24 Books to Understand Racism in America

I’m pretty sure that I don’t need to go into a lot of detail about why I’m posting this article today, nor why it’s important to understand its importance.

Here’s a great website that maps police brutality across America. Here’s an article that explains that black Americans are 2.5 times more likely than whites to be killed by police, and another about a leading cause of death among black people being getting shot by police.

If you’d like to support the protestors or the Black Lives Matter movement, check out these resources:

• How to support Black Lives Matter, wherever you are – Time Out
• Ways You Can Help
• #BlackLivesMatter Master Link – Donations/Resources/Petitions

Below are plenty of books that will help you understand further how we got here as a nation, why the Black Lives Matter movement is important, and how you can help.

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• How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
• 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

• When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele
• Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Brittney Cooper
• This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America by Morgan Jerkins

• Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon
• What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays by Damon Young
• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

• The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
• The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
• The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X

• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein
• The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap by Mehrsha Baradaran

• Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge
• Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi
• Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

• I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown
• The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism by Jemar Tisby
• Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall

• A Black Women’s History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry & Kali Nicole Gross
• Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates Jr
• Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Y Davis

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If I’ve forgotten or missed any, please leave links in the comments below.

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