Why do we read? We read to learn deep truths about ourselves, God, and others; to escape our reality and live in another; to enjoy words whisking us away to brand-new worlds. We read to feel and to live. A good book challenges our worldview, brings us comfort, offers a new set of lenses through which to see the world.
Why should we read books by people of color? For the exact same reasons, to learn deep truths, to escape our reality, to enjoy words whisking us away to a world where we’ve never lived. More than likely, you didn’t grow up in a small town in Puerto Rico or live through Hurricane Katrina in a yellow house in New Orleans or escape slavery via the Underground Railroad.
When we read books by people of color, we discover a richness, depth, beauty, and insight we would never know if the authors didn’t take us by the hand and walk us through their stories.
Here are eight books written by people of color that you’ll want to read this year. At the end of this post, you’ll find links to more books you’ll want to check out (literally or figuratively!).
The FCC requires that I tell you that I’m an Amazon Affiliate, which means I earn a bit of commission on each sale. But don’t worry there’s no added cost to you! All “What it’s about” descriptions are taken from Amazon.
Books about reconciliation
Be the Bridge by Latasha Morrison
What it’s about: “Change begins with an honest conversation among a group of Christians willing to give a voice to unspoken hurts, hidden fears, and mounting tensions. In this perspective-shifting book, founder Latasha Morrison shows how you can participate in this incredible work and replicate it in your own community. With conviction and grace, she examines the historical complexities of racism. She expertly applies biblical principles, such as lamentation, confession, and forgiveness, to lay the framework for restoration.”
Why it’s important: Be the Bridge is a fantastic book for anyone wanting to see racial reconciliation and equality through God’s lens. Latasha offers vulnerable and personal reflections, historical insights, and hard but important truths that each of us needs to consider and allow to penetrate our hearts. (Written by Sarah Westfall of the Not My Story podcast.)
Awards: New York Times bestseller, ECPA bestseller, Winner of the Christianity Today Book Award
Secular/Religious: Religious
The Color of Compromise by Jemar Tisby
What it’s about: “The Color of Compromise is both enlightening and compelling, telling a history we either ignore or just don’t know. Equal parts painful and inspirational, it details how the American church has helped create and maintain racist ideas and practices. You will be guided in thinking through concrete solutions for improved race relations and a racially inclusive church.”
Why it’s important: This book is both inspiring and heartbreaking. Heartbreaking because Tisby outlines instance after instance of racial injustice perpetrated by our country and ignored by the Church. Inspiring because when we know the truth, we can take right action, and right action leads to restoration and healing. Tisby unpacks the hurtfulness of Civil War monuments, what riots are really about, and the egregious inaction of complicity. This book will stay with you.
Awards: A New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestseller
Secular/Religious: Religious
I’m Still Here by Austin Channing Brown
What it’s about: “In a time when nearly every institution (schools, churches, universities, businesses) claims to value diversity in its mission statement, Austin writes in breathtaking detail about her journey to self-worth and the pitfalls that kill our attempts at racial justice. Her stories bear witness to the complexity of America’s social fabric—from Black Cleveland neighborhoods to private schools in the middle-class suburbs, from prison walls to the boardrooms at majority-white organizations.”
Why it’s important: If you have wondered what it’s like to work as a Black woman in a white Christian world, please pick up this book. Brown covers racism, white supremacy, and the workforce. As someone who loves personal stories, this book shared example after example of the hurt, frustration, and anger felt by many Black women in the U.S.
Awards: New York Times bestseller; Reese’ Book Club x Hello Sunshine book pick
Secular/Religious: Religious
So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
What it’s about: “In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo guides readers of all races through subjects ranging from intersectionality and affirmative action to “model minorities” in an attempt to make the seemingly impossible possible: honest conversations about race and racism, and how they infect almost every aspect of American life.”
Why it’s important: Oluo breaks down how racism is a systemic issue and walks through how to avoid talking about race “wrong.” She shares from her own personal stories about growing up with a white mother, how we can have the most beautiful of intentions while executing them so hurtfully. I truly appreciated Oluo’s advice, guidance, and love for those of us trying to learn the ropes.
