hero — through time to face the horrors of slavery and explore the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.

Toni Morrison’s magnificent Pulitzer Prize-winning work — first published in 1987 — brought the wrenching experience of slavery into the literature of our time, enlarging our comprehension of America’s original sin. Set in post–Civil War Ohio, it is the story of Sethe, an escaped slave who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has withstood savagery and not gone mad. Sethe, who now lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing apparition who calls herself Beloved.

When first published in 1930, Not Without Laughter established Langston Hughes as not only a brilliant poet and leading light of the Harlem Renaissance but also a gifted novelist. In telling the story of Sandy Rogers, a young African American boy in small-town Kansas, and of his family — his mother, Annjee, a housekeeper for a wealthy white family; his irresponsible father, Jimboy, who plays the guitar and travels the country in search of employment; his strong-willed grandmother Hager, who clings to her faith; his Aunt Tempy, who marries a rich man; and his Aunt Harriet, who struggles to make it as a blues singer — Hughes gives the longings and lineaments of Black life in the early twentieth century an important place in the history of racially divided America.

A striking and surprising debut novel from an exhilarating new voice, Such a Fun Age is a page-turning and big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both.

A powerful, emotional debut novel told in the unforgettable voice of a young Nigerian woman who is trapped in a life of servitude but determined to fight for her dreams and choose her own future.

A compulsively readable debut novel about marriage, immigration, class, race, and the trapdoors in the American Dream — the unforgettable story of a young Cameroonian couple making a new life in New York just as the Great Recession upends the economy.

Along the streets of Manhattan, a young Nigerian doctor named Julius wanders, reflecting on his relationships, his recent breakup with his girlfriend, his present, his past. He encounters people from different cultures and classes who will provide insight on his journey — which takes him to Brussels, to the Nigeria of his youth, and into the most unrecognizable facets of his own soul.

From an author of rare, haunting power, a stunning novel about a young African-American woman coming of age — a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, family, and country. Through exquisite and emotional vignettes, Clemmons creates a stunning portrayal of what it means to choose to live, after loss. An elegiac distillation, at once intellectual and visceral, of a young woman’s understanding of absence and identity that spans continents and decades, What We Lose heralds the arrival of a virtuosic new voice in fiction.

From James McBride, author of the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird and the bestselling modern classic The Color of Water, a wise and witty tale about what happens to the witnesses of a shooting by a cranky old church deacon named Sportcoat and how their lives intersect with one another.

Propulsively readable, teeming with unforgettable characters, The Death of Vivek Oji is a novel of family and friendship that challenges expectations — a dramatic story of loss and transcendence that will move every reader.