We’ve got six books that will help you better understand antiracism and how to put it into practice.
The concept has been around for decades, but anti-racism really made its way into the mainstream consciousness in 2020. The deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others awakened many Americans to the systemic racism that persists in this country and left many people asking what they could do to help the nation inch closer to justice.
As a philosophy, anti-racism advocates for not just tolerance, but action. To be an anti-racist you must support the ideas and policies affirming that “the racial groups are equals in all their apparent differences — that there is nothing right or wrong with any racial group,” Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, the author of How to Be an Antiracist, writes in his book.
But understanding anti-racism and the ways in which we can put it into practice in our everyday lives isn’t simple. So we’ve collected a few books, recommended by Dr. Kendi and other leading organizations and educators, to help get you started.
Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century
Dr. Kendi recommended Fatal Invention by Dorothy Roberts, writing in the New York Times that “no book destabilized my fraught notions of racial distinction and hierarchy — the belief that each race had different genes, diseases, and natural abilities — more than this vigorous critique of the ‘biopolitics of race.’”
So You Want to Talk About Race
This New York Times bestseller by Ijeomo Oluo lays out how anyone can start having constructive conversations around race. It’s a favorite of several activists and educators, including Britt Hawthorne.
How to Be an Antiracist
Dr. Kendi’s book has become one of the most popular books to emerge in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement — and for good reason. In simple prose, he lays bare how tragically flawed conversations about race are in the U.S., what anti-racism, and why it must be taught.
The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Make of Modern Urban America
Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s 2010 book traces the historical roots and racist policies that have culminated in the shockingly disproportionate incarceration of Black people in this country and how it’s contributed to the ugly stereotypes alive and well today.
Me and White Supremacy
This is an essential workbook that helps people really work through and examine their own racist tendencies and privilege.
Locking Up Our Own
James Forman Jr. takes an in-depth look at how Black lawmakers, police chiefs, and others in positions of power contributed through “tough-on-crime policies” to the mass incarceration of Black Americans in this powerful book, Dr. Kendi writes.
