The most recommended books about black people

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.

I love untold stories – those that look at people who history has often ignored. There are a lot of novels set in WWII, but this is the only one I’ve read that looks at what it was like to be an Afro-German during that period.

Hiero Falk is a mixed-race jazz trumpeter, member of a band who has been banned from playing live under Nazi laws. After escaping with two of his African-American bandmates to Paris, Hiero is forced into hiding as the trio struggle to get out of occupied France. There was so much history here that felt new to me and I was fascinated by Hiero’s story. 

I am always on the verge of returning home. Sometimes, it’s the food; other times, it’s the memory. I am not from New Orleans, but this book is phenomenal in its guidance of a city and what it means to name any place home.

From its onset, this collection moves through music and mythology as a means for sorting through devastation while placing life a step ahead of it.

I’d recommend this book to any seasoned (or first) reader of poetry on the search for beauty around the corner and a reminder of how close we are to it.

Richard Sander, whom I have known and respected for years, has, with his colleagues, written a deeply comprehensive and authoritative book on the origins of housing segregation, the consequences, and what to do about it.

By comparing highly segregated metropolitan regions with ones that are less segregated, the authors demonstrate that high levels of housing segregation provides the central explanation for a whole host of other racial gap in America, including those related to educational achievement, employment, and mortality rates. The book is a stirring call for action.

Everyone knows about how the People’s Republic of China treats Tibetans and Uighurs today, but how many know about premodern China’s response to people it considered foreign, barbarian, or Black?  Don Wyatt’s book shows how people in Southeast Asia—Sumatra, Java, the Malay archipelago—were considered by China as Black, alongside actual Africans.  An excellent companion book to read together with this is Shao-yun Yang’s The Way of the Barbarians: Redrawing Ethnic Boundaries in Tang and Song China.  Many books on race before the modern era focus on the West, but how about race elsewhere? How about China, a country that’s fast becoming a world power? 

Paulina Alberto wrote a binge-reading biography of Raúl Grigera, a Black legend of Buenos Aires during the golden age of tango. While Alberto reconstructs the family’s history of Grigera since the times of slavery in early nineteenth-century Argentina, the narrative arc of the book is the unequal power to control narratives about the self, which affected Grigera and other Black men and women who suffered the dominant and racist narratives about Blackness in Argentina, particularly on the disappearance of Afro-Argentines. This book illustrates the biographical turn in African Diaspora Studies combined with an exquisite interdisciplinary approach, which Alberto employs in her examination of “racial stories” as a methodology.

I wasn’t far into Love before it became crystal clear why its author fled her native Haiti after publishing it, in spite of the fact that the novella is ostensibly historical fiction. The narrator Claire’s depiction of a Duvalier-esque commandant is a scathing one, and in truth, no one escapes Claire’s acerbic wit, keen eye for detail, and incisive observations about colorism, class, and the perpetual violence that is engendered by colonial rule and persists long after its end. Claire is both an unreliable narrator—she is jealous, petty, and bitterly indignant about her treatment by her family—and yet, a trustworthy one. Love taught me how to create a Black woman narrator who does not have to be trusted (or even liked) to be listened to, believed. 

If you’re looking for the guidance of an older sister, Black Girl in Love (with Herself) is exactly what you’re looking for. Trey wrote the book she needed to read but didn’t have as a young woman. She writes from the perspective of a young woman who is raised to be strong but unfortunately learned to sacrifice her own needs to please others. She teaches her audience how to be strong without sacrificing herself and without sacrificing her relationships as a young Black woman. 

Kenneth Mack, a professor at Harvard Law School, has chronicled the lives and careers of a series of African American lawyers, most totally unknown to white America, who, although forced to ply their trade in a legal system that was totally white and aggressively unwelcoming, managed to permanently impact American jurisprudence. Some, like Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall’s mentor, and the founder of the prestigious Howard University Law School, saw their impact ripple out nationally; others, merely by demonstrating competence and dedication, fought bigotry on a more local scale. Each of these men and women was forced to navigate between loyalty to their cause and a willingness to adopt the demeanor and professional skills of their adversaries in order to succeed, leaving them distrusted on both sides of the racial divide. Their willingness to cut themselves adrift, however, set the stage for the great civil rights battles of the second… show more.

A brilliant book (who would dare publish this today?) by the author of the equally brilliant Ben’s Trumpet. In a South African township, some children expect their migrant-labourer fathers to arrive home after 10 months away. They wait, in a celebratory mood at first, but with increasing tiredness and uncertainty as the day and the night go by. They tell stories to stay awake. But the youngest falls asleep. A truck pulls up. It’s not their dads. Then the day dawns. And, with it, the fathers arrive.

There’s hardly any characterisation of the dads. They come to life through the children’s excitement and persistence. So does the deep emotion of an absent father returning. My boys have often chosen this book at bedtime. And they know it well enough to look up curiously when the dads arrive - to check if there are tears of happiness in my eyes.… show more.