Last Updated: February 13, 2025
In looking at the lives of five specific Americans, Kendi approaches the alternating ways in which race and racism have shaped many aspects of American life.
So You Want to Talk About Race
by Ijeoma Oluo
This book looks at both the history and the present of racial presence and disparities in the United States—not just where we are today but how we got there.
A prominent figure himself in contemporary history, Congressman John Lewis discusses the importance of modern protest, and its origins in the Civil Rights Movement in which he began his activist career.
An essential, surprising journey through the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South–and a revelatory argument for why you must understand the South in order to understand America.
The story of how three generations of Black women have passed down a family treasure—a sack filled with a few precious items given from an enslaved woman to her daughter in 1850s South Carolina.
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
by Richard Rothstein
Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods.