The Community for Understanding and Hope book group specializes in books about race in America. We've been meeting for ten years and we've read 94 books together.
We brought 53 books to our annual book selection meeting last week and had to narrow it down to the ten that we can read in a year.
I'll start with the list of books we'll be reading this year and, then, share the 43 books we left on the table this year - maybe, next year!
- An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
- Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance
- Ferguson's Fault Lines: The Race Quake That Rocked a Nation edited by Kimberly Jade Norwood
- The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist
- The Buffalo Soldier by Chris Bohjalian
- Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles M. Blow
- Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class by Ian F. Haney-Lopez
-
Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us
by Claude M. Steele - The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein
- Tell the Truth & Shame the Devil by Lezley McSpadden and Lyah Beth Leflore
Here are the other 43 books we talked about:
On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope by DeRay Mckesson
Speak No Evil by Uzodinma Iweala
We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team That Dismantled Jim Crow by Margaret Edds
Washington Black by Esi Edugyan
Becoming by Michelle Obama
White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo
The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of Reconstruction by Charles Lane
Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America by Michael Eric Dyson
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson
They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement by Wesley Lowery
No One Ever Asked by Katie Ganshert
A Firebell in the Night by Lee A. Drake
All American Boys by Jason Reynolds, Brendan Kiely
Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education by Mychal Denzel Smith
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson
Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo
A House in the Sky by Amanda Lindhout
Beneath the Lion's Gaze by Maaza Mengiste
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White by Daniel J. Sharfstein
Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America by George Yancy
"All the Real Indians Died Off": And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Dina Gilio-Whitaker
Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis by Keona K. Ervin
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen
We Matter: Athletes and Activism by Etan Thomas
I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown
The Black and the Blue: A Cop Reveals the Crimes and Racism in America's Law Enforcement and the Search for Change by Matthew Horace
Forward Through Ferguson, the Report of the Ferguson Commission
A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland by DaMaris B. Hill
One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy by Carol Anderson
The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present by Allan J. Lichtman
The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels by Jon Meacham
White Working Class by Joan C. Williams
Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence by Rachel Sherman
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Y. Davis
A Colony in a Nation by Chris Hayes
Native Son by Richard Wright
Black Boy by Richard Wright
Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston
13 Days in Ferguson by Ronald Johnson
About Joy Weese Moll
a librarian writing about books
