The most recommended books about white privilege

Who picked these books? Meet our 10 experts.

10 authors created a book list connected to white privilege, and here are their favorite white privilege books.
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Book cover of The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

Lisa Black Author Of Red Flags

From Lisa's 3 favorite reads in 2023.

Why am I passionate about this?

Author Nice (translation: boring) Reluctant exerciser Travel junkie Secretive

Lisa's 3 favorite reads in 2023

Lisa Black Why did Lisa love this book?

This was my first Grady Hendrix, and my first "vampire book" since Anne Rice’s. It’s the story of what a genteel housewife in a proper suburb does when a man she considers dangerous moves to town.

Forget convincing her husband if she can’t even convince her best buds: the women with wildly varied personalities and wildly varied backgrounds in her book club. This book is by turns poignant, heartbreaking, terrifying, and laugh-out-loud hilarious. 

By Grady Hendrix,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"This funny and fresh take on a classic tale manages to comment on gender roles, racial disparities, and white privilege all while creeping me all the way out. So good."-Zakiya Dalila Harris, author of The Other Black Girl

Now in paperback, Steel Magnolias meets Dracula in this New York Times best-selling horror novel about a women's book club that must do battle with a mysterious newcomer to their small Southern town.

Bonus features:
* Reading group guide for book clubs
* Hand-drawn map of Mt. Pleasant
* Annotated true-crime reading list by Grady Hendrix
* And more!

Patricia Campbell's life…


Book cover of Jews Without Money

Andrew Ridker Author Of Hope

From my list on Jewish life in America.

Why am I passionate about this?

As an American, a Jew, and a novelist—though not necessarily in that order—I’ve always been interested in Jewish-American literature, and the Jewish-American experience in general. What was it like for the first Jews in America? What accounted for their success? What were the costs of assimilation? And where are they—we—headed? These books are a great starting point for anyone looking for answers to these questions. But be warned: in keeping with the Jewish tradition, they often answer those questions with more questions. Not, to quote the Jewish sage Jerry Seinfeld, that there’s anything wrong with that.

Andrew's book list on Jewish life in America

Andrew Ridker Why did Andrew love this book?

If you’ve read all 783 pages of World of Our Fathers and are still looking for more about early Jewish-American life in New York—or just something more immediate—this is the book for you.

An autobiographical fever-dream of a novel, Jews Without Money is a vivid, violent, look at the life of the Jewish slum kids whose parents emigrated to America. A lifelong communist, Gold only wrote one novel, but it anticipates the hallucinatory fiction of writers like Denis Johnson by half a century.

At once entirely Jewish and entirely American, Jews Without Money gives an unvarnished first-person glimpse into the surreal world of turn-of-the-century New York. 

By Michael Gold,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Jews Without Money as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

As a writer and political activist in early-twentieth-century America, Michael Gold was an important presence on the American cultural scene for more than three decades. Beginning in the 1920s his was a powerful journalistic voice for social change and human rights, and Jews Without Money--the author's only novel--is a passionate record of the times. First published in 1930, this fictionalized autobiography offered an unusually candid look at the thieves, gangsters, and ordinary citizens who struggled against brutal odds in lower East Side Manhattan. Like Henry Roth's Call It Sleep and Abraham Cahan's The Rise and Fall of David Levinsky, Jews…


Book cover of These Walls Between Us: A Memoir of Friendship Across Race and Class

Carolyn Lee Arnold Author Of Fifty First Dates After Fifty: A Memoir

From Carolyn's 3 favorite reads in 2023.

Why am I passionate about this?

Author Dating advice giver Feminist Hiker Photographer Happily coupled

Carolyn's 3 favorite reads in 2023

Carolyn Lee Arnold Why did Carolyn love this book?

I loved this book because it is hard for me to recognize my own privilege as a white woman, and Wendy Sanford helped me see it by being vulnerable and honest enough to see it in herself.

By showing the nuanced everyday actions she took and the attitudes she had to change to counteract her learned white privilege and show up for her African American friend, she gave me hope that I could do the same. Her insightful observations and gripping family scenes of class, race, and gender interactions made me see my own family and class dynamics more clearly.

Along with historical and current information about racism and white privilege in the United States, I felt educated about the insidiousness of racism and optimistic I could change. 

