A Trusted Friend in a Complicated World
Updated on Dec. 13, 2024
Most of us have only scratched the surface when it comes to understanding racism in America. These books about racism can help you gain further insight and become a true ally and anti-racist.
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When it comes to understanding race and social justice in this country, authors of the most prominent books about racism have a message: Skip the announcements about your good intentions and instead settle in to do the hard work. Investing in our understanding of systemic racism allows us to reflect on our own behavior and learn to do better. It’s also important to realize this work is not the responsibility of any one race—it must be shared by everyone who wants a better and more fair country.
Our list of the best books on racism, culture and allyship is a good place to start if you truly want to understand the history and underlying context of racism in America. Here, you’ll find thought-provoking, informative nonfiction books by a variety of scholars, historians and writers, including well-known Black authors. These works have won numerous awards, from Pulitzers to National Book Critics Circle awards, and sparked national conversations that have changed the way we look at racism.
We also talked to social-justice leaders, advocates, authors and people in the book world supporting diverse representation in literature to find out their picks for the best books about racism, so you’re getting personalized recommendations straight from the experts. Keep scrolling for a curated list of anti-racism books everyone needs to read.
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For fans of: The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Winner of the 2015 National Book Award, this anti-racism book has been called the bible for the Black Lives Matter movement. In Between the World and Me, journalist and McArthur Genius Grant recipient Ta-Nehisi Coates creates a new lens for understanding how the bodies of Black women and men have been oppressed through slavery and segregation and how today’s systems widen the gulf between people and exacerbate tensions. In this blend of history and memoir, penned as a loving letter and warning to his son, Coates uses his own coming-of-age journey to shine a light on our history, address our present challenges and offer a road map for living within a system that is, by design, unfair.
For fans of:Â Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
Books by women of color about racism are necessary to examine U.S. culture through an intersectional lens. After all, women of color hold multiple identities and therefore face unique challenges that White women or men of color may not understand. In Thick, Tressie McMillan Cottom analyzes how Black misogyny is perpetuated in everything from the cultural concept of beauty to Black elite circles, ultimately arguing that it’s well past time to start actively listening to Black women. It’s no wonder this collection of brilliant, provocative and witty feminist essays was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award.
“Professor Tressie McMillan Cottom is one of my favorite current thinkers on just about any topic, and her 2019 collection, Thick: And Other Essays, is a wonderful introduction to her writing on race and its intersections with beauty, class and politics in the United States,” says Goodreads senior editor Sharon Hsu. “Do yourself a favor, and don’t skip over the (extensive) end notes, which provide a treasure trove of further reading material!”Â
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For fans of: Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall
If you’re not sure what the term microaggressions means or what it’s like to experience them as a Black woman, author Austin Channing Brown, who’s also the resident director and multicultural liaison for Calvin College, lays it out for you in her book I’m Still Here. She learned that her parents chose her name, in part, so that potential employers would think she was a White man. This story follows the author’s journey to self-worth as she writes about her Christian, middle-class upbringing, her attendance in predominantly White schools and the jobs in which she was the only or one of the few Black women in her workplace. Though published in 2018, it catapulted to bestseller status after the 2020 murder of George Floyd.Â
For fans of: The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson and The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson follows up her highly acclaimed book The Warmth of Other Suns with Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, an insightful look at the role of terror and cruelty in creating and maintaining America’s racial hierarchy. Earning accolades from the Los Angeles Times, the National Book Critics Circle and many others, this meticulously researched 2020 book is also one of Oprah’s Book Club picks.
In Caste, Wilkerson compares America’s caste system to the “unseen skeleton” in an old house—and says it’s as central to its inner workings as the studs and joists we can’t see inside the buildings we call home. She makes the case that although people will continue to be born into superior or subordinate castes, we must respond differently once awakened to this inequity and fight for humanity.Â
For fans of: The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin and Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward
Novelist and two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward compiled the 2017 anthology The Fire This Time, featuring searing essays and poems about race from some important contemporary Black poets and writers, including Carol Anderson, Jericho Brown, Edwidge Danticat, Kevin Young, Claudia Rankine and Honorée Jeffers. Positioned as a follow-up of sorts to James Baldwin’s 1963 classic The Fire Next Time, this book about racism acknowledges how far we’ve come since that seminal text was written but notes that we are indeed a long way from a “post-racial society” and lays out a vision for a better future.Â
For fans of: Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong
Books by Asian American authors provide an additional perspective on racial identity, immigration and discrimination in the United States, and Elizabeth Miki Brina’s 2021 memoir is no exception. As the daughter of a white Vietnam War veteran and an Okinawan war bride who could not speak English, Brina grew up in the predominantly White suburbs, internalizing anti-Asian racism and turning her resentment toward her mother and Okinawa itself. Through vulnerable prose, she highlights the cross-cultural divide U.S.-born children of immigrants face, as well as the complex history of colonization and oppression in Okinawa.
