Ibram X. Kendi's Reading List
Historian and director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research; National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist.
Open in WellRead Daily app →Ibram X. Kendi's Antiracist Reading List (2019)
Antiracist reading list Kendi curated for Oprah Daily.
Source: www.oprah.com
Dorothy Roberts · 2011 · Buy on Amazon
"No book destabilized my fraught notions of racial distinction and hierarchy."
Suzanne Model · 2008 · Buy on Amazon
"Some of the same forces have led Americans to believe that the recent success of West Indian immigrants is rooted in cultural distinctiveness."
Khalil Gibran Muhammad · 2010 · Buy on Amazon
""Black" and "criminal" are as wedded in America as "star" and "spangled.""
Zora Neale Hurston · 1937 · Buy on Amazon
"The black body exists within a wider black culture — one Hurston portrayed."
Langston Hughes · 1926 · Buy on Amazon
"We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame."
Toni Morrison · 1970 · Buy on Amazon
Wallace Thurman · 1929 · Buy on Amazon
"Beautiful and hard-working black people come in all shades."
Malcolm X · 1965 · Buy on Amazon
Jonathan M. Metzl · 2019 · Buy on Amazon
"Malcolm X began by adoring whiteness, grew to hate white people — Metzl explains how seemingly pro-white policies are killing whites."
James Forman Jr. · 2017 · Buy on Amazon
"Just as Metzl explains how seemingly pro-white policies are killing whites, Forman explores how black communities reckoned with crime."
Cedric J. Robinson · 1983 · Buy on Amazon
"Black America has been economically devastated by what Robinson calls racial capitalism."
Peniel E. Joseph · 2006 · Buy on Amazon
"Joseph chronicles how Black Power organized a response to racial capitalism."
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (ed.) · 2017 · Buy on Amazon
Glory Edim (ed.) · 2018 · Buy on Amazon
"Edim's anthology offered a generation of Black women writers naming what reading made possible for them."
Janet Mock · 2014 · Buy on Amazon
Audre Lorde · 1984 · Buy on Amazon
"Lorde's essays unmoor Christian-household thinking about queerness."
By the Book: Ibram X Kendi (2021)
NYT By the Book column (2021-02-25).
Source: www.nytimes.com
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor · Buy on Amazon
"an expertly told history of the post-civil rights emergence of what Taylor terms "predatory inclusion""
William A. Darity Jr. · Buy on Amazon
"the best booklong case for reparations"
Walter Johnson · Buy on Amazon
"adroitly examines a U.S. history of imperial racial capitalism with its crosswinds centered in St. Louis"
Nella Larsen · Buy on Amazon
Wallace Thurman · 1929 · Buy on Amazon
George S. Schuyler · Buy on Amazon
Brit Bennett · Buy on Amazon
Maurice Carlos Ruffin · Buy on Amazon
W. E. B. Du Bois · Buy on Amazon
"Du Bois showed how — far from the tragic era as Jim Crow historians had framed it for decades — formerly enslaved people and antiracist whites came together to form new Southern governments that attempted to spread power to the people."
David Blight · Buy on Amazon
Jeffrey C. Stewart · Buy on Amazon
Peniel Joseph · Buy on Amazon
Imani Perry · Buy on Amazon
"This biography was especially comforting at a time when I was recovering from cancer treatment."
bell hooks · 2000 · Buy on Amazon
""All About Love" taught me how to love; that love is a verb."
David Williams · Buy on Amazon
Favorite books (2021)
Favorite books recommended by Ibram X Kendi, as compiled by radicalreads.com. Source article: https://radicalreads.com/ibram-x-kendi-favorite-books/.
Source: radicalreads.com
Suzanne Model · Buy on Amazon
"Some of the same forces have led Americans to believe that the recent success of black immigrants from the Caribbean proves either that racism does not exist or that the gap between African-Americans and other groups in income and wealth is their own fault. But Model’s meticulous study, emphasizing the self-selecting nature of the West Indians who emigrate to the United States, argues otherwise, showing me, a native of racially diverse New York City, how such notions — the foundation of ethni..."
Khalil Gibran Muhammad · Buy on Amazon
"Black’ and ‘criminal’ are as wedded in America as ‘star’ and ‘spangled.’ Muhammad’s book traces these ideas to the late 19th century, when racist policies led to the disproportionate arrest and incarceration of blacks, igniting urban whites’ fears and bequeathing tenaciously racist stereotypes."
Langston Hughes · Buy on Amazon
"We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,’ Hughes wrote nearly 100 years ago. ‘We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.’ We are all imperfectly human, and these imperfections are also markers of human equality."
Toni Morrison (also rec’d by Gabrielle Union ) · Buy on Amazon
Wallace Thurman · Buy on Amazon
"Beautiful and hard-working black people come in all shades. If dark people have less it is not because they are less, a moral eloquently conveyed in these two classic novels, stirring explorations of colorism."
Malcolm X and Alex Haley (also rec’d by Colin Kaepernick , Gabrielle Union , Ibram X. Kendi , Janelle Monáe, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar , Rose McGowan , Tupac Shakur & Questlove ) · Buy on Amazon
Jonathan M. Metzl · Buy on Amazon
"Malcolm X began by adoring whiteness, grew to hate white people and, ultimately, despised the false concept of white superiority — a killer of people of color. And not only them: low- and middle-income white people too, as Metzl’s timely book shows, with its look at Trump-era policies that have unraveled the Affordable Care Act and contributed to rising gun suicide rates and lowered life expectancies."
James Forman Jr. · Buy on Amazon
"Just as Metzl explains how seemingly pro-white policies are killing whites, Forman explains how blacks themselves abetted the mass incarceration of other blacks, beginning in the 1970s. Amid rising crime rates, black mayors, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs embraced tough-on-crime policies that they promoted as pro-black with tragic consequences for black America."
Cedric J. Robinson · Buy on Amazon
"Black America has been economically devastated by what Robinson calls racial capitalism. He chastises white Marxists (and black capitalists) for failing to acknowledge capitalism’s racial character, and for embracing as sufficient an interpretation of history founded on a European vision of class struggle."
Peniel E. Joseph · Buy on Amazon
"As racial capitalism deprives black communities of resources, assimilationists ignore or gentrify these same spaces in the name of ‘development’ and ‘integration.’ To be antiracist is not only to promote equity among racial groups, but also among their spaces, something the black power movement of the 1960s and 1970s understood well, as Joseph’s chronicle makes clear."
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor · Buy on Amazon
Glory Edim · Buy on Amazon
"I began my career studying, and too often admiring, activists who demanded black (male) power over black communities, including over black women, whom they placed on pedestals and under their feet. Black feminist literature, including these anthologies, helps us recognize black women ‘as human, levelly human,’ as the Combahee River Collective demanded to be seen in 1977."
Audre Lorde · Buy on Amazon
"I grew up in a Christian household thinking there was something abnormal and immoral about queer blacks. My racialized transphobia made Mock’s memoir an agonizing read — just as my racialized homophobia made Lorde’s essays and speeches a challenge. But pain often precedes healing."