Here are 100 books that Burgers in Blackface fans have personally recommended if you like
Burgers in Blackface.
Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.
I love to eat and want to understand why we make the food choices we do—when we are lucky enough to have choices. I have an insatiable appetite for books that examine the underbelly of food traditions and policies. I have been studying the relationship between food and racism for over fifteen years, and I am still not even close to full.
Marcia Chatelain documents the surprising but significant role that McDonald’s played in the civil rights movement. As community hubs, its outlets were sites of protests and bombings. Later, Black franchise owners sued the company for race discrimination. The Golden Arches symbolize the hope and exploitation of Black capitalism. This Pulitzer Prize-winning book is a smorgasbord of stunning detail, and I’m lovin’ it.
Just as The Color of Law provided a vital understanding of redlining and racial segregation, Marcia Chatelain's Franchise investigates the complex interrelationship between black communities and America's largest, most popular fast food chain. Taking us from the first McDonald's drive-in in San Bernardino to the franchise on Florissant Avenue in Ferguson, Missouri, in the summer of 2014, Chatelain shows how fast food is a source of both power-economic and political-and despair for African Americans. As she contends, fast food is, more than ever before, a key battlefield in the fight for racial justice.
I love to eat and want to understand why we make the food choices we do—when we are lucky enough to have choices. I have an insatiable appetite for books that examine the underbelly of food traditions and policies. I have been studying the relationship between food and racism for over fifteen years, and I am still not even close to full.
In the 2020s, McDonald’s sells celebrity meals curated by rappers Saweetie, Cardi B, and Travis Scott. Popeye’s touts a Megan Thee Stallion ‘hottie’ sauce. These blatant appeals to Black consumers gloss over fast food’s racist origin as a business built by and for white people. Naa Oyo A. Kwate vividly exposes this stomach-turning history in a book filled with fantastic images and riveting stories.
The long and pernicious relationship between fast food restaurants and the African American community
Today, fast food is disproportionately located in Black neighborhoods and marketed to Black Americans through targeted advertising. But throughout much of the twentieth century, fast food was developed specifically for White urban and suburban customers, purposefully avoiding Black spaces. In White Burgers, Black Cash, Naa Oyo A. Kwate traces the evolution in fast food from the early 1900s to the present, from its long history of racist exclusion to its current damaging embrace of urban Black communities.
Fast food has historically been tied to the country's…
I love to eat and want to understand why we make the food choices we do—when we are lucky enough to have choices. I have an insatiable appetite for books that examine the underbelly of food traditions and policies. I have been studying the relationship between food and racism for over fifteen years, and I am still not even close to full.
Threatening people with starvation is an effective, if cruel, political tool that seems like a relic of the distant past. But Bobby J. Smith II uncovers the unsavory story of how, in 1963, a Mississippi county’s board of supervisors put up a food blockade during a particularly freezing Delta winter to stop Black people from voting. Resistance spread across the country, inspiring Martin Luther King, Jr. and others to collect food and call for an end to this threat to democracy.
This book unearths a food story buried deep within the soil of American civil rights history. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and oral histories, Bobby J. Smith II re-examines the Mississippi civil rights movement as a period when activists expanded the meaning of civil rights to address food as integral to sociopolitical and economic conditions. For decades, white economic and political actors used food as a weapon against Black sharecropping communities in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, but members of these communities collaborated with activists to transform food into a tool of resistance. Today, Black youth are building a food justice movement…
I love to eat and want to understand why we make the food choices we do—when we are lucky enough to have choices. I have an insatiable appetite for books that examine the underbelly of food traditions and policies. I have been studying the relationship between food and racism for over fifteen years, and I am still not even close to full.
This book starts with an unforgettable vignette from a silent film produced in 1900: an alligator swallows an unsuspecting Black child while he is fishing by the river. A man comes to the rescue, slitting the gator open and lifting the child out of its stomach. From there, Tompkins shows how eating culture became a part of racist ideology in the United States. I gobbled this fascinating book up in just a few sittings.
