Adult Non-Fiction

This list of fiction and nonfiction books, compiled by kYmberly Keeton of ART | library deco of Austin, Texas provides a range of perspectives on the issues raised by the POV documentaryUnapologetic.

About Film: After two police killings, Black millennial organizers challenge a Chicago administration complicit in state violence against its Black residents. Told through the lens of Janaé and Bella, two fierce abolitionist leaders, Unapologetic is a deep look into the Movement for Black Lives, from the police murder of Rekia Boyd to the election of mayor Lori Lightfoot.

Adult Non-Fiction

Alexander, Michelle.The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York, New Press, 2010.‌
This powerful text highlights the racial dimensions of the "War on Drugs." The author argues that federal drug policy unfairly targets communities of color, keeping millions of young, Black men in a cycle of poverty and behind bars.The New Jim Crow is a stunning account of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status—denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement.

‌Bennett, Michael, and Dave Zirin.Things That Make White People Uncomfortable. Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2019.
Bennett adds his unmistakable voice to discussions of racism and police violence, Black athletes and their relationship to powerful institutions like the NCAA and the NFL, the role of protest in history, and the responsibilities of athletes as role models to speak out against injustice. Following in the footsteps of activist-athletes from Muhammad Ali to Colin Kaepernick, Bennett demonstrates his outspoken leadership both on and off the field. Written with award-winning sportswriter and author Dave Zirin, Things that Make White People Uncomfortable is a sports book for our turbulent times, a memoir, and a manifesto as hilarious and engaging as it is illuminating.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi.Between the World and Me. New York, Spiegel & Grau, 2015.
Between the World and Me unfolds as a six-chapter letter from Coates to his 15-year-old son Samori, prompted by his son’s stunned and heartbroken reaction to the announcement that no charges would be brought against Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown.Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer 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.

Collins, Patricia Hill.Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (Contradictions of Modernity). 1st ed. vol. 7, University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
In Fighting Words, Collins investigates how effectively Black feminist thought confronts the injustices African American women currently face. The book examines poverty, mothering, white supremacy and Afrocentrism, the resegregation of American society by race and class, and the ideas of Sojourner Truth and how they can serve as a springboard for more liberating social theory.

Day, Susie.Brother You Choose: Panthers, Politics, and Revolution. 2020.
Paul Coates and Eddie Conway met as young men in Baltimore in the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. When Conway went to prison in 1970 based on flimsy evidence, Coates advocated for him. Coates (father of Ta-Nehisi) founded Black Classic Press and maintained his friendship with Conway despite the 44 years the latter spent in prison. Day has compiled and edited their wide-ranging conversations.

Haga, Kazu.Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm.Parallax Press, 2020.
Activists and social change agents, restorative justice practitioners, faith leaders, and anybody engaged in social progress and shifting society will find this mindful approach to nonviolent action indispensable. Nonviolence was once considered the highest form of activism and radical change. And yet its basic truth, its restorative power, has been forgotten. In Healing Resistance, leading Kingian Nonviolence trainer Kazu Haga blazingly reclaims the energy and assertiveness of nonviolent practice (utilized by the Women’s March and Black Lives Matter), and proves that nonviolent civil resistance remains the most effective strategy for social change in hostile times. With over 20 years of experience practicing and teaching Kingian Nonviolence, Haga offers us the practical approach to societal conflict first begun by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement, which has been developed into a fully workable, step-by-step training and deeply transformative philosophy. Kingian Nonviolence takes on the timely issues of endless protest and activist burnout, and presents tried-and-tested strategies for staying resilient, creating equity, and restoring peace.

hooks, bell.Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. 1st ed. Routledge, 2003.
In Teaching Community bell hooks seeks to theorize from the place of the positive, looking at what works. Writing about struggles to end racism and white supremacy, she makes the useful point that "No one is born a racist. Everyone makes a choice." Teaching Community tells us how we can choose to end racism and create a beloved community. hooks looks at many issues-among them, spirituality in the classroom, white people looking to end racism, and erotic relationships between professors and students. Spirit, struggle, service, love, the ideals of shared knowledge and shared learning - these values motivate progressive social change. Teachers of vision know that democratic education can never be confined to a classroom. Teaching - so often undervalued in our society -- can be a joyous and inclusive activity. bell hooks shows the way. "When teachers teach with love, combining care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust, we are often able to enter the classroom and go straight to the heart of the matter, which is knowing what to do on any given day to create the best climate for learning."

Lorde, Audre.A Burst of Light. 2nd ed. Ixia Press, 2017.
Winner of the 1988 Before Columbus Foundation National Book Award, this path-breaking collection of essays is a clarion call to build communities that nurture our spirit. Lorde announces the need for a radical politics of intersectionality while struggling to maintain her own faith as she wages a battle against liver cancer. From reflections on her struggle with the disease to thoughts on lesbian sexuality and African-American identity in a straight white man's world, Lorde's voice remains enduringly relevant in today's political landscape.

Lorde, Audre.Sister Outsider. 1984. Reprint, Penguin Random House, 2007.
In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde-scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde’s philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published. These landmark writings are, in Lorde’s own words, a call to “never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is . . . ”

Moraga, Cherríe and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds.This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. 4th ed. State University of New York Press, 1981.
Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, the collection explores, as coeditor Cherríe Moraga writes, "the complex confluence of identities--race, class, gender, and sexuality--systemic to women of color oppression and liberation." Reissued here, nearly thirty-five years after its inception, the fourth edition contains an extensive new introduction by Moraga, along with a previously unpublished statement by Gloria Anzaldúa.

