Our Diversity Book Club meets next week over a potluck supper to choose the books we’ll read for the coming year. These meetings are always rich with possibility as we all throw books on the table to sort through, talk about, and vote on. We often start with a couple of dozen that we have to narrow down to 8 or 9.
We’ve been meeting most months since the summer of 2008. Here’s a piece about our beginning: Fifth Anniversary of Kirkwood City Hall Shooting. The list of books we’ve read is so long that none of us can remember them all. I promised that, before this year’s selection meeting, I would compile the list so we weren’t relying on memory. I decided to do it on my blog since such a list will be generally useful to any one who wants to read about race in America, whether or not it happens to be Black History Month. The breadth, scope, and length of this list of books make me proud and happy to be part of this group.
After reading this list, let me know if there’s a title we’ve missed. I know some of us are interested in reading some classics and we occasionally read novels. We’re pretty open to new ideas.
Here’s the list of all 45 books, in the order that we read them:
Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black by Gregory Williams
White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son By Tim Wise
Dreams of my Father by Barack Obama
Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom by Lisa Delpit and Herbert Kohl
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum
Black Wealth, White Wealth by Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro
When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories by Bernestine Singley
Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome by Joy DeGruy Leary
Race Matters by Cornel West
The Color of Water by James McBride
White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era by Shelby Steele
Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception by Martha Sandweiss
Modello: A Story of Hope for the Inner City and Beyond by Jack Pransky
Forbidden Fruit: Love Stories from the Underground Railroad by Betty DeRamus
The Hemmingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed
Best African-American Fiction 2009, ed. E. Lynn Harris and Gerald Early
140 Years of Soul: A History of African-Americans in Manhattan Kansas, 1865-2005 by Geraldine Baker Walton
The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges–And Who Gets Left Outside the Gates by Daniel Golden
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
The Black Girl Next Door: A Memoir by Jennifer Lynn Baszile
Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts
The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore
The Grace of Silence by Michele Norris
Little X: Growing Up in the Nation of Islam by Sonsyrea Tate
Never Been a Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked the Civil Rights Movement by Harper Barnes
Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America by Melissa V. Harris-Perry
Unbowed: A Memoir by Wangari Muta Maathai
At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance: A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power by Danielle L. McGuire
Color Me English: Thoughts about Migrations and Belonging Before and After 9/11 by Caryl Phillips
Miracle at St. Anna by James McBride
Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America by Rich Benjamin
killing rage: Ending Racism by bell hooks
How to Be Black by Baratunde Thurston
A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines
Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock by David Margolick
Wake of the Wind by J. California Cooper
No Crystal Stair: A Documentary Novel of the Life and Work of Lewis Michaux, Harlem Bookseller by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People, and Communities by Will Allen
Telling Memories Among Southern Women by Susan Tucker