Winner of the 2013 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize presented by the American Studies Association
Winner of the 2013 Association for the Study of Food and Society Book Award
Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series
The act of eating is both erotic and violent, as one wholly consumes the object being eaten. At the same time, eating performs a kind of vulnerability to the world, revealing a fundamental interdependence between the eater and that which exists outside her body. Racial Indigestion explores the links between food, visual and literary culture in the nineteenth-century United States to reveal how…
We are two historians who have been writing together for about a decade now, first on project related to race relations after WWI, then on a book about debates over the enlistment age in nineteenth century America. Rebecca teaches at UCSD while Frances works at the University of Sydney in Australia, but we regularly meet online to write together and talk about our favorite new books.
Who gets to claim “childhood innocence” and the protections that come with this designation? Certainly not Black children in nineteenth-century America, according to Robin Bernstein. They were instead pictured as “pickaninnies”—comic figures who felt no pain, whatever mischief befell them. This book won a slew of awards for good reason: reading the racial ‘scripts’ in seemingly innocuous cultural products like children’s picture books, dolls, and knickknacks, Bernstein reveals how race-making hides in plain sight.
2013 Book Award Winner from the International Research Society in Children's Literature
2012 Outstanding Book Award Winner from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education
2012 Winner of the Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize presented by the New England American Studies Association
2012 Runner-Up, John Hope Franklin Publication Prize presented by the American Studies Association
2012 Honorable Mention, Distinguished Book Award presented by the Society for the Study of American Women Writers
Dissects how "innocence" became the exclusive province of white children, covering slavery to the Civil Rights era
Beginning in the mid nineteenth century in America, childhood became synonymous…
I grew up in an era of feminism but did not necessarily see opportunities outside of the traditional female roles. I became a teacher, mother, and now grandmother, and I am more passionate than ever about the challenges of being a woman, especially in this strident time in America. I think it is imperative that women stand up for themselves and fulfill the dreams that some of our ancestors were not able to achieve. We should never move backward in terms of allowing all citizens to strive toward their pursuit of happiness. Consequently, I have gravitated towards books with strong women protagonists in my reading selections.
This one captured my heart completely, and I sobbed at the end. Although dystopian, it is a timely story about the consequences of racism, oppression, and fear in America. The main characters are a boy and his missing mother. His quest to find her will touch you deeply.
I love emotionally gripping books that carry a deep message or meaning, and this one does that beautifully.
THE REESE WITHERSPOON BOOK CLUB PICK THE PANDORA BOOK CLUB PICK A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A hottest book for THE TIMES, DAILY MAIL, THE INDEPENDENT, VOGUE, STYLIST, TIME MAGAZINE, EVENING STANDARD, THE I and THE IRISH MAIL ON SUNDAY.
'It's impossible not to be moved' Stephen King, New York Times
'Thought-provoking, heart-wrenching...I was so invested in the future of this mother and son, and I can't wait to hear what you think of this deeply suspenseful story!' Reese Witherspoon (Reese's Book Club October '22 Pick)
From the #1 bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere, comes one of the most…
I came to genderqueer histories searching for a reflection of myself that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment (the rural American South). Early on, I thought I’d found it—historical figures, both real and fictional, who shared my gender identity. But as I’ve continued to research, I’ve realized that the reflections of history are less a mirror image, more a reflection in water—fluid and distorting. Genderqueer people throughout history use different language for their identities, navigate different social and family systems, and express their gender in different ways. In the space created by this difference, I’ve begun to understand my gender as a thing that changes, too, across space and time.
An Unkindness of Ghosts opens with the dedication, “To my mother and her mother all the way back to Eve.” While the other four books on this list emphasize the queer and genderqueer people we might choose to recognize as ancestors, this book focuses on Aster’s relationship with her mother, revealing the way that biological family can, in certain instances, support and affirm genderqueer identity.
"Harrowing and beautiful, this is SF at its best: showing the possible future but warning of the danger of bringing old prejudices and cruelties to that new world. While a story about enslaved people in space could be a one-note polemic, the fully rounded characters bring nuance and genuine pathos to this amazing debut." --Library Journal, Starred Review
"Solomon debuts with a raw distillation of slavery, feudalism, prison, and religion that kicks like rotgut moonshine...Stunning." --Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"Infused with the spirit of Octavia Butler and loaded with meaning for the present day, An Unkindness of Ghosts will appeal…
I've benefited from (or perhaps been cursed by) a diverse life. I've lived and worked in six countries on three continents. I've been an English teacher, copywriter, magazine columnist, internet entrepreneur (in Bangkok, of all places), author, and creativity consultant. But before that, I was a child with an overactive imagination. I delighted in science fiction, surrealism, and humor. Outlandish ideas inspire me. And I love absurdity when done well. It is easy to come up with nonsense. Creating meaningful nonsense is far more difficult. But when it works, it is brilliant!
