The best social justice books

This anthology is as powerful as it is still necessary: beware. Some pieces may be triggering, but they raised my awareness and empathy. These collected poems from writers across the globe declare one common theme: resistance. By exploring sexual assault and violence in their work, each writer resists the patriarchal systems of power that continue to support a misogynist justice system that supports abusers. In doing so, they reclaim their power and their voice. Resistance underscores the validity of all women’s experiences, and the importance of dignifying such experiences in voice, however that may sound. Because once survivors speak out and disrupt their pain, there is no telling what else they can do.

This is a great book about a young girl named Esperanza living a good life on a ranch in Mexico when she and her mother are forced to leave the country after family tragedy strikes. They go to the US during the Great Depression and have serious financial problems that they never had to deal with before. When she lived in Mexico, they had servants to do everything for them, so living in poverty in the US is a major adjustment. She doesn’t even know how to use a broom! This kind of detail makes for an interesting saga about a young lady overcoming obstacles to survive. 

This book is an excellent companion to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness and adds some important nuance to the story of how the United States came to imprison a higher proportion of its population than any other nation on earth. Forman notes that many African Americans in communities afflicted by rising drug abuse and crime rates in the 1970s were desperate to solve these problems and advocated more law enforcement along with greater investments in schools, jobs, and housing to address the root causes of the crisis. Instead, they got only increasingly draconian laws and punishments, often passed with the support of middle-class Black people seeking to discipline poorer African Americans. Writing from his personal experience as a public defender in addition to historical research, Forman includes dozens of illuminating examples of how race and class interact at every level in the… show more.

Even though this book is really for adults, I am recommending it to parents because I love to have meaningful conversations with my kids and grandkids.

This book helps me answer their hard questions on race, God, sex, punishment, gender, and truth. The author, Scott Hershovitz, also suggests ways I can keep our conversations flowing with questions like: What do you think? Why do you think so? Can you think of any reasons you might be wrong?

I would have recommended John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, which is one of the great masterworks of the twentieth century, but reading Keynes himself can be difficult.

Hansen’s book is the best summary available despite being more than 70 years old. And understanding Keynes is essential if you want to understand how certain economic policies continue to lead us astray.

Hard to find, but not impossible. 

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a “queer, black feminist love evangelist and a marine mammal apprentice,” has created an exuberant book—impossible to categorize. Undrowned is everything—a dramatic account of marine mammals’ struggles, a meditation, a call for action, a manifesto, a workbook with activities. Referencing the middle passage as a Black feminist, Gumbs considers the enmeshment of breathing, drowning, and undrowning, looking to “marine mammal kindred” as “teachers, mentors, guides.” I was deeply moved by how this book passionately voices love for whales, dolphins, and seals. But this love isn’t sentimental—it is active. The chapters call readers to do things, such as “listen,” asking how can we “listen across species, across extinction, across harm?” I marvel at Gumbs’ fierce, unabashed love for marine mammals. Gumbs inspires me to take more risks for others.

Wicksell had social justice at heart.

His motivation to investigate money concerned the welfare impact of inflation/deflation on purchasing power.

His model has capital and resources flowing whither returns are highest and bankers chasing the highest interest rate on loans, entrepreneurs, the best profit rate on investment, and merchants, the best price for products.

As pure credit, money can unceasingly feed demand for loans, generating the cumulative process whereby loan rate increases add to costs of production and prices. Wicksell’s conclusion: if loan rates lag behind the rate of profit, prices rise.

For stability’s sake, when prices are rising/falling, there must be an increase/decrease in the interest rate.

Central banks implement this rule of thumb, but, alas, without grasping Wicksell’s doubts about whether the greedy banking system considers public interest.

Robin loves the way that this book displays how even a Kantian basis (not home territory for him) shows why poverty should not be tolerated.

It underlines how extreme poverty undermines the exercise of rational agency, and thus the proper functioning of human beings.

Onora O’Neill argues cogently that morality precludes the employment of force or fraud, and gives rise to universal principles applicable both within and between societies. Population policies, for example, should depend on the informed consent of those affected.

A big mistake in much radical analysis is to characterize problems in dualistic terms that externalize responsibility from Africa (Rodney, of course, is wide open to that critique). Thus, colonialism is not just irredeemably bad but simple to identify and directly related to white skin. The end of formal colonialism provided new targets in sometimes caricature form: black-skin-white-mask neocolonialism and neoliberalism, notably. Such things undoubtedly exist. However, Kenworthy’s brilliant, gob-smacking analysis of the unintended consequences of life-saving technologies reveals levels of complexity and complicity that belie easy dualisms. How does something that promises liberation from mass suffering and death (anti-retroviral drugs) become a machine to entrench corrupt elites and opportunistic NGOs, to sell cheap textiles in America, and to exploit poor women’s unremunerated care work? Read, weep, and lose your illusions about corporate social responsibility.

I have learned as much from conservative authors as I have from writers who share my ideological predispositions.

In his classic book, economist Thomas Sowell seeks to answer the question of why we are so divided on a number of political issues.

Sowell outlines two competing visions that underlie most controversial areas of public policy – one that is “constrained” by history, tradition, and a skeptical view of human nature and another “unconstrained” by limits and thus malleable and perfectible.

