95 books like Take Back the Block

Like many parents of kids and tweens, I sometimes forget that my kids weren’t alive yet on 9/11, nor do they understand the ripple effects of the terrorist attacks and surrounding time on our current political and social world. My husband and I had just moved to New York City on September 11, 2021, and witnessed the city’s grief and resilience firsthand, but it’s hard to explain to our kids the effects that that event had on how some people treat and regard American Muslims and people of color, and how history still very much affects us all today. This book is a wonderful way to start that conversation with kids.

I love a good dystopian novel, and this hit all the right notes for me. At first, everything seems perfect in Jonas’s tightly-ordered world—only everyone is hiding something. Jonas is different, but he doesn’t know how.

I loved how thought-provoking The Giver was. It got me asking questions about what it means to be a part of a community, a friend, and a member of a family. What risks are we willing to take for the ultimate good, and what crosses the line?

I found Jonas’s story fascinating and felt genuinely concerned for him throughout the book.

Body image issues affect so many of us, and it can feel particularly acute in the middle school years, when our bodies are undergoing so much change. Though it’s been decades, I palpably remember how strange my growth spurt felt from the inside and how it changed my confidence.

In Alyson Gerber’s excellent book, Sarah is used to excelling on the basketball court, but when the shots stop falling, she’s quick to blame her changing physique and takes matters into her own hands to rectify things by drastically altering her eating habits.

Gerber handles this material with empathy and compassion, never talking down to the reader or getting preachy. Whatever your gender (body image issues are hardly limited to girls), there’s so much to relate to in this story.

This book is a milestone in transgender literature for kids. Published in 2015, it follows a fourth-grader’s attempts to get classmates, teachers, parents, etc. to see past the surface: she’s a girl named Melissa, not a boy named George as everyone perceives. An argument often leveled against transgender kids is that they can’t know they’re transgender because they’re too young. This novel counters that by compassionately and realistically portraying a child who knows her identity from an early age, and it shows how devastating it is when the people who should love and support Melissa instead reject her assertion of her identity. It has a happy ending, but it leaves the reader thinking about how many transgender kids don’t get that—thereby inspiring advocacy. 

This book offers insight into how Black DC residents think about their changing city.

For many Black long-term residents, DC has long been a “Chocolate city,” a city where Black people held both the demographic and political majority, and where Black people created their own spaces of belonging, pride, and self-reliance.

This book draws from oral histories and ethnographic data with long-term African-American residents of DC to explain both how gentrification has enhanced the vulnerability of low-income residents and how Black residents of DC are reclaiming spaces in their city.

Chocolate City covers the last few centuries of history in DC.

This tome provides an in-depth overview of the history of race in Washington, DC from its founding to the present. It traces the history of race and democracy in the nation’s capital – from its days as a trading post for enslaved persons to its emergence as a booming metropolis.

By putting racial dynamics, tensions, and demographics at the center of the narrative, the authors develop a cohesive narrative that helps us to understand the multiple and consistent ways that Black DC residents have been disenfranchised and dispossessed. 

This book demonstrates that prose doesn’t have to be lyrical to leave an indelible impact on readers.

Lutie Johnson is a single mother living in a rundown building on the street. Her desires are simply articulated as are the barriers keeping her from achieving them. Lutie spends most of the novel dodging the clutches of men who think they deserve her just because they desire her, and a neighborhood snake-eyed madam who wants to exploit Lutie’s beauty.

Petry begins the book describing a cold November wind and continues with an icy precision that will entrance the reader until the very last page.  

Read this book if you want to understand the nuances of blackness in the nation’s capital.

Brandi Thompson Summers argues in her book, Black in Place, that gentrification along the H Street Corridor in DC has involved the embracing of blackness as an aesthetic alongside the displacement of actual Black people. Summers explains how blackness came to be valued as a prized aesthetic at the same time that Black people experienced the heavy policing, predatory lending, and displacement that both make possible and accompany the gentrification of Black neighborhoods.

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. 

This is a great book if you want to understand how some expressions of blackness can be valued while Black people are being displaced.

Derek Hyra describes gentrification and racial change in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington, DC – which went from 90 percent Black in 1970 to 30 percent Black by 2010. Shaw’s status as the cultural epicenter of the Black community in the early twentieth century has become a selling point: many of the new establishments highlight this Black history, with odes to Marvin Gaye, Langston Hughes, and Duke Ellington in their names and featured artwork.

Hyra argues many of the White newcomers to Shaw embrace its Black history while ignoring the needs and preferences of contemporary Black residents. Thus, Black residents are experiencing both political and cultural displacement as they have lost political and economic power in the neighborhood.