100 books like Black and British

The opening of this book about how public transport systems have been designed to get men where they need to go (to the city center for work) but not women where we often go (all over neighborhoods caring for people) just blew my mind.

I loved how Criado Perez challenges so many things we take for granted – like why you can go out with a client after work and expense your steak and drinks but not the babysitter you have to hire. Her explanations of how the world is basically designed for men helped me understand why the voice control system in my car never seems to understand me and why there’s always a line for the ladies’ room.

When it comes to the literature relating to social justice, class, race, and gender tend to take the lion’s share of interest and coverage.

This means that ageism, which can have devastating effects on older people's lives is often left out of the picture. And, even when it is covered, it tends to be addressed in theoretical and policy terms, with little or nothing said about the practical challenges of tackling ageism on a day-to-day basis.

This book is the clear exception. The author is evidently a passionate champion of treating older people with dignity as part of an overall strategy of anti-ageist practice. Clearly written, with a lovely blend of theory and practice, this is a gem of a book.

After football and music, my first love was languages. From an early age I became fascinated with how language works and how significant it is in shaping social life and interpersonal relationships.

That fascination still remains, but what I find particularly interesting (and significant) is the relationship between language and social justice. Unfortunately, this has been hijacked by the simplistic ‘political correctness’ approach that seeks to simply ban certain words. The reality is far more complex and nuanced than this, and so a much more sophisticated approach is needed.

That’s where this excellent book comes in. It provides a very helpful analysis of how language and society interact in a variety of ways. 

I’ve long been suspicious of the medical model of mental health.

My own work with people struggling with mental health challenges convinced me that simply regarding them as ‘mentally ill’ and in need of medication was not helpful. The reality I encountered was far more multidimensional, with psychological, social, and spiritual matters being just as important as the biological, if not more so.

This edited collection brings together critical analyses of the medical model from a wide range of authors. The basic message is that we need to rethink conceptions of mental illness and recognize that there is immense potential for discrimination and oppression if these wider aspects are not taken into consideration.

Anyone who doubts the wisdom of the medical model will find this book very informative.

As some reactions to the first season of the television show Bridgerton have made clear, many people need to believe that Black people first arrived in Britain after World War II, and that Britain + the past = whites only. But it wasn’t so!

Black people have been British, and part of British history, for hundreds of years. I’m embarrassed how little I learned about Black Britons in studying British history in college and graduate school; this book has been a fantastic way to learn more.

A. Sivanandan was a key intellectual of the Asian and African-Caribbean working-class movements in Britain during their insurgent heyday from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. The essays collected in this volume, written between 1982 and 1990, are about how those movements were disaggregated and undermined – laying the ground for today’s racist Britain. The son of a rural postal clerk from the hinterland of a minor colonial territory, Sivanandan fled Sri Lanka after the anti-Tamil pogroms of 1958 and arrived in London as a refugee. The socialism the book advocates is poetic, loving, joyful, and centered upon the experiences of Third World peoples. Not a single sentence of Communities of Resistance is clunky or lacking in feeling.

If there is any one book that has changed the way I view early modern British history, Kaufman has written that book.

Kaufman has written a series of mini-biographies here of Black residents of Britain during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that predate Britain’s involvement in the slave trade and demonstrate just how wide-ranging the Black British experience was during this period. The book challenges many preconceptions, especially the association of Blacks with slavery that really only emerged in England after the Tudor period.

The stories of the individuals featured in this book have much to teach us, not only about this early period, but about the Black contribution to British history in general and the need for historians to write them back into that history.

In this thought-provoking book, Onyeka Nubia encourages us to re-examine Tudor concepts of race and ethnicity in Tudor (and Stuart) England without assumptions based on post-colonial narratives. What emerges is a nuanced picture of complex interactions, attitudes, and prejudices. As well as studying the writings of Tudor scholars, theologians, and authors, Nubia looks at the lives of individual Africans in England, showing that they weren’t “strangers” but lived as part of English communities - whether in cosmopolitan London parishes such as St Botolph without Aldgate, or in rural villages.

This book is slim as a Hanzo knife and its sentences cut just as precisely.

It comes in at a scant 72-page read, so those of us trying to fit in a great read between all our other obligations should take a look at this scathing look at the microaggressions endured in a male-dominated corporate environment.  

This book gets into the mind of a Black British woman; overqualified, impeccably educated, and yet still somehow made to feel inadequate through multiple tiny attacks on her character and her competence. Her white, well-to-do fiancé wants to marry her, and this marriage could be a way to lessen the impact of the toxic masculine environment surrounding her, but our nameless protagonist can’t be sure if there is true love in the union or if it is just a rebellious addition to her fiancé’s heretofore bland pedigree.

Told in a series of vignettes, Assembly… show more.

This novel is the story of Leonard. The book starts with a focus on Jamaica but most of the story is about life after Leonard arrives in the UK with his mother to join his estranged father, who left Jamaica when Leonard was a baby. I found this to be a thought-provoking but easy-to-read historical novel about leaving the home you know where you feel loved and starting again somewhere that doesn’t feel so warm and welcoming. The story is about family, the Windrush generation and the history of Jamaica and Great Britain. An interesting read drizzled with Benjamin Zephaniah’s poetry.