“Speak, Okinawa is one of the most powerful memoirs I’ve ever read,” says mental health advocate and writer Michelle Yang, author of the memoir Phoenix Girl: How a Fat Asian with Bipolar Found Love. “I learned so much about Okinawa while being completely enthralled by Brina’s personal story of identity, what it means to be a mixed-race Asian American woman and overcome internalized racism.”Â
For fans of: Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis and Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson
The revolutionary 2010 book The New Jim Crow is key to understanding the oppressive judicial system that has used the war on drugs to target and oppress Black men and communities of color with almost surgical precision. Legal scholar Michelle Alexander lays out in intricate detail how the criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control and relegates millions to permanent second-class status. She argues that we are far removed from an era of colorblindness and should therefore stop saying “I don’t see color.” Our racial caste system hasn’t ended; it’s merely been redesigned. Alexander makes it clear that nothing short of a nationwide social movement will remake our unjust criminal justice system.Â
For fans of: What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma by Stephanie Foo and The Body Is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor
As a young boy, Resmaa Menakem would sit with his grandmother, rubbing her thickened, pained hands to give her some relief. She’d explain how her hands got that way from picking cotton while working in the fields, starting at age 4. These experiences launched the author’s awakening of how America’s racial divisions result in generational trauma.
What makes Menakem’s 2017 book, My Grandmother’s Hands, one of the more intriguing nonfiction books about racism is his perspective as a therapist. He explains how the daily pain of discrimination has a cumulative, damaging effect on the minds and bodies of people of color and that only when we all acknowledge how the hue of our skin influences everything—from the decisions we make to the paths open to us—and confront White supremacy head-on can America begin healing.
For fans of: White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson
In this 2018 New York Times bestseller, sociologist and anti-racist academic Robin DiAngelo explores how White people react when their assumptions about race are challenged and why those reactions make progress so difficult. DiAngelo helps us understand that racism is not just expressed by “bad people” and defines “White fragility” as a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering defensive moves like anger, guilt, silence and a desire to flee the stress-inducing situation. Whether intended or not, these reactions curtail honest conversations and ensure that nothing ever changes. White Fragility explores how people can discuss racism more effectively and be true allies in the fight against it.Â
For fans of: So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
Psychologist and educator Beverly Daniel Tatum, PhD, first published this bestselling book about racism more than 20 years ago. This 2017 update adds to the conversation with more recent events, including the elections of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Today, as debates around race become increasingly polarized and tensions continue to flare, the psychology of racism is even more relevant. In Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, Tatum argues that self-segregation in high school can be fixed only if we are able to talk across racial lines. This “straight talk” may be difficult, but it’s essential if we have any hope of moving forward—practical advice that makes this a great book for teens and adults.Â
For fans of: White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo
“I’m not the least bit racist” is a common rebuttal to being identified as a racist. But even if that statement is somewhat true, it’s still insufficient, argues author Ibram X. Kendi, director of Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research. In his 2019 bestseller, How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi explains that not being racist is a neutral stance, and in the fight for a fairer world, neutrality isn’t good enough. We must choose a side and lean into the work of anti-racism, actively attempting to dismantle the systems that have promoted inequality and inequity for far too long and taking a long, hard look at ourselves to understand how our implicit biases affect our thoughts and actions.Â
For fans of: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison and Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves, edited by Glory Edim
It should come as no surprise that mainstream art and media is still inherently White and elitist. In 2022’s How to Read Now, Elaine Castillo breaks down the politics and ethics of reading. Whether it’s how we read literature or watch movies and television, Castillo urges us to question, decolonize and diversify the art we consume.
