57 Books about race and ethnicity

The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution is a 2009 book by anthropologists Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending. Starting with their own take on the conventional wisdom that the evolutionary process stopped when modern humans appeared, the authors explain the genetic basis of their view that human evolution is accelerating, illustrating it with some examples.

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism is a 2018 book by Safiya Umoja Noble in the fields of information science, machine learning, and human-computer interaction.

Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era is a sociological critique of the angry white male phenomenon in America by Michael Kimmel, first published in 2013. The book was re-published in April 2017 with a new preface by Kimmel discussing U.S. President Donald Trump.

Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age is a 2004 book by historian Kevin Boyle, published by Henry Holt. The book chronicles racism in Detroit during the 1920s Jazz Age through the lens of Ossian Sweet, a grandson of a slave who becomes a doctor and eventually moves from the ghetto to an all-white middle-class neighborhood. When racist whites attack and invade Sweet's home, a white man is killed. Sweet and his family are persecuted by the legal system, leading to the deaths of members of Sweet's family and the destruction of Sweet's career as a physician.

Between the World and Me is a 2015 nonfiction book written by Ta-Nehisi Coates and published by Spiegel & Grau. It is written as a letter to the author's teenage son about the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being Black in the United States. Coates recapitulates American history and explains to his son the "racist violence that has been woven into American culture." Coates draws from an abridged, autobiographical account of his youth in Baltimore, detailing the ways in which institutions like the school, the police, and even "the streets" discipline, endanger, and threaten to disembody black men and women. The work takes structural and thematic inspiration from James Baldwin's 1963 epistolary book The Fire Next Time. Unlike Baldwin, Coates sees white supremacy as an indestructible force, one that Black Americans will never evade or erase, but will always struggle against.

Black Like Me, first published in 1961, is a nonfiction book by white journalist John Howard Griffin recounting his journey in the Deep South of the United States, at a time when African-Americans lived under racial segregation. Griffin was a native of Mansfield, Texas, who had his skin temporarily darkened to pass as a black man. He traveled for six weeks throughout the racially segregated states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Georgia to explore life from the other side of the color line. Sepia Magazine financed the project in exchange for the right to print the account first as a series of articles.

Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America is a 1994 book by Tricia Rose. It was released in hardback on April 29, 1994 through Wesleyan University Press.

Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America is a 2016 non-fiction book written by Patrick Phillips investigating the 1912 Racial Conflict of Forsyth County, Georgia.

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America is a 2017 book by Richard Rothstein on the history of racial segregation in the United States. The book documents the history of state sponsored segregation stretching back to the late 1800s and exposes racially discriminatory policies put forward by most presidential administrations in that time, including liberal presidents like Franklin Roosevelt. The author argues that intractable segregation in America is the byproduct of explicit government policies at the local, state, and federal levels, also known as de jure segregation — and not happenstance, or de facto segregation. Among other discussions, the book provides a history of subsidized housing and discusses the phenomenons of white flight, blockbusting, and racial covenants, and their role in housing segregation. Rothstein wrote the book while serving as a research associate for the Economic Policy Institute, where he is now a Distinguished Fellow.

Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy is a non-fiction book by Talia Lavin. In it, Lavin describes a project of inventing online personae that allow her to meet and expose fascist white supremacists who gather in online chatrooms and websites; the book also traces the historical roots of these contemporary phenomena.

Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland is a 2019 non-fiction book written by Jonathan M. Metzl, a Nashville, Tennessee Vanderbilt University professor of sociology and psychiatry, based on research undertaken in Missouri, Tennessee and Kansas from 2013 to 2018.

The End of Policing is a 2017 book by the American sociologist Alex S. Vitale. The author argues for the eventual abolition of the police, to be replaced variously by decriminalization or with non-law enforcement approaches, depending on the crime. Vitale argues that the function of police is to uphold inequalities of class, gender, race or sexuality.

A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World is a 2007 book about economic history by Gregory Clark. It is published by Princeton University Press.

The Fire Next Time is a 1963 non-fiction book by James Baldwin, containing two essays: "My Dungeon Shook: Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation" and "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region of My Mind". The book's title comes from a couplet in "Mary Don't You Weep", a Negro spiritual:

Friday Black is the 2018 debut book by author Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Set in a dystopian near-future of twisted prosaic settings, the collection of short stories explores themes surrounding black identity as it relates to a range of contemporary social issues. The book enjoyed an overall positive reception, including the naming of Adjei-Brenyah as one of the "5 Under 35 Authors" for 2018, by the National Book Foundation.

