If you’re looking for resources to begin to confront the history of racism in our country, here are books (nearly all) by people of color that have been helpful to me. These are all ACHINGLY beautiful or incisive or helpful books. We don’t read them because we should. We read them because they are amazing art and help us be better people.

I’d love, in the comments, if you’d share books YOU are reading that are changing how you approach race–ESPECIALLY resources by people of color. Let’s cheer each other on as we learn and work for change.

Personal Favorites

These are the writers whose books helped me see the world and our history in an astoundingly new way.

Anything by Ta-Nehisi Coates. His articles at The Atlantic are SO great for understanding the history of racial oppression.

Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer. Kimmerer’s lyric love of the earth helped me see what we lost when we committed genocide against native peoples…and why that matters today, so urgently.

Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. No author I know pins the truth down on the page so ably, so unflinchingly. Yet throughout his writing, Baldwin shows such compassion for the White people he is calling to task. Brilliant.

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. If you wonder how the city you live in got so divided by race, you will learn why–and see the very personal, human cost of “ghettoes” for all of us.

Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman. This is the book that Civil Rights leaders apparently carried around with them to protests. Thurman asks the very moving, very awkward question: what does Jesus have to say to the people with their backs against the wall?

The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right by Lisa Sharon Harper. This book made me understand the idea of peace–shalom–in such a tangible way. Life-changing.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. Sometimes we read about slavery casually. This book helped me to understand its vertiginous horror—but so beautifully, and with such amazing imagination.