Awards: New York Times bestseller
Secular/Religious: Secular
What LIES Between Us
by Dr. Lucretia Berry
What it’s about: “This journal and guide is for those who are being stirred toward racial healing but don’t know where to begin. When we don’t understand how race/ism actually works (e.g. its about skin color or censoring “racist” language), we are ineffective in our resolution. We have the right heart, but we don’t have the right tools. Dr. Berry assembled this journal and guide to help begin the process of equipping you with the right tools. This journal and guide are your companion as you take your first steps towards analyzing race/ism and its personal and social effects.”
Why it’s important: This self-paced journal is a helpful tool that asks good (but hard) questions; your answers may surprise you. If you are serious about being a part of the healing process, you must, must, must get your hands on this book. This journal is best used in conjunction with Brownicity‘s anti-racism course, What LIES Between Us. Register or learn more information here.
White Fragility by Robin Diangelo
What it’s about: “In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’ (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.”
Why it’s important: I was thankful for Diangelo’s breakdown of the difference between racism, prejudice, and discrimination. She also gave language for what rumbles in our hearts, so we can work toward healing and a better, more honest world. Her heart is for all of us to know what barriers others face so we can knock them down together.
Awards: New York Times bestseller
Memoir
The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom
What it’s about: “The Yellow House tells a hundred years of Sarah’s family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America’s most mythologized cities (New Orleans). This is the story of a mother’s struggle against a house’s entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power.”
Why you’ll love it: With phrases like this “Mother wore shock to the funeral” and “… sometimes elegance is just willpower and grace, a way to keep the flailing parts of the self together,” it’s easy to fall in love with Sarah’s lyrical story. This is her love story to a house she loved, hated, and always came back to. If a sense of place is important to you in a book, you will lose yourself quickly inside this one.
Awards: New York Times bestseller, Winner of the 2019 National Book Award in Nonfiction
When I Was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago
What it’s about: “In a childhood full of tropical beauty and domestic strife, poverty, and tenderness, Esmeralda Santiago learned the proper way to eat a guava, the sound of tree frogs, the taste of morcilla, and the formula for ushering a dead baby’s soul to heaven. But when her mother, Mami, a force of nature, takes off to New York with her seven, soon to be eleven children, Esmeralda, the oldest, must learn new rules, a new language, and eventually a new identity.”
Why you’ll love it: Whether you’ve lived in Puerto Rico or not, grew up in a rural community or not, or emigrated to a new country or not, the feelings and experiences of Esmeralda are universal. I haven’t read a more beautiful memoir. Here’s a quick sample:
“I walked home from Abuela’s house feeling Mami’s absence as if she had already left. By the time I got home, I had wrapped myself in the blanket of responsibility she was about to drop on me. It felt heavy, too big for me, yet if I made the wrong move, I was afraid it would tear, exposing the slight, frightened child inside.”
For those who love reading memoir and appreciate descriptive, thoughtful, beautiful writing, you will want to add this book to your “Must Read” list.
Awards: One of “The Best Memoirs of a Generation” (Oprah’s Book Club)
How to Be Black
by Baratunde Thurston
What it’s about: “The Onion’s Baratunde Thurston shares his 30-plus years of expertise in being black, with helpful essays like “How to Be the Black Friend,” “How to Speak for All Black People,” “How To Celebrate Black History Month,” and more, in this satirical guide to race issues—written for black people and those who love them. Audacious, cunning, and razor-sharp, How to Be Black exposes the mass media’s insidiously racist, monochromatic portrayal of black culture’s richness and variety.”
Why you’ll love it: If you like to learn with a sprinkle of sarcasm and a good belly laugh, you will love this book. Thurston is quick-witted, funny, insightful, and poignant. Thurston shares tidbits of his life — how his mother raised him while they lived in drug-war-torn D.C. in the 1980s — as well as tips on how to become the next Black president (Be Perfect).
Fiction
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston
What it’s about: “One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years—due largely to initial audiences’ rejection of its strong black female protagonist—Hurston’s classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.”
Why you’ll love it: Their Eyes Were Watching God is a beautifully told story that lends as much truth today as it did when it was written in 1937. This work of fiction fings full of truth, making it both poignant and important piece of American literature. (Written by Sarah Westfall of the Not My Story podcast.)
