The best books on racism in the USA

This book is really exciting and appealed to my love for espionage, political intrigue, and all things dystopian. Although it’s a political commentary, the book is a suspenseful narrative following an ordinary man who begins to peel back the curtain of his society and the assumptions he has made of it. While the book opened my eyes to the potential of abuse of nations and governments, it also taught me of the dangers of indoctrination that can sometimes even be apolitical. Most of all, Winston Smith to this day is one of my most beloved characters for whom my heart broke continually for in this book.

When I first read this book, I thought “This is the book I’ve been waiting for!” Focused on New York and Philadelphia at the beginning of the 20th century, it explores the intimate lives of Black women who have been largely invisible in Black women’s history: girls and women who did not fit the definitions of Black “respectability.” Using sources in ways creative and thrilling, it explores how those women imagined a “free life” within a world shaped by racism, sexual abuse, single motherhood, and economic insecurity. Sometimes their new forms of intimacy involved “ordinary refusals”—to follow the law, to do menial labor, to submit—while at other times their challenges to Victorian beliefs and practices involved song, luxury, and sex. Hartman’s book is a gorgeous read.

Arguably, no single person has shaped the built environment of New York City as much as Robert Moses. To some, he was an evil dictator imposing his will on the urban fabric; while to others, he was the man who got things done. In his four-decade career, Moses oversaw the buildings of beaches, parks, highways, bridges, tunnels, public housing, slum clearance projects, and World Fairs. Caro’s work is a detailed chronicle of Moses’ life and projects. Five decades later, one can quibble with Caro’s conclusions, but it remains a jaw-dropping tome about how Moses reshaped New York, for good and for bad.