City Lights Bookstore's Antiracist Reading List
I just saw that City Lights Bookstore, one of the finest bookstores in all the world, put out an Antiracist reading list — a solid supplement to some of the titles and writers Eleanor suggested the other day — and a great place to start or continue your fight against systemic racism and engineered inequality. Choose one, choose many, but do choose to deepen your understanding of the issue. —Travis
“Human creativity is integral to revolutionary resistance—the urgent plea, the silenced cry, the righteous rage. It is imperative that we educate and illuminate ourselves to deepen our commitment to justice and equity for Black people and all people of color, and to pave the way for radical systemic change.”—City Lights Books
Antiracist Reading List:
Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Til to Trayvon Martin
Edited by Philip Cushway and Michael Warr
Norton
Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?
by Mumia Abu-Jamal
City Lights
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
Vintage
A Black Women’s History of the United States
Daina Ramey Berry and Kali N. Gross
Beacon
W.E.B. Dubois’ Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America
The W.E.B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts
Edited by Britt Rusert and Whitney Battle-Baptiste
Princeton Architectural Press
Race Man: Selected Works 1960-2015
Julian Bond
Edited by Michael G. Long
City Lights
Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot
Mikki Kendall
Viking
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
Isabel Wilkerson
Random House
The Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas
Henry Dumas
Coffee House
Everywhere You Don’t Belong: A Novel
Gabrielle Bump
Algonquin
The Meaning of Freedom and Other Difficult Dialogues
Angela Y. Davis
Foreword by Robin D.G. Kelley
City Lights
No Fascist USA!: The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today’s Movements
Hillary Moore and James Tracy
Foreword by Robin D.G. Kelley
City Lights
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Michelle Alexander
The New Press
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
adrienne maree brown
AK
Black Skin, White Masks
Frantz Fanon
Translated from the French by Richard Philcox
Grove
The Wretched of the Earth
Frantz Fanon
Translated from the French by Richard Philcox
Commentary by Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi K. Bhabha
Grove
Citizen: An American Lyric
Claudia Rankine
Graywolf
How to Be An Antiracist
Ibram X. Kendi
One World
The Fire Next Time
James Baldwin
Random House
No Name in the Street
James Baldwin
Vintage
How To Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide
Crystal Marie Fleming
Beacon
The History of White PeopleNell Irvin Painter
Norton
Heaven Is All Goodbyes: City Lights Pocket Poet Series No. 61
Tongo Eisen-Martin
City Lights
AfropessimismFrank WIlderson III
Liveright
If They Come in the Morning … : Voices of Resistance
Edited by Angela Y. Davis
Verso
So You Want to Talk About RaceIjeoma Olua
Seal
Troublemaker for Justice: The Story of Bayard Ruskin, the Man Behind the March on WashingtonJacqueline Houtman, Walter Naegle, and Michael G. Long
City Lights
We Are Not Yet Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide Carol Anderson with Tonya Bolden
Foreword by Nic Stone
Bloomsbury
Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You - A Remix of the National Book Award-Winning Stamped from the Beginning Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi
Little, Brown
Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice
Mahogany L. Browne with Elizabeth Acevedo and Olivia Gatwood
Illustrated by Theodore Taylor III
Foreword by Jason Reynolds
Roaring Brook
Betty Before XIlyasah Shabazz with Renée Watson
FSG
Clifford’s Blues
John A. Williams
Coffee House
Native Son
RIchard Wright
Harper Perennial
Training School for Negro Girls
Camille Acker
Feminist Press
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us: Essays
Hanif Abdurraqib
Two Dollar Radio
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
Bryan Stevenson
One World
The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
Toni Morrison
Vintage
Oreo
Fran Ross
New Directions
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches Audre Lorde
Foreword by Cheryl Clarke
Crossing Press
Ghost BoysJewell Parker Rhodes
Little, Brown
Monument: Poems New and Selected
Natasha Trethewey
Mariner
And one additional book we love:
