Racism Reading List

Sunnyhill Racism – Proposed Reading and Book Club List (compiled by Valerie J.H. Powell)

Books

  1. Rediker M, The Middle Passage: The Slave Ship (Penguin, 2007).
  2. Baptist EE, The Half has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books, 2016).
  3. Blight DW, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard Univ Press, 2001).
  4. Ortiz P, An African American and Latinx History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2018).
  5. Blackmon, DA, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (Anchor Books, 2009).
  6. Rothstein R, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (Liveright, 2017). 
  7. Alexander M, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2014).
  8. Coates, Ta-Nehisi, Between the World and Me. (One World, 2015). 

Additional readings can be identified in the Sunnyhill Racism Resources document and from at least two other good sources (1. Harvard Kennedy): https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/library-knowledge-services/collections/diversity-inclusion-belonging/anti-racist (2. Epic Reads): https://www.epicreads.com/blog/critical-race-theory-books/ 

Here are some suggestions:

  1. Anderson C, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy. (Bloomsbury, 2019).
  2. Haley A, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (Doubleday, 1976).
  3. Washington HA, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. (Anchor, 2006).
  4. Abrams S, Our Time is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America (Holt, 2020).
  5. Shetterly ML, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race. (W Morrow Paperbacks, 2016).
  6. Frederick Douglas, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”: https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/nations-story-what-slave-fourth-july 
  7. The Ten Million Names Project: https://10millionnames.org/ 
  8. Tatum, BD. Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations about Race. (Basic Books, 2003).