My favorite books about what race is (and is not)

The Sum of Us lays out clearly why antiracism is helpful to everyone. We are all victims in a web of racism that divides us and makes for a weaker social fabric. McGee uses both data and stories to explain why racism hurts everyone. She tells stories with data and personal experiences. One story centers on repeated draining of municipal pools in the 1960s because whites did not want to share pools with African Americans. The result, of course, is that nobody now gets to go for a swim on a hot day. Instead of seeing life as a “zero sum game” in which what one group gets what another does not, McGee argues for a solidarity dividend.  

In 1939 it was well-accepted that Europe was home to many different races. Jacobson tells the story of how, after the Holocaust, different ethnic and national groups slowly because members of the “Caucasian” or White race. Jacobson uses a variety of sources, including those from popular culture to tell the story of how these marginal groups, such as the Irish, Poles, Italians, and of course Ashkenazi Jews, became honorary white. This is a highly readable book about the history of racism against some ethnic Europeans. More so, it is an important book for showing how racial categories change through time and how being white is neither stable nor a given. Rather, it is a club that policies entry.  

Fatal Invention is a masterfully researched book on the faulty science of biological race. Roberts shows how race continues to be re-invented as somehow in the skin, bones and genes. Using extensive and wide ranging sources from history and genomics to medicine and business, Roberts shows how the notion of biological race is continually reinvented to support existing hierarchies. Roberts explains clearly the fundamental flaws of race science and what is at stake in believing that race is somehow genetically a real think. A must read to understand how racism, rather than race, gets into our bodies and souls.  

The late Stephen Gould is as important as anyone in the last fifty years in showing how the idea of biological race has been used to support racism. Gould clearly dismantles this idea in this book. It is both a tour de force of science and scientific history, so well written that one forgets one is reading a scholarly book. Gould takes apart key moments in the history of race science, not just to show where they were biased, but how those biases and blind spots persist into the present. This is the definitive book on why biological race is a myth and why there is no hierarchy of intelligence by race.  

Superior by science journalist Angela Saini is based on source materials. In addition, it is animated by interviews with key scientists involved in the struggle to end race science. Saini weaves together stories that get at the more intimate details of, on the one hand, the persistence and continual reinvention of race and race science, and on the other, the work of individuals including Jonathan Marks and Jay Kaufman to move us all to better understanding why racism, not biological race, is the cause of inequalities in health and wealth. Superior is the most readable of all the books that focus on race and human variation.