Simone wants to find the perfect color to describe herself. She doesn’t have dark skin like her mom, and she doesn’t have light skin like her dad. She’s somewhere in between. Simone discovers more about her own identity in her search.
Kids (Grades K -2)
All Because You Matter, by Tami Charles. This ode to young black and brown children everywhere assures them that they matter.
Desmond and the Very Mean Word: A Story of Forgiveness, by Desmond Tutu. Desmond hears some boys call him "a very mean word" which makes him is hurt and angry. By talking to his mentor and working through some real emotions, Desmond finds a way to feel compassion and ultimately, forgiveness.
Let the Children March, by Monica Clark-Robinson. In May 1963 while people planned to protest segregation and to hear Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speak, many were afraid that they would lose their jobs. Thousands of children and teens volunteered to march in their parents' place.
Let's Talk About Race, by Lester, Julius. In easy, conversational tone, the author tells his "story" explaining that his race is only one part of who he is.
Black Brother, Black Brother, by Jewell Parker Rhodes. Dante, a biracial student at a Massachusetts prep school struggles to navigate institutional racism.
Brown Girl Dreaming, by Jacqueline Woodson. In this award-winning autobiography, Jacqueline Woodson tells the story of her childhood and what it was like growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. Written in verse, it reflects her journey as first, a struggling reader then as a writer expressing her voice.
New Kid, by Jerry Craft. Jordan has transferred from his old neighborhood school in the Bronx to an expensive new private school. He would really prefer to go to art school, but his parents want him to succeed in other ways. He's one of only a few colored kids and assumptions based on skin color abound. Jordan handles it with grace and humor.
Kid Activists: True Tales of Childhood from Champions of Change, by Robin Stevenson. Adult activists were kids once too. The childhood stories of 16 activists, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Hellen Keller and Malala Yousafzai are told in this collection.
My Year in the Middle, by Lila Quintero Weaver. Blacks and whites don't mix in Alabama in 1970. Lu Olivera, daughter of Argentinian immigrants, finds a friend in black runner, Belinda. Conflicts abound and Lu knows she needs to find the strength to do the right thing.
Not Your All-American Girl, by Madelyn Rosenberg. Set in 1984 Virginia, Lauren, who is half-Jewish and half-Chinese doesn't get the lead in the school play because she doesn't look the part. She is crushed and begins to doubt whether her dream of being a singer is possible. Through heart and humor Lauren finds her way with music, button making and friends.
This Book is Anti-Racist, by Tiffany Jewell. This guidebook geared towards older school-aged children presents tools for young people to build understanding and an anti-racist mindset.
We Resist, We Resist, We Raise Our Voices, by Wade Hudson."We Rise, We Resist, We Raise Our Voices" is a collection of writing and art from 50 diverse children's authors and illustrators. Poetry, letters, personal essays and art empower and encourage young readers to be leaders, to be kind and tolerant.
Teens
The Black Flamingo, by Dean Atta. This novel in verse tells the story of a mixed-race gay teen coming to terms with his identity.
Dear Martin, by Nic Stone. While trying to make sense of a society marked by racism and negativity, 17-year-old Justyce finds solace and guidance in the letters he writes to the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas. The life of 16-year-old Starr Carter is forever changed when she witnesses the shooting death of her best friend Khalil, at the hands of a police officer.
Here to Stay, by Sara Farizan. A high school basketball star of Middle Eastern descent faces racism and cyberbullying from his classmates.
I'm Not Dying with You Tonight, by Kimberly Jones & Gilly Segal. Two girls, one black and one white, must set aside their differences and work together to make it home safely after a race riot erupts during a high school football game.
Piecing Me Together, by Renee Watson. An underprivileged teen encounters microaggression and hostility when she is awarded a scholarship to a predominately white private school.
Punching the Air, by Ibi Zoboi & Yusef Salaam. In this novel in verse, co-written by Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five, a teen finds himself incarcerated for a crime he didn't commit.
Slay, by Brittney Morris. A secretive teen game developer tries to protect her identity as well as her Nubian themed game, from the threats of a malicious online troll.
Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, And You, by Jason Reynolds. This remixed edition of author Ibram X. Kendi's award winning book, Stamped from the Beginning, gives young readers an overview of racist and antiracist ideas in America, from their roots in Europe until today.
This Book is Anti-Racist: 20 Lessons on How to Wake up, Take Action, and Do the Work, by Tiffany Jewell. This interactive guidebook helps readers understand the complexities of racism and discrimination and gives them the tools to combat it.
Adults
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander. Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that 'we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.'
Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race," a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men--bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates's attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son--and readers--the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children's lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.
Stamped from the Beginning: the Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, by Ibram X. Kendi. The National Book Award winning history of how racist ideas were created, spread, and deeply rooted in American society. Some Americans insist that we're living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America -- it is more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit. In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. He uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to drive this history: Puritan minister Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and legendary activist Angela Davis.As Kendi shows, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. They were created to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation's racial inequities.In shedding light on this history, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose racist thinking. In the process, he gives us reason to hope.
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison. Both a deeply compelling bestselling novel and an epic milestone of American literature. The book's nameless narrator describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood", before retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.Originally published in 1952 as the first novel by a then unknown author, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land , Joyce, and Dostoevsky.
The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison. Published in 1970, The Bluest Eye is the first novel written by Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature.
It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove -- a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others -- who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
Ain't I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism, by Bell Hooks. A classic work of feminist scholarship, Ain't I a Woman has become a must-read for all those interested in the nature of black womanhood. Examining the impact of sexism on black women during slavery, the devaluation of black womanhood, black male sexism, racism among feminists, and the black woman's involvement with feminism, hooks attempts to move us beyond racist and sexist assumptions. The result is nothing short of groundbreaking, giving this book a critical place on every feminist scholar's bookshelf.
Women, Race & Class, by Angela Y. Davis. A powerful study of the women's liberation movement in the U.S., from abolitionist days to the present, that demonstrates how it has always been hampered by the racist and classist biases of its leaders. From the widely revered and legendary political activist and scholar Angela Davis.
The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin. A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two "letters," written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as "sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle...all presented in searing, brilliant prose," The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.
The Condemnation Of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, by Khalil Gibran Muhammad. (Streaming Audio Book). Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society.Following the 1890 census-the first to measure the generation of African Americans born after slavery-crime statistics, new migration and immigration trends, and symbolic references to America as the promised land of opportunity were woven into a cautionary tale about the exceptional threat black people posed to modern urban society. Excessive arrest rates and overrepresentation in northern prisons were seen by many whites-liberals and conservatives, northerners and southerners-as indisputable proof of blacks' inferiority. In the heyday of "separate but equal," what else but pathology could explain black failure in the "land of opportunity?"The idea of black criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban America, as were African Americans' own ideas about race and crime. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.
Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine. An art exhibit in a book, Rankine blends striking images with her poetry about race, racism, and media.
Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Reni Eddo-Lodge. Speaks to the importance of people of color leading the discussion on structural racism and what can be done to dismantle it.
Hood Feminism: Note from the Women that a Movement Forgot, Kendall Mikki. Women of color are often excluded from mainstream feminism and Hood Feminism talks about the intersectionality of race, feminism, and how we can do better.
So You Want to Talk About Race, by Ijeoma Oluo. Discusses and explains the structural racism and oppression of America, how it permeates everything, and how to dismantle it all.
Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson. Highlights the disparity within the justice system towards the disadvantaged.
Sing, Unburied, Sing, by Jesmyn Ward. An intersectional story about family, race, and America told across three generations.
An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones. A couple grapples with their relationship in light of a wrongful imprisonment.