Contemporary Books on Social Justice

What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City (2018) is pediatrician, scientist, and public health advocate Mona Hanna-Attisha’s (Dr. Mona) debut book that provides an in-depth look at the government’s poisoning of Flint residents and subsequent coverup. This story, according to Dr. Mona, is also about much deeper crises that the broader American society is currently facing: a breakdown in local democracy; misguided austerity policies; environmental injustices... Read What the Eyes Don’t See Summary

When They Call You a Terrorist is a nonfiction memoir published in 2018 by the American authors and activists Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele. Subtitled A Black Lives Matter Memoir, the book chronicles Cullors’s early life in Los Angeles and her role in cofounding Black Lives Matter, a decentralized racial justice movement established after George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the Trayvon Martin shooting. The book’s title refers to accusations of terrorism lobbed at Cullors and her... Read When They Call You a Terrorist Summary

... Read WHEREAS Summary

... Read Where Do We Go From Here Summary

... Read White by Law Summary

Published in 2018, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo received critical acclaim and became a New York Times Bestseller for explaining how white people should address racism in the moment and how they can move into a new, healthier, less racist paradigm. DiAngelo holds a PhD in multicultural education and specializes in critical racial and social justice education.Plot SummaryDiAngelo stresses that all white people play... Read White Fragility Summary

White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era is a 2006 nonfiction book by Shelby Steele, a Black conservative author who specializes in the study of race relations in the US. This guide refers to the e-book published in 2009 by HarperCollins. The title points to the book’s central theme: white guilt—the loss of moral authority—and the damaging responses it elicited in Black and White Americans in the... Read White Guilt Summary

... Read Whiteness of a Different Color Summary

... Read White Privilege Summary

Carol Anderson's 2016 nonfiction book, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, looks at the way African-American progress has been halted and repressed, again and again, by a powerful cocktail of economic self-interest, fear, and hatred on the part of America's white elites, a philosophy she calls "white rage." The book’s five chapters examine five crucial turning points in the African-American struggle for freedom and equality: Reconstruction and the abolition of slavery, the... Read White Rage Summary

... Read White Rural Rage Summary

IntroductionIn White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg documents the historical and contemporary disdain of the upper and middle classes in America for the white poor and the resultant staying power of a class hierarchy. Isenberg, an award-winning historian, uses her expertise to contribute this non-fictional work to the academic literature on social class. Originally published in 2016, the book became a New York Times bestseller and was a finalist... Read White Trash Summary

... Read Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper Summary

First published in 1997, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race addresses race and racism in the United States from a psychologist’s perspective. Beverly Daniel Tatum is a clinical psychologist with extensive experience in researching racial identity development. We need to learn how to have productive dialogues about race and racism, and to do that we need to understand how our racial identities form and how... Read Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Summary

... Read Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race Summary

Why We Can’t Wait is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s history of the Birmingham protests that took place in 1963 and his effort to explain the aims and goals of the Civil Rights Movement to a national audience. King explores the background of the protests in Birmingham, the importance of nonviolence as the primary approach to protest, how this approach played out in Birmingham, and the aftermath of the protests in an introduction and eight chapters... Read Why We Can't Wait Summary

... Read Wilmington's Lie Summary

... Read Winners Take All Summary

Woman at Point Zero, also titled Firdaus, is a 1975 novella by Nawal El Saadawi based on the true account of a woman named Firdaus who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1974. Saadawi was a prolific Egyptian feminist and physician, and she worked with Egyptian women who experienced various mental conditions that Saadawi saw largely as resulting from living in a patriarchal society. She had the privilege of meeting Firdaus on... Read Woman at Point Zero Summary

... Read Women, Race & Class Summary