From Bananas to Buttocks: The Latina Body in Popular Film and Culture is a 2007 non-fiction collection of essays that was edited by Myra Mendible. The book was published through the University of Texas Press and examines the roles and impact of depictions of Latina women in film and culture.

Noel Ignatiev was an American author, historian, and Marxist. He was best known for his work on race and social class and for his call to abolish "whiteness". Ignatiev was the co-founder of the New Abolitionist Society and co-editor of the journal Race Traitor, which promoted the idea that "treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity". He also wrote a book on antebellum Northern xenophobia against Irish immigrants, How the Irish Became White. His publisher billed him as "one of America's leading and most controversial historians".

The Invisible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Florida is a 2001 book about the Ku Klux Klan by Michael Newton.

The Japanese in Latin America is a 2004 book published by the University of Illinois Press about Japanese Latin Americans. The author is Daniel Masterson, while Sayaka Funada-Classen gave research assistance related to the Japanese language. The book discusses all of the major Japanese populations in Latin America and some other groups of Japanese diaspora who are not as well known. The Japanese populations of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay in South America, Cuba and the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean, Central America, and Mexico are all discussed in this book.

The Last Innocent White Man in America is a 1993 non-fiction book by liberal writer John Leonard.

Malign Neglect: Race, Crime, and Punishment in America is a book about race in the United States criminal justice system by Michael Tonry, a criminologist at the University of Minnesota. It was published in 1995 by Oxford University Press. In it, Tonry criticizes "tough-on-crime" policies in the United States, arguing that they have had disproportionately negative effects on the education and employment prospects of African-American men.

Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor is a book by Layla Saad published on January 28, 2020. Structured as a 28-day guide targeted at white readers, the book aims to aid readers in identifying the impact of white privilege and white supremacy over their lives. It contains quotations, terminology definitions and question prompts. It received positive critical reception, entering many bestseller lists in June 2020 after a surge in popularity in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and subsequent protests.

The Mis-Education of the Negro is a book originally published in 1933 by Dr. Carter G. Woodson. The thesis of Dr. Woodson's book is that blacks of his day were being culturally indoctrinated, rather than taught, in American schools. This conditioning, he claims, causes black people to become dependent and to seek out inferior places in the greater society of which they are a part. He challenges his readers to become autodidacts and to "do for themselves", regardless of what they were taught:History shows that it does not matter who is in power... those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they did in the beginning.

My Awakening: A Path to Racial Understanding is a 1998 autobiography written by David Duke. Duke's social philosophies are outlined, including the reasoning behind his advocacy of racial segregation.

Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire is a 2019 British book by the rapper Akala. Part memoir, the book provides race and class analysis of a variety of historical eras, in addition to contemporary British society. It received positive critical reception, in addition to nominations for the Jhalak Prize and James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and saw renewed attention following the May 2020 killing of George Floyd in America.

The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925) is an anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays on African and African-American art and literature edited by Alain Locke, who lived in Washington, DC, and taught at Howard University during the Harlem Renaissance. As a collection of the creative efforts coming out of the burgeoning New Negro Movement or Harlem Renaissance, the book is considered by literary scholars and critics to be the definitive text of the movement. "The Negro Renaissance" included Locke's title essay "The New Negro," as well as nonfiction essays, poetry, and fiction by writers including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Eric Walrond.

The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration: 1966-1999 is a 1999 non-fiction book by Ray Suarez. It describes the process of urban flight, as it has occurred in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s.

The Price of the Ticket is a collection of James Baldwin's writing that was published in 1985. It is a collection of essays spanning the years from 1948 to 1985. These are Baldwin's commentaries on race in America.

Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective is a book by Canadian psychologist and author J. Philippe Rushton. Rushton was a professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario for many years, and the head of the controversial Pioneer Fund. The first unabridged edition of the book came out in 1995, and the third, latest unabridged edition came out in 2000; abridged versions were also distributed.

Race: The Reality of Human Differences is an anthropology book, in which authors Vincent M. Sarich, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Frank Miele, senior editor of Skeptic Magazine, argue for the reality of race. The book was published by Basic Books in 2004. It disputes the statements of the PBS documentary Race: The Power of an Illusion aired in 2003.

William Z. Ripley published in 1899 The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study, which grew out of a series of lectures he gave at the Lowell Institute at Columbia in 1896. Ripley believed that race was critical to understanding human history, though his work afforded environmental and non-biological factors, such as traditions, a strong weight as well. He believed, as he wrote in the introduction to The Races of Europe, that:"Race, properly speaking, is responsible only for those peculiarities, mental or bodily, which are transmitted with constancy along the lines of direct physical descent from father to son. Many mental traits, aptitudes, or proclivities, on the other hand, which reappear persistently in successive populations may be derived from an entirely different source. They may have descended collaterally, along the lines of purely mental suggestion by virtue of mere social contact with preceding generations."

Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States is a book about color-blind racism in the United States by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a sociology professor at Duke University. It was originally published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2003, and has since been re-published four times, most recently in June 2017. The fourth edition was published soon after Barack Obama's election, and includes a new chapter on what Bonilla-Silva calls "the new racism". It was reviewed favorably in Science & Society, Urban Education, and Educational Studies.

Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is a 1970 book by Tom Wolfe. The book, Wolfe's fourth, is composed of two essays: "These Radical Chic Evenings", first published in June 1970 in New York magazine, about a gathering Leonard Bernstein held for the Black Panther Party, and "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers", about the response of many minorities to San Francisco's poverty programs. Both essays looked at the conflict between black rage and white guilt.

Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes, is a book written by German race researcher and Nazi Party member Hans Günther and published in 1922. The book strongly influenced the racial policy of the Nazi Party; Adolf Hitler was so impressed by the work that he made it the basis of his eugenics policy. The book had gone through six editions by 1926, and by 1945, more than half a million copies had been sold in Germany.

Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America is a 2009 non-fiction book by Rich Benjamin.

Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race is a 2019 book by Thomas Chatterton Williams. It was published by W. W. Norton & Company on October 15, 2019.

The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles is a nonfiction book by Scott Kurashige, published in 2008 by Princeton University Press. It discusses interactions between African Americans and Japanese Americans in the Los Angeles area from the 1920s through the 1990s. Kurashige argued that the distinct civil rights' movements of both the African-Americans and the Japanese Americans in Los Angeles were affected by the "shifting grounds of race"; aspects of their movements overlapped but they used distinct methods and strategies. On many occasions members of the two ethnic groups lived in proximity to one another. Japanese people focused on business as they were unable to participate in politics, since they were not U.S. citizens. African-Americans, who were U.S. citizens, were able to participate in politics while having less footing in the business world. The focus on black-Japanese relations is distinct from the usual tendency of race-related nonfiction works to focus on white-black relations. Kurashige emphasized the presence of "triangular relations" among blacks, Japanese, and the politically dominant white political center.

Smoky Night is a 1994 children's book by Eve Bunting. It tells the story of a Los Angeles riot and its aftermath through the eyes of a young boy named Daniel. The ongoing fires and looting force neighbors who previously disliked each other to work together to find their cats. In the end, the cats teach their masters how to get along. The book made the list of One Hundred Books that Shaped the Century compiled by the Staff at the School Library Journal. They added the book to the list as paving the way towards the genre of serious picture books. David Diaz's acrylic, collage-like illustration of the tale earned the book the 1995 Caldecott Medal.

The Souls of Black Folk is a 1903 work of American literature by W. E. B. Du Bois. It is a seminal work in the history of sociology and a cornerstone of African-American literature.

The Southern Mystique is a 1964 book by Howard Zinn that critiques current conceptions of racism in the North and South and the capacity for change in race relations. The book provoked considerable discussion at time of publication.

Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes is a 2008 children's picture book by Mem Fox and Helen Oxenbury. It is about babies, who, although they are from around the world, all share the common trait of having the same number of digits.

Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities by American sociologist Rogers Brubaker is an analysis of racial and gender identity, published by Princeton University Press in 2016 in the wake of the publicity around Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal.

Transnational Reproduction: Race, Kinship, and Commercial Surrogacy in India is a 2016 book by anthropologist Daisy Deomampo. The book analyzes transnational commercial surrogacy, focusing on the practices of doctors, surrogates, parents, and agents in India. The book proposes that the practice of transnational surrogacy reinforces social status distinctions through a shared "racial reproductive imaginary". Transnational Reproduction was reviewed in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Social Anthropology, Anthropological Quarterly, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, and Signs.

