University Library News

On February 12, Ibram X. Kendi, professor and Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, published “A Reading List for Ralph Northam” in the Atlantic Monthly. Kendi wrote specifically in response to Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s statement that he would begin a program of antiracist reading following his admission to having worn blackface and possibly also a Ku Klux Klan costume during his medical-school years (photographic evidence appeared in the Eastern Virginia Medical School’s 1984 yearbook). Kendi, the author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, compiled a list of books that he recommended to readers (and Northam) as starting points for understanding racism and its history in the United States.

The Georgia State University Library holds all of the books Kendi recommended. See below for Kendi’s full list with links to our holdings of these books. We will also be purchasing Kendi’s new book, How to Be an Antiracist (forthcoming in August 2019) when it is available.

• Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (2011)
• Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016)
• Robin J. DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (2018)
• James Forman, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (2017)
• Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969, but the library also has later editions)
• Malcolm X with Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965, but the library also has later editions)
• Janet Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love and So Much More (2014)
• Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (2018)
• Kiese Laymon, Heavy: An American Memoir (2018)
• James Baldwin, The Fire This Time (1963, but the library also has later editions)
• Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (1984, but the library also has later editions)
• Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (2015)
• Jesmyn Ward, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race (2016)
• Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014)
• Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved from Womb to Grave in the Building of a Nation (2017)
• Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (1961)
• Eric Foner, Reconstruction (1988, but the library also has a later edition)
• Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (2008)
• James D. Anderson, Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (1988)
• Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (2010)
• Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (2017)
• Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996)
• Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010)
• Jeanne Theoharis, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History (2018)
• Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (2000; 2011 edition also available)
• Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (1999)
• Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter (1984; 1996 edition also available)
• Elizabeth K. Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (2016)
• Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (2010, but the library has later editions and also Daniel Hunter’s Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow: An Organizing Guide [2015])
• Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)
• Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy (2014)
• Wesley Lowery, They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement (2016)
• Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016)
• Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (2008)
• Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2017)
• Ari Berman, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (2015)
• Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy (2018)

Kendi closes his list by writing: “This anti-racist syllabus is a first step. It is for people beginning their anti-racist journey after a lifetime of not truly knowing themselves or their country. It is for people opening to knowledge now, to changing themselves now, to changing the world now.” Start with a book from this list to take those steps.