Victoria Alexander (https://twitter.com/victoriaalxndr) put together and tweeted antiracist reading list.
You can find original tweets here:
https://twitter.com/victoriaalxndr/status/1266829408268095493?s=20
https://twitter.com/victoriaalxndr/status/1266832195483828227?s=20
since it’s twitter, i wanted to save the list here as well. the list is US-centric, but it’s not like the problem exists only there. we all could learn something from these books.
Starter kit
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo
So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
Intermediate Kit
The Burning House: Jim Crow and the Making of Modern America by Anders Walker
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America by Khalil Gibran Muhammad
Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland by Jonathan M. Metzl
A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America by Ronald Takaki
How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
Topic Specific
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond – on poverty housing
Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond by Marc Lamont Hill – on police violence and mass incarceration
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen – on education, colonialism, and ahistoricism
Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together In The Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum – on education discrimination bias
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein – on segregation housing and discrimination redlining
Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy by Darryl Pinckney – on voter suppression and black voting
Biographies, non-fiction novels, personal narratives
The Warmth Of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley
Between The World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
killing rage: Ending Racism by bell hooks
Becoming by Michelle Obama
Black Feminism
How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consiousness and the Politics of Emprowerment by Patricia Hill Collins
Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism by bell hooks
Bad Feminist: Essays by Roxane Gay
Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Brittney Cooper
In Search of OUr Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose by Alice Walker
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
Women, Race, & Class by Angela Y. Davis
Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur
Black LGBTQ+
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde
Real Life by Brandon Taylor
Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movemnents by Charlene A. Carruthers
No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies
Since I Laid My Burden Down by Brontez Purnell
Other Side of Paradise by Staceyann Chin
No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America by Darnell L. Moore
The Summer We Got Free by Mia McKenzie
Black Centred Fiction
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Native Son by Richard Wright
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams
opinions about books 