100 books like The Race Beat

This list could be full of Toni Morrison novels and be no worse for it.

I’d argue that the late writer is the finest we’ve ever had on the topics of grief, loss, and ancestry—especially from the Black American perspective. One of my favorite examples is Song of Solomon, a mesmerizing journey through what it takes to craft an identity in the midst of racism and the ruptures it creates in our lives.

Morrison's singular prose is pure magic as it weaves a tale of the enduring power of love. A literary masterpiece.

Monumental, extraordinary, a landmark: only superlatives would do in 1975 to praise Simple Justice by Richard Kluger.

If you want to understand education in America, race in America, the absence of equity in America, Simple Justice gets you there. The book begins with the South Carolina heroes of Briggs v. Elliott, impoverished rural petitioners who filed the first of five lawsuits composing Brown v. Board of Education. The book ends with the 1954 and 1955 US Supreme Court’s decisions declaring unconstitutional the legal segregation of public schools.

Kluger focuses on people, beginning with tenant farmers and sharecroppers who defied the white men controlling their every breath and petitioned for “equal everything.” Kluger’s vivid storytelling was among my inspirations, forty years after Brown, to seek South Carolina’s forgotten heroes. 

Out of the House of Bondage destroys the myth of the Southern plantation mistress as a delicate, gentle being presiding over a household maintained by passive, devoted, enslaved women.

A professor of history and law at Duke University, Thavolia Glymph scoured female slaveholders’ diaries and enslaved and freed people’s narratives to expose the mistresses’ use of violence – cowhide whippings, “until she was just a piece of living raw meat”; burning with hot irons, “hot enough to take off flesh”; beating to death a crying baby – and enslaved women’s resistance, perceived then and described later as laziness, misbehavior, and insubordination.

Glymph’s uncovering of abuse upsets a familiar false narrative, dismantling previous scholarship and exposing white women’s use of violence to assert power. A seeker of missing voices and lost stories, I am deeply interested in what has been ignored, misinterpreted, or omitted.

The History of White People tracks the creation of race as a fact, rather than an idea or social construct, and of Anglo-Saxon whiteness, for the free male, as a promise of power and supremacy.

Nell Irvin Painter, a Princeton professor of American history, emerita, begins with Greek historians and Roman conquerors BCE, who thought not of race but of place, the highlands and lowlands shaping appearance and temperament.

Along the way, Rome’s scrubbed-up copies of Greek statuary become the ideal for beauty, and skin colors and skull measurements become a way to rank superiority. Painter traces the United States’ enslavement of Africans, slaughter of Native Americans, eugenics, endorsement of male brutality (Ralph Waldo Emerson! Teddy Roosevelt!), and race-oriented immigration control: all play a role in whiteness.

I want to know how things really work; don’t you?

Chavez modernizes the Mexican miscreant myth, explaining how vivid TV news scenes of immigrants inspire visceral reactions.

He argues that the emotions inspired by media coverage of vigilante groups rounding up immigrants are a potent part of “the spectacle” that plays out on the news. Chavez also gives the xenophobic storytelling of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century an updated name: The Latino Threat Narrative.

The book powerfully picks apart ideas posited by the late Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington, among others, that suggest that Mexican Americans won’t assimilate, making them perennial “others” who threaten American democracy. Another thing I like about this book is that it includes a chapter on Latinas and how media coverage of Latina fertility and sexuality plays into racist stereotyping.

The wealth gap between Blacks and Whites in the U.S. is enormous! Whites have 10 times the wealth as Blacks. The disparity is not because Whites are smarter or have worked harder. This book does a masterful job of clearly explaining one of the reasons behind the wide wealth gap. 

Most people are aware of the fact that 246 years of slavery was a successful government policy that intentionally enriched Whites while simultaneously impoverishing Blacks. But most people are not aware that a new system with the same dual objectives, followed the abolition of slavery in 1865. This book tells the story of Black Codes, Vagrancy Laws, and convict leasing that occurred for 60 years after the passage of the 13th Amendment, emancipating Black enslaved people. These government supported policies replaced slavery as the new program to subsidize White wealth creation at the expense of millions of Blacks. 

Douglas Blackman… show more.

This book details the engagement and impact African American women have made on race and gender issues throughout American history.

Paula Giddings uses first-person narratives to portray how generations of Black women have acted as “agents of change” to achieve political and economic progress. In researching the lives of two nineteenth-century Black female sculptors, I needed to understand the cultural and political environment that inspired them to tackle the controversial themes of race, gender, and social injustice in their art.

When and Where I Enter provided a gendered and historical framework to help me answer these critical questions.

Delmont’s sweeping story about the complex wartime outlooks and experiences of Black Americans necessarily includes the travails and triumphs of combat fighters; the battlefield contributions of Black GIs have been too often dismissed or ignored. 

But here they appear alongside a fascinating, broader cast of war workers battling racism while doing their bit to defeat the Axis across the world’s continents. From the engineers carving roads out of impenetrable Asian jungle or Alaskan tundra to the women of the all-Black 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion who sorted mail in an unheated English warehouse while under bombardment, Delmont’s subjects offer a reminder of the awesome scope of this war.

This book is not about death on its own but images of death, and the roles to which they are put by the press and politicians.

Focusing on iconic photographs of death from events such as the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, the Vietnam War, and the September 11th attacks, among many others, Zelizer charts a growing discomfort over time with images of death in the news. As technology improved, such photos became more graphic and intimate, and norms around the increasingly professionalized field of journalism came to render them mostly off limits.

Despite the general squeamishness of Western journalists and readers towards such images today, however, we do still see them during major world events and important breaking stories. It’s also true, Zelizer points out, that images of death in far away places are often shown in American newspapers with less concern.

There are important lessons here for all of… show more.

The compelling, digestible, and often dangerous metaphor is the star of Brown Tide Rising.

Santa Ana clearly explains that it is the mediated metaphor that embeds itself in our brains, cementing ideas and tropes. Looking at Latino metaphors in historical issues of the Los Angeles Times, he offers a new application for linguist George Lakoff’s cognitive model of metaphor, which studies how metaphors map to each other.

For instance, Santa Ana identifies “flowing waters” as one such metaphoric tie-in that joins metaphors such as tides, surges, waves. I like this book because it is a great reminder about how the images conjured by words—in this case metaphors—make us “see” the world in certain ways.