Race Relations Reading List

The protests throughout the nation is something that is on the mind of many people especially the librarians and staff of the Sullivan Family Library. Below are a selection of books at the Sullivan Family Library that will hopefully shed light on the many aspects of race and race relations in the United States.

Baker, C. (2015). Humane insight: looking at images of African American suffering and death [Electronic resource]. University of Illinois Press.

"In the history of black America, the image of the mortal, wounded, and dead black body has long been looked at by others from a safe distance. Baker questions the relationship between the spectator and the victim and urges viewers to move beyond the safety of the "gaze" to cultivate a capacity for humane insight toward representations of human suffering... An innovative cultural study that connects visual theory to African American history, Humane Insight asserts the importance of ethics in our analysis of race and visual culture." -- from publisher

Harris, F. C. (2013). Beyond discrimination: racial inequality in a postracist era [Electronic resource]. Russell Sage Foundation.

"Nearly half a century after the civil rights movement, racial inequality remains a defining feature of American life. Along a wide range of social and economic dimensions, African Americans consistently lag behind whites. This troubling divide has persisted even as many of the obvious barriers to equality, such as state-sanctioned segregation and overt racial hostility, have markedly declined...Beyond discrimination exposes the unequal consequences of the ordinary workings of American society. It offers promising pathways for future research on the growing complexity of race relations in the United States." -- from publisher

Holloway, V. A. (2015). Getting away with murder: the twentieth-century struggle for civil rights in the U.S. Senate [Electronic resource]. University Press of America.

"Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the U.S. Congress engaged in bitter debates on whether to enact a federal law that would prosecute private citizens who lynched black Americans. In Getting Away with Murder, the fundamental question under scrutiny is whether Southern Democrats' racist attitudes toward black Americans pardoned the atrocities of lynching." -- from publisher

Powell, T. (1993). The persistence of racism in America. Littlefield Adams Quality Paperbacks.

"Why have racist attitudes persisted in America despite tremendous changes in education and socialization during the last four decades? In this book, Powell, explains the patterns of beliefs, attitudes, and values that have supported these views. In a broad exploration that analyzes the values expressed by Western thinkers from the Enlightenment to contemporary thought, Powell reaches the controversial conclusion that racism is linked to many of our most cherished social, political, and religious values." -- from publisher

Wayne, M. (2014). Imagining Black America [Electronic Resource]. Yale University Press.

"In Imagining Black America, Wayne explores the construction and reconstruction of black America from the arrival of the first Africans in Jamestown in 1619 to Barack Obama's reelection... He discusses the emergence in the nineteenth century -- and the erosion, during the past two decades -- of the notorious "one drop rule." He shows how significant periods of social transformation raised major questions for black Americans about the defining characteristics of their racial community... And he considers how slavery and its legacy have defined freedom in the United States." -- from publisher