Awards: A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick
Amnesty by Aravind Adinga
What it’s about: “Danny—formerly Dhananjaya Rajaratnam—is an illegal immigrant in Sydney, Australia, denied refugee status after he fled from Sri Lanka. Working as a cleaner, living out of a grocery storeroom, for three years he’s been trying to create a new identity for himself. But then one morning, Danny learns a female client of his has been murdered. The deed was done with a knife, at a creek he’d been to with her before; and a jacket was left at the scene, which he believes belongs to another of his clients—a doctor with whom Danny knows the woman was having an affair. Suddenly Danny is confronted with a choice: Come forward with his knowledge about the crime and risk being deported? Over the course of this day, evaluating the weight of his past, his dreams for the future, and the unpredictable, often absurd reality of living invisibly and undocumented, he must wrestle with his conscience and decide if a person without rights still has responsibilities.”
Why you’ll love it: What is it like to be undocumented and virtually unseen? What would you do if you want to meet your moral obligation to report a crime, but in so doing, you’ll lose the life you’ve built for yourself. Adinga’s words are lyrically written. Take this line, “He had gluten and common sense in his guts now, and his odds of survival felt good to Andy.” No matter how you feel about immigration, you’ll appreciate the brilliant writing and thoughtful approach of this book.
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
What it’s about: “Cora is a young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him. In Colson Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop.”
Why you’ll love it: Some books you say, “One more page,” and you finish one more page. This is not that book. You’ll tell yourself, “One more page,” and don’t put it down for twenty more minutes. This is a beautifully crafted piece of literature that has you rooting Cora on from the very first page.
Awards: #1 New York Times Bestseller • Winner of the Pulitzer Prize • Winner of the National Book Award • Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction • Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, The Boston Globe, The Seattle Times, HuffPost, Esquire, Minneapolis Star Tribune
Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin
What it’s about: “‘Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself: but know whence you came.’ Originally published in 1953, Go Tell it on the Mountain was James Baldwin’s first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem. Baldwin’s rendering of his protagonist’s spiritual, sexual and moral struggle towards self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understood themselves.”
Why you’ll love it: With lines like this, “Men spoke of how the heart broke up, but never spoke of how the soul hung speechless in the pause…” and this, “The rain came down as though once more in Heaven the Lord had been persuaded of the good uses of a flood,” you will find this writing hauntingly beautiful. Baldwin knew his Bible and was a preacher for a short time. Anyone who has been in Sunday School will catch every reference and know every verse he quotes, and yet… Baldwin’s God is wrathful, vengeful, spiteful, and unkind. It was hard to read the story knowing he views God more like a policeman waiting to catch him doing something wrong than a Heavenly Father or Good Shepherd. This is not only Baldwin’s story but the story of anyone who views God as a religion to keep and not a relationship to be enjoyed.
For Kids
The Fierce 44 by The Staff of The Undefeated
What it’s about: “From visionaries to entrepreneurs, athletes to activists, the Fierce 44 are beacons of brilliance, perseverance, and excellence. Each short biography is accompanied by a compelling portrait by Robert Ball, whose bright, graphic art pops off the page. Bringing household names like Serena Williams and Harriet Tubman together with lesser-known but highly deserving figures such as Robert Abbott and Dr. Charles Drew, this collection is a celebration of all that African Americans have achieved, despite everything they have had to overcome.”
Why it’s important: Our girls loved learning about people they hadn’t learn about before who have achieved incredible feats. Now, our younger daughter is the biggest Stevie Wonder fan who holds a special fondness for “Sir Duke,” which pays an homage to Black music pioneers. Help your kids learn about others who may not be covered in history books. And the portraits are gorgeous!
Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson
What it’s about: “Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child’s soul as she searches for her place in the world. Woodson’s eloquent poetry also reflects the joy of finding her voice through writing stories, despite the fact that she struggled with reading as a child. Her love of stories inspired her and stayed with her, creating the first sparks of the gifted writer she was to become.”
Why it’s important: We read a lot of fiction in our house, so this collection of poems that tells the story of Jackie’s life is a nice gift. To hear about what it’s like to grow up as a Black girl is important to their understanding of those around them.
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