By Wendy Sanford,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked These Walls Between Us as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From an author of the best-selling women's health classic Our Bodies, Ourselves comes a bracingly forthright memoir about a life-long friendship across racial and class divides. A white woman's necessary learning, and a Black woman's complex evolution, make These Walls Between Us a "tender, honest, cringeworthy and powerful read." (Debby Irving, author, Waking Up White.)

In the mid-1950s, a fifteen-year-old African American teenager named Mary White (now Mary Norman) traveled north from Virginia to work for twelve-year-old Wendy Sanford's family as a live-in domestic for their summer vacation by a remote New England beach. Over the years, Wendy's family came…


Book cover of Avalanche

J.J. Dupuis Author Of Umboi Island

From J.J.'s 3 favorite reads in 2023.

Why am I passionate about this?

Author Seeker Skeptic Adventurer Reader

J.J.'s 3 favorite reads in 2023

J.J. Dupuis Why did J.J. love this book?

I love a book of fiction that makes you see the outside world more clearly than when you picked it up.

Though a collection of short stories, this book serves as a manual for this moment in time, articulating feelings and impressions that are tough to put into words.

Upon finishing the book, I turned back to the first page and started the first story again; it’s that kind of book.

By Jessica Westhead,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Avalanche as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Featured on 49th Shelf's Most Anticipated: 2023 Fall Fiction Preview

"Things used to be easier, but even in those carefree days, the rules were in place for a reason. And that reason is: so we can all agree. So we can all have the same standard applied across the board. So there is no special treatment, which no one should receive. This is why we need the rules."

The stories in Avalanche combine humor with an earnest examination and indictment of white entitlement, guilt, shame, and disorientation in the wake of waking up to the reality of racism. Focusing on…


Book cover of Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays

Elizabeth Greenspan Author Of Battle for Ground Zero: Inside the Political Struggle to Rebuild the World Trade Center

From my list on Post-9/11 New York City.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have always loved cities, New York in particular. A few weeks after 9/11, I decided to study the rebuilding of the WTC site for my graduate thesis, compelled by the immensity of the project and the layers of conflict embedded in the reconstruction and memorialization. None of the books listed below are directly about 9/11, but the attacks and their aftermath thread through all of their stories. New York is an intense, fraught, sometimes fun, sometimes heartbreaking place, like these stories, which are listed from newest to oldest.

Elizabeth's book list on Post-9/11 New York City

Elizabeth Greenspan Why did Elizabeth love this book?

This essay collection isn’t exclusively about New York, but the four essays that open the collection are, and they are excellent. Biss writes personally about race relations in the city, and the United States. Her insights still feel relevant more than a decade later. She also refreshingly tackles the myth of New York, and the way that it is, as she says, overimagined. 

By Eula Biss,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Notes from No Man's Land as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A frank and fascinating exploration of race and racial identity, Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays begins with a series of lynchings and ends with a series of apologies. Eula Biss explores race in America and her response to the topic is informed by the experiences chronicled in these essays - teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting from an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of hurricane Katrina from a college town in Iowa, and settling in Chicago's most diverse neighbourhood.
As Biss moves across the country from New York to…


Book cover of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

Rebecca Struthers Author Of Hands of Time: A Watchmaker's History

From my list on for people who love taking things apart.

Why am I passionate about this?

For as long as I can remember I’ve been obsessed with figuring out how things work. What started with me pulling apart redundant household tech as a child (thanks to my very supportive parents) has become a lifelong passion in making and restoring one of the most incredible machines invented – the watch. Our millennia-old obsession with making things tells us so much about who we are and the world we like in. I love all of these books as, in varied ways, they inspire curiosity and connect us with our innately human instinct to understand the world around us.

Rebecca's book list on for people who love taking things apart

Rebecca Struthers Why did Rebecca love this book?

Shop Class as Soulcraft is a very special book to me, because it’s the first one I read over 10 years ago that managed to perfectly weave between the philosophy and practice of craft. It was that moment of “wow, I want to be able to write like this!”

Too often, craft is studied by academics or theorists, while the craftspeople getting their hands dirty rarely write about what they do. This book so perfectly balances between the two, it’s an ode to making, with the passion for working with your hands oozing from every page in such a brilliantly funny and engaging way.

