If You Know Anything About Us, You Know That We Are Avid Readers. 

Over the years, we’ve been asked countless times for reading recommendations, so we decided to share a few of the books that have shaped our thinking, informed our trainings, and continue to live on the shelves throughout our home.

These are the books we return to often — for reflection, challenge, growth, and liberation-centered leadership.

Pour a Cup. Open a Book. Shift the Culture.

 

Reading Recommendations

 Foundational Texts

·         The New Jim Crow – Michelle Alexander

·         Stamped from the Beginning – Ibram X. Kendi

·         How to Be an Antiracist – Ibram X. Kendi

·         Me and White Supremacy – Layla F. Saad

·         You Don’t Know Us Negroes- Zora Neale Hurston

·         Abolitionist’s Handbook -Patrisse Cullors

 History & Structure of Anti-Blackness

·         Slavery by Another Name – Douglas A. Blackmon

·         Caste – Isabel Wilkerson

·         The Half Has Never Been Told – Edward E. Baptist

·         The Color of Law – Richard Rothstein (housing segregation specifically)

·         The Delectable Negro -Vincent Woodard

·         Four Hundred Souls – ed. Ibram X. Kendi & Keisha N. Blain (anthology)

·         The 1619 Project – Nikole Hannah-Jones et al.

·         Accounting For Slavery – Dr. Caitlin Rosenthal

·         They Were Her Property – Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

 Black Feminist & Intersectional Perspectives

·         Sister Outsider – Audre Lorde

·         Ain't I a Woman – bell hooks

·         Fire Next Time – James Baldwin

·         In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens – Alice Walker

·         All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave – ed. Hull, Scott & Smith

·         Thick – Dr. Tressie McMillan-Cottom

 Anti-Blackness in Specific Systems

·         The Condemnation of Blackness – Khalil Gibran Muhammad (criminal justice)

·         Medical Apartheid – Harriet A. Washington (medicine & experimentation)

·         The Sum of Us – Heather McGhee (economics)

·         Dark Ghettos – Tommie Shelby (philosophy & poverty)

 Psychology & Lived Experience

·         Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome – Joy DeGruy

·         My Grandmother's Hands – Resmaa Menakem (somatic/body-centered)

·         Between the World and Me – Ta-Nehisi Coates

·         So You Want to Talk About Race – Ijeoma Oluo

 Global & Diasporic Anti-Blackness

·         Black Looks – bell hooks

·         Lose Your Mother – Saidiya Hartman

·         Scenes of Subjection – Saidiya Hartman (pairs beautifully with Accounting for Slavery)

·         Afropean – Johny Pitts (anti-Blackness in Europe)

 Theory & Critical Race Studies

·         Critical Race Theory: An Introduction – Delgado & Stefancic

·         Are Prisons Obsolete? – Angela Y. Davis

·         Abolition Democracy – Angela Y. Davis

·         Blackness and the Adventure of Western Culture – George E. Kent