“For readers who are ready to engage more critically with cliches like ‘art builds empathy‘ or ‘representation matters,’ I can think of no better book than Elaine Castillo’s How to Read Now, which is less about reading literature and more about reading, well, the world itself,” Hsu says. “Get ready to be a little uncomfortable; Castillo’s analysis is fierce and fearless but deeply rewarding for those who keep an open mind.”Â
For fans of: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
When educator and activist Geoffrey Canada talks about transforming kids and the spaces around them, he speaks from experience. As a young boy growing up in the South Bronx, he learned that the conventions of the neighborhood streets were ranked in ascending orders of violence: fist, stick, knife and gun. His 1995 memoir of the same name, Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun (which was later adapted into a nonfiction graphic novel), points the way to saving all the children who grew up like him in abject poverty and surrounded by violence. His formula is simple: In order to change these children, you must change their environments and teach them to change their own worlds.
For fans of: Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era by Jerry Mitchell and Wilmington’s Lie by David Zucchino
This 2004 memoir recounts author Timothy Tyson’s childhood growing up as the son of a White liberal Methodist minister in a small North Carolina town riven by conflict and racism. As a historian, Tyson deconstructs the revisionist history of the Civil War, which seeks to recast treason as patriotism and whitewash the brutality of slavery. Beautifully written and, at times, laugh-out-loud funny, Blood Done Sign My Name is one of the most powerful books about racism in America, and goes a long way toward providing an understanding of the uniquely American struggle for racial equality.Â
For fans of: Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis
Not many people know the actual story behind the Black Lives Matter movement, which started as a simple but powerful social media hashtag in 2013 in the aftermath of the murder of teen Trayvon Martin. Now, Black Lives Matter has chapters all around North America fighting for policy changes against racial inequality and police brutality. In her 2018 memoir, When They Call You a Terrorist, co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors walks us through this journey.
“I love the power of memoir to tell a story that resonates beyond one individual’s experience,” says Tania Israel, author, psychology professor and associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion at the University of California. “In this book, the authors share how Khan-Cullors’s life as a Black woman in America moved her to found Black Lives Matter. Readers will learn what inspired this movement and why it matters.”
For fans of: A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan
Before he was a Supreme Court Justice, the solicitor general or the lead attorney in Brown v. Board of Education, Thurgood Marshall was a fearless courtroom attorney who risked his life to defend Black men accused of horrific crimes—and he changed the course of the Civil Rights Movement. Winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King recounts Marshall’s time in Florida defending four young Black men accused of raping a 17-year-old white woman. This compelling 2013 book focuses on an important yet often-overlooked moment in American history and the case that forged Marshall’s legacy as Mr. Civil Rights.Â
For fans of: Becoming by Michelle Obama
On its face, Born a Crime is the story of a dirt-poor boy who makes good. On a deeper level, this 2016 memoir paints a poignant and sometimes painful picture of a biracial man struggling to find his place in a society where his very existence as the son of an interracial couple is a crime. Comedian and former Daily Show host Trevor Noah offers hilariously brilliant insights into the world of apartheid as a construct at odds with itself and bound to collapse under its own nonsensical weight. In that respect, it is one of the more personal books about racism on this list; despite that, it is also one of the funniest books of all time.Â
For fans of: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light a shameful and little-known chapter in our country’s history: the Age of neoslavery that thrived in the South from the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Published in 2008, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Slavery by Another Name uncovers the lost stories of enslaved people and their descendants, who tasted freedom only to be re-enslaved again in a cruel system of new laws and regulations aimed at Black people. They were then pushed into forced labor or, in other cases, simply trafficked and sold into slavery.
Blackmon also calls out the businesses and enterprises that profited from neoslavery. Ultimately, the book illuminates both the tragedy of holding human chattel and the corruption that flows from such inhumanity.