By Matthew B. Crawford,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Shop Class as Soulcraft as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A philosopher/mechanic's wise (and sometimes funny) look at the challenges and pleasures of working with one's hands 

“This is a deep exploration of craftsmanship by someone with real, hands-on knowledge. The book is also quirky, surprising, and sometimes quite moving.” —Richard Sennett, author of The Craftsman

Called “the sleeper hit of the publishing season” by The Boston Globe, Shop Class as Soulcraft became an instant bestseller, attracting readers with its radical (and timely) reappraisal of the merits of skilled manual labor. On both economic and psychological grounds, author Matthew B. Crawford questions the educational imperative of turning everyone into a…


Book cover of How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America

Cheryl Lynn Greenberg Author Of Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century

From my list on Black-Jewish relations.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a professor who teaches and works in the field of African American History. Because I am both white and Jewish, I’ve been repeatedly asked to give talks about relationships between African Americans and white Jewish Americans, and about what “went wrong” to shatter the “grand alliance” of the civil rights movement embodied by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. I had no answer, but I suspected that none of the stories that we had been told, whether good or bad, were fully true. So I went back to the sources and uncovered a complex and multilayered history. Black and Jewish collaboration was never a given, and underlying tensions and conflicts reflected the broader realities of race and class in the U.S. In the book I explored how these historical and political forces operated, and continue to resonate today.

Cheryl's book list on Black-Jewish relations

Cheryl Lynn Greenberg Why did Cheryl love this book?

Now that I’ve raised the issue of whiteness – ways in which American structures and institutions reflect the agendas and interests of white people, and the role those structures play in shaping opportunity and life experiences -- here I want to bring it front and center. Many white people don’t recognize how they benefit from having white skin (called “white privilege”) and many white ethnic groups, including many white Jews in the U.S., deny their white privilege altogether, insisting that they too have been the victim of white discrimination, and that anti-Black racism is no different. Brodkin offers a powerful counter-narrative, pointing out the many important ways that American Jews of European descent did indeed benefit from their white skin even when they did not realize it. 

By Karen Brodkin,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The fashion identities in the context of a wider conversation about American nationhood, to whom it belongs and what belonging means. Race and ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality are all staple ingredients in this conversation. They are salient aspects of social being from which economic practices, political policies, and popular discourses create ""Americans."" Because all of these facets of social being have such significant meaning on a national scale, they also have major consequences for both individuals and groups in terms of their success and well-being, as well as how they perceive themselves socially and politically.

The history of Jews…


Book cover of I Am Not Your Baby Mother

Amy Beashel Author Of Spilt Milk

From my list on modern motherhood.

Why am I passionate about this?

I had a very distinct vision of what kind of mother I would be: patient, kind, and creative. And I can be all of these things, but so too can I be frustrated, furious, and exhausted beyond belief. This contradictory experience of motherhood was what I wanted to explore in Spilt Milk and is the motherhood exposed in these five books which, while very different in form, share a willingness to acknowledge the darker and less curated aspects of a relationship that can be as stifling as it is wonderful.  

Amy's book list on modern motherhood

Amy Beashel Why did Amy love this book?

As Spilt Milk’s protagonist Bea Straw is a mum-blogger, I was keen to read experiences of real-life “mummy influencers”. Braithwaite’s book – part memoir, part manifesto – was of particular interest because she is Black, somewhat of a rarity in the picture of motherhood painted by social media that tends to be both very white and very middle class. 

Documenting the difficult birth of her daughter and the subsequent mishandled complications, Braithwaite exposes the many and varied ways in which women of colour are disadvantaged and endangered by racial bias. 

While light in tone, there’s a power and vulnerability in Braithwaite’s writing, and I learnt so much from this brilliant book.

By Candice Brathwaite,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked I Am Not Your Baby Mother as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

*THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER*

'Really good ... accessible, sometimes shocking, honest, and feels written from the heart' - Bernardine Evaristo

'I gobbled it in one weekend and encourage everyone - mother, or otherwise - to do the same' - Pandora Sykes

'Remarkable' - Lorraine Kelly

'Searing' - Dolly Alderton

'I absolutely loved I Am Not Your Baby Mother' - Giovanna Fletcher

'Brilliant' - Sophie Ellis-Bextor

'An essential exploration of the realities of black motherhood in the UK' - Observer

'Urgent part-memoir, part-manifesto about black motherhood' - Red

'[An] original and much-needed guide to navigating black motherhood' - Cosmopolitan

'The woman…