Race - further reading guide

Civil rights march in Seattle

Libcom's guide to further reading on race, racism and anti-racism.

Submitted by Steven. on October 26, 2008

*Marx on Colonialism and Modernization
*Ireland and The Irish Question - Marx/Engels
Toward the Abolition of Whiteness – Roediger
*The Wages of Whiteness – Roedier
*The Color of Politics – Goldfield
Congress of the People's of the East at Baku
*The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism – F. Perlman
*Third Worldism or Socialism? – Solidarity (U.K.)
How the Irish Became White – Ignatiev
Racism and the Class Struggle – James Boggs
The Political Economy of Racism – M. Leiman
The Economics of Racism, USA 1 and 2 - Perlo
The Invention of the White Race, 2 Vols. – Theodore Allen
Imagined Communities – B. Anderson
Race, Nation, Class – I. Wallerstein/Balibar
Germans and Jews Since the Holocaust - Rabinbach/Zipes, Eds.
Anti-Semite and Jew - Sartre
Black Corporate Executives: The Making and Breaking of a Black Middle Class - Wallerstein
Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960’s to the 1980’s – Omi/Wynant
Anarchism and the black revolution – Lorenzo Komboa Ervin

*Frantz Fanon:
Black Skin, White Masks
The Wretched of the Earth
Towards the African Revolution
A Dying Colonialism
Adolph Reed, Jr.:
Class Notes
Stirrings in the Jug
W.E.B. DuBois and American Political Thought
The Jesse Jackson Phenomemon

*W.E.B. DuBois:
Selected Writings, 2 vols
Unpublished Writings on Racism
The W.E.B. DuBois Reader

*C.L.R. James:
The CLR James Reader
C.L.R. James on the Negro Question
C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism
Fighting Racism in WWII

Race and IQ studies
Race & IQ - A.Montagu (ed.)
The Science and Politics of I.Q. - Kamin
Race And Intelligence: The Fallacies Behind The Race Iq Controversy - Ken Richardson
Race, Culture & Intelligence - Richardson, Spears, and Richards (Eds)

*Kenan Malik:
Meaning of Race
Strange Fruit
Multiculturalism and Its Discontents

Comments

Fleur

7 years 5 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Fleur on October 20, 2016

I'm not sure if this is the right place to put this but there are two books that I would recommend reading -

The New Jim Crow - Michelle Alexander
http://newjimcrow.com/

An examination of how the criminal justice system and mass incarceration in the US has been deliberately structured as a mechanism of racialized social control. The new (and very good) Netflix film "The 13th" draws very heavily from this book.

Medical Apartheid - Harriet A Washington

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/114192.Medical_Apartheid

A very comprehensive study in how African Americans have been exploited and experimented upon by the medical profession, from slavery times, right up to the present. It's a pretty harrowing read but I think it's really worth it.

Neither of the authors are what you could call "radical." Michelle Alexander is a former ACLU lawyer. However, The New Jim Crow is really good at explaining the process and the consequences of mass incarceration in the US and between them, these two books demonstrate the racist bias of the law, law enforcement and the medical system in the US.

Steven.

7 years 5 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Steven. on October 21, 2016

Good stuff, thanks

Sike

7 years 5 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Sike on October 21, 2016

Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Barbara J. Fields and Karen Elise Fields.

I found this 2014 book to be especially helpful in explaining the etymological development of the concept of "race" in the history of America, as well as offering an explanation for the continued pervasiveness of racialized belief and white-supremacist ideas in the everyday life of American society. In this regard, the authors compare the moral panics regarding people of African descent in white American society as analogous to the moral panics surrounding witches and witchcraft in other societies, hence the title of the book.The authors are also well aware of the class ramifications of racism and this aspect of racism is not glossed over as the authors contend that common perceptions of race in America are central to the organization of class-hierarchy in American society. Perhaps where the book is weakest is at the conclusion in which the authors offer proposed solutions to America's racism which are thoroughly reformist.

The first chapter of the book is available as a PDF here.