For fans of: Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King
David Zucchino, a contributing writer and foreign correspondent for the New York Times, received the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for this riveting account of America’s first and only successful armed overthrow of a legally elected government. Published in 2020, Wilmington’s Lie recounts the bloody 1898 campaign of violence and intimidation by White supremacists against a thriving Black middle class and a local government that included Black aldermen, police officers and magistrates. This travesty is key to understanding that the post-Reconstruction era was a land of broken promises and brutal oppression for African Americans.Â
For fans of: Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
In the 1965 book The Autobiography of Malcolm X, civil rights activist and Muslim leader Malcolm X recounts his journey from a prison cell to Mecca, describing his transition from hoodlum to minister. He clearly spells out the injustice and anger that results from racism in America while also being brutally honest about his own failings and misgivings. This autobiography defines both the movement and the evolution of Malcolm X from “the angriest Black man in America” to someone who recognized the brotherhood of all mankind. Like other books about racism, this is essential reading for moving beyond empathy and actually seeing racism through the eyes of those most affected by it.Â
For fans of: Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum
While acknowledging that talking about race is difficult, Ijeoma Oluo has written a tutorial for anyone who wants to go there nonetheless. In frank, blunt language, So You Want to Talk About Race guides readers of all races through everything from intersectionality to affirmative action to White privilege. It is the only way we can have honest, productive conversations about race and racism, she asserts. Her 2018 book gets to the core of how pervasive racism is in nearly every part of American life, and it dismantles the grievances and blind spots that impede clear, constructive dialogue. The New York Times bestseller also helps readers understand the psychology of racism and prejudice.
“Do you have questions about race? This book has answers!” says Israel. “Oluo models how to teach about race effectively and talk about race approachably. Neither overly theoretical nor simplistic, the material is marvelously accessible. The author offers insights and life experience demonstrating how race affects us in the real world.”
For fans of: Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond and Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi
This compassionate and scholarly 2017 work diagnoses the past policies that led to systematic racial segregation and the disparities we still find in many of the nation’s metropolitan areas today. The United States did not arrive at this current moment in time by happenstance: In The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein’s meticulous research lays bare the specific policy choices and resources that were used to get us here, and it asserts that government resources are essential if we are ever going to change course. As a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and a fellow at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Thurgood Marshall Institute, he certainly knows what he’s talking about. This book about White privilege highlights inequities you may have never noticed.Â
For fans of: Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon
Historian Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told asserts that contrary to popular belief, the growth of slavery in the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War actually led to the development of the United States’s prosperous capitalist system. Compared with the burgeoning industrialism of the 19th century, the system of slavery in the South is usually seen as backward and inefficient. But Baptist takes a different stance: that slavery was crucial to America’s economic growth.
Told through slave narratives and the stories of those who escaped, in addition to plantation logs, news articles, political writing and other records of the time, this 2016 book gives readers an alternate view of the role slavery played in the development of the American economic system.
For fans of: The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein
Published in 2021, How the Word Is Passed is a gorgeously written and meticulously researched look at historical sites that are fundamental to the history of slavery and therefore fundamental to the history of the United States.
“Every monument has a story, and Clint Smith travels to some of the most famous United States monuments to reckon with the United States’s legacy of slavery,” says Booktokker Carmen Alvarez. “The underlying question of this work is: Who deserves the monuments we build as a society? As both a journalist and poet, Clint’s beautifully lyrical prose and journalistic savvy for detail attempt to answer this question, as well as examine the collective memory monuments.”Â
For fans of: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
In 1989, Bryan Stevenson founded the Equal Justice Initiative, which provides legal representation to those who most need it, including those who couldn’t otherwise afford it and those who may have been wrongly convicted. Published in 2013, Just Mercy recounts the organization’s beginnings through a successful campaign to challenge the cruel practice of sentencing minors to life in prison.
Central to Stevenson’s understanding of mercy and justice was the case of Walter McMillian, a Black man who was not only given the death penalty for murder, although he maintained he was innocent, but also placed on death row in 1987, before the trial even began. Part biography, part memoir, Just Mercy is a compelling call to action against mass incarceration. “Proximity has taught me some basic and humbling truths, including this vital lesson: Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done,” Stevenson writes, explaining why he does this work and never gives up hope.Â
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At Reader’s Digest, we’ve been sharing our favorite books for over 100 years. We’ve worked with bestselling authors including Susan Orlean, Janet Evanovich and Alex Haley, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning Roots grew out of a project funded by and originally published in the magazine. Through Fiction Favorites (formerly Select Editions and Condensed Books), Reader’s Digest has been publishing anthologies of abridged novels for decades. We’ve worked with some of the biggest names in fiction, including James Patterson, Ruth Ware, Kristin Hannah and more. The Reader’s Digest Book Club, helmed by Books Editor Tracey Neithercott, introduces readers to even more of today’s best fiction by upcoming, bestselling and award-winning authors. For this piece on books about racism, Melba Newsome tapped her experience as an award-winning journalist with more than two decades of experience to ensure that all information is accurate and offers the best possible advice to readers. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.
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