In my teenage years in the 1970s, I read science fiction voraciously. I loved the ideas and imaginativeness, but it was all rather serious stuff. So, I was delighted when I discovered Robert Sheckley, a rare humorist and absurdist in a largely serious genre.
I reckon his best novel is this one. It tells the story of a rather dull civil servant who wins the grand prize in a galactic lottery. He is whisked across space and time to Galactic Central to receive his prize: a shape-shifting, talking device/creature. Unfortunately, there is no provision for returning home, so an absurd journey begins from galactic bureaucracy to bizarre alternative Earths and homes. Maybe.
In addition to this book, I recommend diving into any of Sheckley's short story collections.
'Hilarious SF satire. Douglas Adams said it was the only thing like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, although written ten years earlier. It's wonderful' Neil Gaiman
This madcap cosmic farce relates the adventures of the hapless human Carmody, as he attempts to make his way home to Earth after winning the grand prize in the Intergalactic Sweepstake, encountering parallel worlds, incompetent bureaucrats and talking dinosaurs on the way.
'The greatest entertainer ever produced by science fiction ... a feast of wit and intelligence' J. G. Ballard
Most of my public success has been as a novelist. My MFA, from the Iowa Writers Workshop, is in poetry. When I grow up, I want to be a short story writer. The dirty truth is, though, I’ve been making trouble with stories since I was a kid. During my first attempt in 10th grade, I wrote a story that got me suspended for two weeks. No explanation. No guidance. Just a conference between my parents, teachers, and principal (I wasn’t present), and they came out and banished me. I dropped out of school shortly after. I reckon that experience, both shameful and delicious, shaped my life and love of narrative.
Such a rule breaker. A complete disregard for the laws of nature. That can’t happen!I shouldn’t feel so for those characters! And yet, and yet! The characters that people these pages are real and convincing. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah takes us in and out of realities. His world is dark sibling to our everyday world, but even his most flawed characters resonate with dignity, and through skillful well-crafted revelation, the reader comes to understand why these characters struggle—often against societal forces larger/older/engrained—and even when his characters make bad decisions (lord knows a misbehaving character is what good fiction is about) a glimmer of the potential for human goodness is exposed. This a contemporary voice, fierce and fresh, and worth paying attention to.
The instant New York Times bestseller 'An unbelievable debut' New York Times
Racism, but "managed" through virtual reality
Black Friday, except you die in a bargain-crazed throng
Happiness, but pharmacological
Love, despite everything
A Publisher's Weekly Most Anticipated Book for Fall 2018
Friday Black tackles urgent instances of racism and cultural unrest, and explores the many ways we fight for humanity in an unforgiving world. In the first, unforgettable story of this collection, The Finkelstein Five, Adjei-Brenyah gives us an unstinting reckoning of the brutal prejudice of the US justice system. In Zimmer Land we see a far-too-easy-to-believe imagining of…
Marita Golden is an award-winning author of over twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Her books include the novel The Wide Circumference of Love and the memoirs Migrations of the Heart, Saving Our Sons, and Don’t Play in the Sun One Woman’s Journey Through the Color Complex. She is the recipient of many awards including the Writers for Writers Award from Barnes & Noble and Poets and Writers, an award from the Authors Guild, and the Fiction Award for her novel After, from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, been featured as a question on Jeopardy!, and is a two-time NAACP Image Award nominee.
In the introduction to the first edition of Black Boy, Richard Wright acknowledges that while inspired by his life the book is both a record of his life and an imagined autobiography of all the “black boys” he knew who like him came of age in the segregated south.
Wright’s book is an early example of the use of creative nonfiction techniques that make this memoir gripping, suspenseful, deeply psychological, and a testimony to the power of dreams and the will to prevail against adversity.