In addition to being fascinating philosophically, the book is very useful challenge for those who are most confident in the ability to change society through public policy and new government programs.

McKenzie looks at the extraordinary phenomenon of the 'last dying speech' that condemned prisoners in Britain got to give from the scaffold. In particular, she explores events at Tyburn, London's most notorious execution site, in the 18th century, exploring how this period saw an explosion of printed literature that featured the criminal as an Everyman from whom everyone could learn a harsh lesson in morality. It's a fantastic exploration of the reality of the gallows versus what one could read in print: from the 'game' highwayman who refused to bow to society's expectations to the fearful, trembling prisoner who begged for mercy. Totally fascinating. 

One area of social justice that is often overlooked is intergenerational justice. As we deplete the planet’s resources, we pass problems along to future generations. Rather than leaving the Earth a better place for those who follow, we are leaving them with an environment at the tipping point. There are a number of science fiction and fantasy books that address this, and it’s possible that Wanderers (2019) springs to mind in part because it’s fairly recent. On the other hand, most of the books I’ve listed are decades old, and this is one of the best works of speculative fiction I’ve read in the past few years. Wendig’s epic novel provides prescient commentary on the political divisions that currently plague our nation and our world, as we split into seemingly disparate tribes, as well as the mounting environmental dangers that coming generations will face if we do not take substantive… show more.

Not a response to climate change per se, but rather to the whole raft of inequities that underprivileged peoples have been through, this collection of fictional imaginaries speculates on what future worlds might look like—good, bad, or ugly. But it couldn’t be more relevant to our climate breakdown future, as it shows how diverse practices of imagination can be harnessed in ways that range from the terrifying to the uplifting.  

Andrea Gibson’s spoken word poems are gut-wrenching testaments to the power of vulnerability and tenderness, weaving anecdotes into fervent pleas for empathy, connection, and social justice. The magic of their pieces lies in the both/and of beauty and pain, unflinchingly facing trauma while clinging to hope. This collection’s strongest poems include “Ashes” (about a gay soldier burned to death) and “Somewhere, a Carpenter” (about the artist’s love for their grandmother). If you want to be truly spellbound, look for the recorded versions of these poems—I’ve attended two of Gibson’s live performances and had goosebumps all over and/or tears streaming down my face from start to finish.

When Jilly’s sister Emma is born deaf, she realizes the world is going to treat Jilly, who is white and hearing, differently from Emma, and Jilly’s new friend Derek, who is a Deaf, Black ASL user. Within a world where kids like Derek and Emma aren't assured the same freedom or safety as kids like Jilly, Jilly starts to learn all the things she doesn't know–and works to discover how to support her family and friends. Gino uses their trademark humor, heart, and humanity to show readers how being open to difference can make you a better person, and how being open to change can make you change in the best possible ways.

I don’t often praise edited collections, but this book is the most clear-eyed discussion of our current predicament in the face of worsening global warming I have ever encountered. The authors argue that the political deployment of geoengineering to ‘save’ us has become essentially a foregone conclusion—forget all that wishful Green New Deal happy talk. They then proceed to argue out the various potential political scenarios concerning what this means for future politics. Read this and weep.

While many celebrated the ethnic revival of the 1960s and the social justice causes that grew from them, Steinberg offers a powerful and challenging thesis that argues the limits of ethnicity. A sense of ethnic re-birth, he argues, can only occur once ethnicity is gone. Rather than empowering a new generation of social justice youth, ethnicity proves a myth.

Though it came out in the Summer of 2022, and had a headstart on the other books on my list, Just Care is in conversation with the rest of this list, and is just as relevant to our current moment, when we might agree that we have a crisis of care. Nishida shows that care dynamics exist within a brutal social order that determines who survives and who deteriorates. Along with the other books on this list, the research methods are creatively mixed here, with interviews, focus groups, and participant observation with care workers and people with disabilities. Just Care documents how people with disabilities work together to reimagine care. We are all enmeshed in a healthcare industry with giant cracks and fissures exposed by the pandemic, and in which we will all move between caregiving, receiving, or both. Read Just Care to better understand imbalances in care, as well… show more.

For those who study or teach about Africa, it is essential to know the pioneers of struggles for justice on the continent. African intellectuals eloquent in European languages began calling out injustices as early as the 18th century. To my mind, however, Nkabinde is a particularly impressive pioneer from the early 21st. It’s not just that African women have been routinely overlooked by historians. The very existence of African lesbians and transwomen was until very recently completely denied. Here, then, for the very first time, an African woman tells of her coming to sexual self-awareness, first as a spirit medium for a powerful male ancestor and then through modern sexual identity discourses. It is a poignant appeal to the humanistic potential of African traditional cultures when married to a universal human rights framework.

The definitive book for understanding today’s social justice movements, and what needs to change for them to be successful. The brilliant women of color of INCITE come from a background of organizing and scholarship, and together they show the systemic flaw in left movements today, showing the ways that organizations become accountable to wealthy funders rather than the people they say they wish to serve. Read this book to learn what can be done to challenge this dynamic and build a better world.