Parenti, Christian.Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis. New York, Verso, 2001.
In this important book, Parenti surveys the rise of the prison industrial complex from the Nixon through Reagan eras and into the present. Why does the United States currently have one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world, with over 1.8 million Americans living behind bars? Why are only 29 percent of all prisoners violent offenders? Parenti, a former radio journalist and now a professor at the New College of California, argues that capitalism implies and demands a certain amount of poverty; the powers that be then respond by incarcerating drug users, the underclass, and other relatively powerless persons.

Rankine, Claudia. Citizen :An American Lyric. Graywolf Press, 2014.
Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. Including personal stories about the weight of racism, Hurricane Katrina, the denigration of Serena Williams, police killings and more, “Citizen” plunges readers into a world of pain, but softens the blow with writing so beautiful that my breath caught in my throat.

Reagan, Michale Beyea.Intersectional Class Struggle.AK Press, 2021.
This innovative study, explores the relevance of class as a theoretical category in our world today, arguing that leading traditions of class analysis have missed major elements of what class is and how it operates. It combines instersectional theory and materialism to show that culture, economics, ideology, and consciousness are all factors that go into making “class” meaningful. Using a historical lens, it studies the experiences of working class peoples, from migrant farm workers in California’s central valley, to the “factory girls” of New England, and black workers in the South to explore the variety of working-class experiences. It investigates how the concepts of racial capitalism and black feminist thought, when applied to class studies and popular movements, allow us to walk and chew gum at the same time—to recognize that our movements can be diverse and particularistic as well as have elements of the universal experience shared by all workers. Ultimately, it argues that class is made up of all of us, it is of ourselves, in all our contradiction and complexity.

Saeed Jones.How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir. Cengage Gale, 2020.
As a teenager growing up in Texas, Jones had wrestled with the feelings provoked by other men’s bodies. The murders of James Byrd, Jr. and Matthew Shepard taught him that “[b]eing a black gay boy is a death wish.” Yet Jones endured and embraced his sexuality. His relationship with his Buddhist mother forms the backbone of this affecting story.

Samaran, Nora.Turn this World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture.AK Press, 2019.
As Nora Samaran writes, “violence is nurturance turned backwards.” In its place, she proposes “nurturance culture” as the opposite of rape culture, suggesting that models of care and accountability—different from “call-outs” rooted in the politics of guilt—can move toward dismantling systems of dominance and oppression.
When communities identify and interrupt systemic violence, prioritize the needs of those harmed, and hold a circle of belonging that humanizes everyone, they create a foundation that can begin to resist and repair the harms inflicted by patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism. Emerging from insights in gender studies, race theory, and psychology, and influenced by contemporary social movements, Turn This World Inside Out engages today's crucial questions, helping move us beyond seemingly intractable barriers to collective change.

Smith, Clint.How the World is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America.Little, Brown, and Company, 2021.
Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history, and ourselves.

It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation–turned–maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers.

Smith, Mychal Denzel.Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching : A Young Black Man’s Education. New York, Bold Type Books, 2017.
How do you learn to be a Black man in America? For young Black men today, it means coming of age during the presidency of Barack Obama. It means witnessing the deaths of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Akai Gurley, and too many more. It means celebrating powerful moments of Black self-determination for LeBron James, Dave Chappelle, and Frank Ocean. Mychal Denzel Smith chronicles his own personal and political education during these tumultuous years, describing his efforts to come into his own in a world that denied his humanity

Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, editor.How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Haymarket, 2017.
The Combahee River Collective, a path-breaking group of radical black feminists, was one of the most important organizations to develop out of the antiracist and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. In this collection of essays and interviews edited by activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, founding members of the organization and contemporary activists reflect on the legacy of its contributions to Black feminism and its impact on today’s struggles.

Taylor, Renee Sonya.The Body Is Not An Apology: The Power Of Radical Self-Love.Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2018.
Humans are a varied and divergent bunch with all manner of beliefs, morals, and bodies. Systems of oppression thrive off our inability to make peace with difference and injure the relationship we have with our own bodies.

The Body Is Not an Apology offers radical self-love as the balm to heal the wounds inflicted by these violent systems. World-renowned activist and poet Sonya Renee Taylor invites us to reconnect with the radical origins of our minds and bodies and celebrate our collective, enduring strength. As we awaken to our own indoctrinated body shame, we feel inspired to awaken others and to interrupt the systems that perpetuate body shame and oppression against all bodies. When we act from this truth on a global scale, we usher in the transformative opportunity of radical self-love, which is the opportunity for a more just, equitable, and compassionate world—for us all.

‌Ward, Jesmyn.Men We Reaped : A Memoir. London, Bloomsbury, 2018.
Jesmyn's memoir shines a light on the community she comes from, in the small town of DeLisle, Mississippi, a place of quiet beauty and fierce attachment. Here, in the space of four years, she lost five young men dear to her, including her beloved brother-lost to drugs, accidents, murder, and suicide. Their deaths were seemingly unconnected, yet their lives had been connected, by identity and place, and as Jesmyn dealt with these losses, she came to a staggering truth: These young men died because of who they were and the place they were from, because certain disadvantages breed a certain kind of bad luck. Because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle.