The Community for Understanding and Hope book group specializes in books about race in America. We’ve been meeting for ten years and we’ve read 94 books together.

We brought 53 books to our annual book selection meeting last week and had to narrow it down to the ten that we can read in a year.

I’ll start with the list of books we’ll be reading this year and, then, share the 43 books we left on the table this year — maybe, next year!

• An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
• Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance
• Ferguson’s Fault Lines: The Race Quake That Rocked a Nation edited by Kimberly Jade Norwood
• The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist
• The Buffalo Soldier by Chris Bohjalian
• Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles M. Blow
• Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class by Ian F. Haney-Lopez
• Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us
  by Claude M. Steele
• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein
• Tell the Truth & Shame the Devil by Lezley McSpadden and Lyah Beth Leflore

 

Here are the other 43 books we talked about:

On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope by DeRay Mckesson

Speak No Evil by Uzodinma Iweala

We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team That Dismantled Jim Crow by Margaret Edds

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

Becoming by Michelle Obama

White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo

The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of Reconstruction by Charles Lane

Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America by Michael Eric Dyson

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement by Wesley Lowery

No One Ever Asked by Katie Ganshert

A Firebell in the Night by Lee A. Drake

All American Boys by Jason Reynolds, Brendan Kiely

Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man’s Education by Mychal Denzel Smith

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson

Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo

A House in the Sky by Amanda Lindhout

Beneath the Lion’s Gaze by Maaza Mengiste

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford

The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White by Daniel J. Sharfstein

Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America by George Yancy

“All the Real Indians Died Off”: And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Dina Gilio-Whitaker

Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis by Keona K. Ervin

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen

We Matter: Athletes and Activism by Etan Thomas

I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown

The Black and the Blue: A Cop Reveals the Crimes and Racism in America’s Law Enforcement and the Search for Change by Matthew Horace

Forward Through Ferguson, the Report of the Ferguson Commission

A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland by DaMaris B. Hill

One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy by Carol Anderson

The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present by Allan J. Lichtman

The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels by Jon Meacham

White Working Class by Joan C. Williams

Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence by Rachel Sherman

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Y. Davis

A Colony in a Nation by Chris Hayes

Native Son by Richard Wright

Black Boy by Richard Wright

Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston

13 Days in Ferguson by Ronald Johnson