Top Picks—A Suggested Reading List

Sep 13, 2016 | Racism and Bias

We would like to share a reading list that we believe can increase awareness and a different level of understanding of racism and bias. We are also interested in hearing from you. If you have suggestions of additional text, please feel free to send them our way.

The list will be available on the Levy Library’s Guides, and we will have a table set up in the library highlighting some of our top five books, and you will be able to borrow them at any time.

Dr. Muller’s Top 5:

  1. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness—Michelle Alexander
  2. The Souls of Black Folk— W.E.B. Dubois
  3. Fatal Invention—Dorothy Roberts, JD
  4. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present—Harriet A. Washington
  5. Americanah—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Dr. Karani’s Top 5:

  1. The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, And Reconciliation After The Genome—Alondra Nelson
  2. Body & Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination—Alondra Nelson
  3. The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Differences in West Africa— Duana Fulwiley
  4. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks— Rebecca Skloot
  5. The Nature of Race: how scientists think and teach about human difference—Ann Morning

Dr. Palermo’s Top 5 (At the moment):

  1. The War Against All Puerto Ricans—Nelson Denis
  2. Dog Whistle Politics: How coded racial appeals have reinvented racism and wrecked the middle class—Ian Haney Lopez
  3. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present—Harriet A. Washington
  4. Speaking Treason Fluently, Anti-Racist Reflections from an Angry White Male—Tim Wise
  5. Seeing White: An Introduction to White Privilege and Race—Jean Halley, Amy Eshelman, and Ramya Mahadevan Vijaya

ADDITIONAL SUGGESTIONS:

  1. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies—Jared Diamond
  2. The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League—Jeff Hobbs
  3. The Mismeasure of Man—Stephen Jay Gould
  4. Blind Spot: Hidden Biases of Good People—Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald
  5. Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor’s Reflections on Race and Medicine—Damon Tweedy
  6. A People’s History of the United States—Howard Zinn
  7. Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America—David K. Shipler
  8. Breathing Race Into The Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics—Lundy Braun
  9. The Dignity of Difference—Jonathan Sacks
  10. White Like Me—Tim Wise
  11. Dear White America—Tim Wise
  12. Pedagogy of the Oppressed—Paulo Freire
  13. Dog Whistle Politics: How coded racial appeals have reinvented racism and wrecked the middle class—Ian Haney Lopez
  14. Between the World and Me—Ta-Nehisi Coates
  15. Upsetting the Apple Cart: Black and Latino Coalitions in New York City from Protest to Public Office—Frederick Douglass Opie

 

We encourage you join in the discussion. We look forward to working with students to continue our efforts to eliminate racism bias in our learning environment.