Racism

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates · 2015

Written as a letter to his teenage son, Coates’s book is a devastating, lyrical account of what it means to inhabit a Black body in America — the constant vigilance it requires, the violence it has historically been subject to, and the love a father tries to offer his son in the face of it. It won the National Book Award and remains one of the most essential texts on race published this century.

Caste

Isabel Wilkerson · 2020

Wilkerson argues that American racism is best understood not simply as prejudice but as a caste system — a rigid social hierarchy with deep structural roots, comparable to those of India and Nazi Germany. Her research is exhaustive and her argument genuinely illuminating, offering readers a new framework for understanding patterns they may have struggled to name.

Minor Feelings

Cathy Park Hong · 2020

Hong writes about growing up Asian American and the particular, often dismissed emotional experience of racism that doesn’t fit neatly into the country’s more familiar conversations about race — the feeling of being seen as perpetually foreign, or not seen at all. It is a vital reminder that racism takes many different forms and is felt differently depending on which community is living with it.

The Sum of Us

Heather McGhee · 2021

McGhee travels the country making an argument that reframes the whole conversation: that racism carries a real, measurable cost for everyone, including the people it was supposedly designed to benefit, and that dismantling it is therefore not a zero-sum trade but a shared gain. For readers looking for a more hopeful, solutions-focused way into this subject, McGhee offers one grounded in solid research rather than wishful thinking.

Pachinko

Min Jin Lee · 2017

Lee follows four generations of a Korean family living in Japan, where they are treated as permanent outsiders no matter how many decades they have lived there or how completely they have built their lives around a country that will not fully claim them. It is a sweeping, patient novel about a form of ethnic discrimination many Western readers have never encountered in fiction before.

Exit West

Mohsin Hamid · 2017

Two refugees fall in love while fleeing an unnamed war, moving through magical doors that deposit them in cities across a world growing steadily more hostile to people who look like them. Hamid uses fantasy lightly, as a way of universalising a specific, urgent story about the xenophobia migrants face almost everywhere they land.

There There

Tommy Orange · 2018

Orange follows twelve Native characters converging on a powwow in Oakland, refusing every stereotype of what an Indigenous life in America is supposed to look like. It is a vital corrective for readers whose understanding of racism against Indigenous peoples has been limited to the past tense.

Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race

Reni Eddo-Lodge · 2017

Eddo-Lodge’s bestselling book grew out of a 2014 blog post explaining why she had stopped discussing race with white people who refused to accept the existence of structural racism. Focused specifically on Britain, it traces the country’s own history of empire, immigration, and denial — a necessary corrective for readers who associate racism only with America.