100 books like Manufacturing Decline

What are the true costs of racism and the benefits of breaking out of its cage? I deeply admire the way Heather McGhee mines evidence and shows how the construction of race has worked against the interests of everyone, regardless of race. Then, she flips the script and shows compelling evidence for all the ways that we as a people benefit by working together. She calls it the ‘Solidarity Dividend,’ and I love this term she has coined.

She gives living examples of how everyone benefits when we work together to move beyond the zero-sum game, whether in the fields of healthcare, education, housing, employment, voting rights, the safety net, or more. Data-driven but in a refreshing style, McGhee’s book is inspiring!

The Color of Welfare is a classic text on the history of American social policy.

The American welfare state was created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the wake of the Great Depression. Quadagno explains how Roosevelt compromised with conservative southern members of Congress in order to enact the New Deal into law. These consequences shaped early anti-poverty policies in ways that disproportionately excluded African Americans by design. 

Quadagno then traces how this legacy of racially discriminatory social policymaking continued through President Johnson’s War on Poverty in the 1960s. The Color of Welfare taught me why the American welfare state is so underdeveloped compared to the nations of Western Europe and why it is characterized by so many racial disparities.

Why Americans Hate Welfare has been very influential to my own scholarship. 

Gilens examined a paradox: a majority of Americans consistently express support for government spending to aid people experiencing poverty, but a majority also consistently express opposition to welfare—which is, itself, government spending to fight poverty! 

Through a careful analysis of data, Gilens demonstrates that Americans hate welfare because they associate that word with the stereotype that African Americans are lazy and prefer to live off government handouts rather than work. 

Think about President Reagan’s infamous condemnation of “welfare queens.” Gilens’ book is one of the clearest examples I’ve encountered of the ways that cynical political appeals to racism can sabotage public support for government spending for the common good.

I love The Government-Citizen Disconnect because it examines the relationship between social policy and politics. 

Mettler demonstrates that over 90% of Americans receive financial benefits from the government, but most of these are submerged in the tax code (like the home mortgage interest deduction). People who only receive submerged benefits believe that the government does little to improve their personal lives. In contrast, the more antipathy they feel toward people who receive visible government benefits (like food stamps), the more they also express cynical, negative attitudes toward government in general.

Since White Americans are more likely to receive submerged benefits than Americans of color, this pattern fuels racialized “us vs. them” attitudes when, in fact, the government financially buffers most Americans from the full costs of the free market in a variety of ways.

I didn’t discuss mental health in my own book, simply because the topic so vast and nuanced it really needs a book of its own. Luckily, it’s comprehensively discussed in this new volume, with chapters such as “The green city,” “The active city,” and “The playable city.” There are several concrete examples here from the authors’ own research into “neurourbanism,” or the application of neuroscience to urban design and planning, which are fascinating to read. An overarching theme, which I have found in my own research as well, is that the more access everyone has to nature and parks, the more beneficial it is for better mental and physical health. 

I love the way Andrew Robichaud brings to life the animal ghosts that haunt our modern cities. In ways that we often forget today, animals were integral to the development of urban spaces in ways that were much more visible in the nineteenth century, whether they were horses pulling carriages or pigs and cows herded down the street toward slaughterhouses. The laws governing how cities were organized typically began with debates over where animals were welcome. Robichaud does a great job of recreating the ecologically diverse nineteenth-century American cities in ways that make it easier to understand urban spaces and our relationships with animals today.

The history that matters most to me is the history that can help explain the world we live in now. The editors of Baltimore Revisited, a collection of brilliant essays about the city, takes that to heart. Fascinating chapters trace the War on Drugs back to the 1910s, when the city outlawed cocaine, examine how Johns Hopkins University’s growth has displaced Black residents for decades, and surprise us with the fact that Maryland was home to the longest-running movie censorship board in the country (which only closed shop in 1981). More than curiosities, though, these authors reveal how race, gender, sexuality, and class have affected Baltimore.

Most importantly, the book focuses on how everyday people fought back against discrimination through acts as varied as pickets against segregation to dancing in gay bars. The book is good history, yes, but also a call to action. 

This is the book that launched a thousand essays about gentrification in urban neighborhoods and reinvented the term “revanchism” for use in critical geography.

From the French noun revanche, revanchism refers to a policy or movement focused on reacquiring a nation's lost territory. The Revanchist City as it became known after Smith’s book, describes city residents under siege by their own city governments.

Starting with a description of the battles over who could use Tompkins Square Park in New York City’s Lower East Side in the 1980s and 90s, and moving on to other case studies (some global), Smith shows how cities are transformed into zones of international capital investment and class privilege through neoliberal policies enacted at the municipal level. 

The description of this book lays it all out for the readers. It says, “This is NOT a history book.

This is a book about the here and now. A book to help us better understand why we are where we are. A book about race. What a journey it takes the readers on, exploring the construct of race in this country.

I love this book because Fleming offers necessary socio-historical correctives and demystifies many myths that people believe about race, racism, and stereotypes.

The writing is punchy, pithy and humorous. As such, it is entertainingly educational and scholarly while presenting facts in a way that is accessible to general readers.

I also love this book because it is incredibly useful both to those who are “stupid about race,” so to speak, and those who aren’t. For the former, I think this is a great book to start with on one’s journey toward becoming more race-conscious and more educated about race.