Race & Ethnicity

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The Sum of Us

What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

By Heather McGhee

Heather McGhee examines a central contradiction in American public life: policies shaped by racial division often harm the people they are presented as protecting. Drawing on economic research, political history, interviews, and reporting across the United States, she connects racism to weakened public services, barriers to healthcare, declining worker power, housing inequality, environmental danger, and restrictions on democratic participation. Her governing idea is the “zero-sum” story—the belief that progress for people of color must mean loss for white people. The book’s defining image is the public swimming pool that officials chose to close rather than integrate, sacrificing a shared resource to preserve racial exclusion. Against that pattern, McGhee develops the “Solidarity Dividend”: the material and civic gains made possible when people organize across racial lines. The result is both a diagnosis of American inequality and an argument that racial justice and broadly shared pr…

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Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

An Indian History of the American West

By Dee Brown

Dee Brown's 1970 history retells the conquest of the American West from the side of the Native nations who lived through it. Covering roughly 1860 to 1890, it moves from the Navajo Long Walk and the Dakota war in Minnesota through Sand Creek, Red Cloud's war, the Little Bighorn, the Nez Perce flight and the Apache surrenders, and closes with the killing of Sitting Bull and the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. Brown builds each episode around treaty councils, speeches and recollections, so that named leaders such as Red Cloud, Cochise, Chief Joseph and Sitting Bull speak for themselves. It remains a landmark among historical non fiction books on the American West, valued for changing whose testimony counts, and best read alongside later scholarship that has refined parts of its picture.

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Caste

The Origins of Our Discontents

By Isabel Wilkerson

In Caste, Isabel Wilkerson argues that American racism is sustained by a deeper architecture of inherited social ranking. She uses “caste” to describe a system that assigns status, authority, vulnerability, and presumed worth according to ancestry and group membership, whether or not individual participants consciously endorse it. Her main focus is the United States, but she develops the argument through comparisons with caste in India and Nazi Germany’s racial order. Historical episodes, reported encounters, biographical portraits, and experiences from Wilkerson’s own life show how hierarchy operates through law, custom, violence, etiquette, and ordinary assumptions. The book organizes these mechanisms into eight recurring pillars, including heredity, endogamy, dehumanization, occupational hierarchy, and enforcement through terror. Its central challenge is to look beyond personal prejudice and examine the durable social structure that teaches people where they supposedly belong—and w…

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The Black Count

Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

By Tom Reiss

Tom Reiss reconstructs the life of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the father of novelist Alexandre Dumas and one of the most remarkable military figures of Revolutionary France. Born in colonial Saint-Domingue to an enslaved Black woman and a French nobleman, Dumas traveled to France, enlisted as an ordinary cavalryman, and rose to the rank of general during a brief revolutionary period of expanded opportunity for men of color. His campaigns in the Alps, Italy, and Egypt established his reputation for courage, physical power, and independence. Those same qualities eventually brought him into conflict with Napoleon Bonaparte. Capture, imprisonment, political abandonment, and the restoration of racial discrimination transformed his final years. Reiss connects this history to the fiction of Dumas’s celebrated son, showing how the general’s heroism, captivity, betrayal, and longing for justice helped shape works including The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. The result is simultan…

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Roots: The Saga of an American Family

By Alex Haley

Alex Haley's Roots follows one family across roughly seven generations. It begins with Kunta Kinte, a young Mandinka man from the Gambian village of Juffure who is seized in 1767 and shipped to the Americas. It then follows his descendants through slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, to Haley's own family in twentieth-century Tennessee. Haley blended documented history, family oral tradition and invented scenes, a method he called "faction". Published in 1976, the book became a publishing phenomenon and the basis of a landmark 1977 television miniseries. It won special citations from the Pulitzer Prize board and the National Book Awards. It also changed how many Americans thought about slavery, African heritage and family history. Its research and its borrowings from other writers have been seriously disputed, so it is best read as both a cultural event and a contested work of historical fiction.

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The Autobiography of Malcolm X

By Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley

The Autobiography of Malcolm X recounts the successive transformations of Malcolm Little into a street hustler, prisoner, Nation of Islam minister, Black nationalist leader, Sunni Muslim, and international advocate for human rights. Told to journalist Alex Haley during the final years of Malcolm X’s life, the book joins personal testimony to a forceful examination of racism, religious conversion, education, crime, incarceration, political awakening, and Black self-determination. Its narrative moves from Malcolm’s childhood in the Midwest through Boston and Harlem, his years in prison, his rise under Elijah Muhammad, and his eventual break with the Nation of Islam. His pilgrimage to Mecca and travels through Africa and the Middle East initiate another major revision of his thinking without ending his commitment to Black dignity and self-defense. Published after his assassination in 1965, the book preserves both the power of his public voice and the unfinished character of his political…

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Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

An Indian History of the American West

By Dee Brown

Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee recounts the conquest of the American West largely through the experiences and recorded words of Native peoples. Concentrating on the period from 1860 to 1890, it follows a succession of treaty negotiations, removals, wars, surrenders, killings, and reservation policies involving nations across the Plains, Southwest, Great Basin, and Northwest. Leaders including Little Crow, Red Cloud, Black Kettle, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Chief Joseph, Captain Jack, and Big Foot emerge not as marginal figures in someone else’s frontier story but as political and military actors confronting invasion and dispossession. Brown ends with the killing at Wounded Knee, making it the culmination of a repeated pattern: federal promises yield to settler pressure, military force, and administrative control. Published in 1970, the book decisively challenged celebratory popular accounts of western expansion. It remains powerful and influential, though it is best read al…

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The Known World

By Edward P. Jones

Set in fictional Manchester County, Virginia, before the Civil War, The Known World begins with the death of Henry Townsend, a formerly enslaved Black man who has become a landowner and enslaver. His death unsettles the plantation he leaves to his widow, Caldonia, but the novel’s reach extends far beyond that household. Edward P. Jones follows enslaved people, free Black families, white landowners, patrolmen, officials, and others whose lives are connected by ownership, law, kinship, desire, and betrayal. Moving backward and forward through time, the narrative reveals consequences before causes and exposes how slavery reshapes generations. The novel’s central historical complication—Black participation in slaveholding—does not soften its judgment of slavery. Instead, it demonstrates how a system based on human property corrupts freedom itself, placing even legally free people inside a social order that can erase their rights, divide families, and turn aspiration into complicity.