The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America is a book published in 2014 by two professors at Yale Law School, Amy Chua and her husband, Jed Rubenfeld. Amy Chua is also the author of the 2011 international bestseller, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History is a 2014 book by British writer and journalist Nicholas Wade, a retired science reporter for The New York Times. Wade argues that "human evolution has been recent, copious and regional" and that this has important implications for the social sciences. The book has been widely denounced by scientists.

The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy is a book by William Julius Wilson. The book was first published in 1987; a second edition was published in 2012. It examines the relationship between race and poverty in the United States, and the history of American inner-city ghettos. The broad-ranging book rejects both conservative and liberal arguments for the social conditions in American inner cities. In it, Wilson argues that the decline of such conditions is due to "basic economic changes which radically altered the occupational structure of the central cities," such as the withdrawal of large industries from inner cities during the 1970s. He also criticizes the architects of the War on Poverty during the 1960s, saying that they focused too much on poverty as a problem of environment rather than as a problem of "economic organization".

Vibration Cooking: Or, the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl is the 1970 debut book by Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor and combines recipes with storytelling. It was published by Doubleday. A second edition was published in 1986, and a third edition was published in 1992. The University of Georgia published another edition in 2011. Smart-Grosvenor went on to publish more cookbooks after Vibration Cooking. Vibration Cooking raised awareness about Gullah culture. Scholar Anne E. Goldman compared Vibration Cooking with Jessica Harris' Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons, arguing that, in both books, "the model of the self... is historicized by being developed in the context of colonialism." Scholar Lewis V. Baldwin recommended Vibration Cooking for its "interesting and brilliant insights on the social significance of food and eating and their relationship to 'place' in a southern context." The book inspired filmmaker Julie Dash to make the film Daughters of the Dust, which won awards at the Sundance Film Festival.

Waking Up White: And Finding Myself in the Story of Race is a 2014 non-fiction book about the subject of white privilege written by Debby Irving.

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy is a collection of essays by Ta-Nehisi Coates originally from The Atlantic magazine between 2008 and 2016 over the course of the American Barack Obama administration. It includes the titles that launched his career: "The Case for Reparations" and "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration". Each of the essays is introduced with the author's reflections.

Weapons of Math Destruction is a 2016 American book about the societal impact of algorithms, written by Cathy O'Neil. It explores how some big data algorithms are increasingly used in ways that reinforce preexisting inequality. It was longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction, has been widely reviewed, and won the Euler Book Prize.

White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism is a 2018 book written by Robin DiAngelo about race relations in the United States. An academic with experience in diversity training, DiAngelo coined the term "white fragility" in 2011 to describe any defensive instincts or reactions that a white person experiences when questioned about race or made to consider their own race. In White Fragility, DiAngelo views racism in the United States as systemic and often perpetuated unconsciously by individuals. She recommends against viewing racism as committed intentionally by "bad people".

White Girl Bleed a Lot: The Return of Racial Violence to America and How the Media Ignore It is a 2012 book by Colin Flaherty. It deals with race and crime in the United States, particularly the knockout game, violent flash mobs, and black-on-white crime. It is published by WorldNetDaily's WND Books imprint.

White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son is a book by activist and writer Tim Wise. It is a personal account examining white privilege and his conception of racism in American society through his experiences with his family and in his community. The title is based on the book Black Like Me written by John Howard Griffin.

White-Washing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society is a 2005 book arguing that racial discrimination is still evident on contemporary American society. The book draws on the fields of sociology, political science, economics, criminology, and legal studies. The authors argue that the inequalities which prevail in America today, especially with regard to wages, income, and access to housing and health care, are the effects of either cultural or individual failures.

Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love is a 2016 book by the French-Algerian political activist Houria Bouteldja, first published in English in 2017.

Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race is a 2017 debut book by British writer Reni Eddo-Lodge that was published by Bloomsbury Publishing.

World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability is a 2003 book by the American law professor Amy Chua. It is an academic study of ethnic and sociological divisions in the economic and political systems of various societies. The book discusses the concept of market-dominant minorities, defined as ethnic minority groups who, under given market conditions, tend to dominate economically, often significantly, over all other ethnic groups in the country.