Books on race — recommendations from local bookstores

Books on race | Photo by the Regulator Bookshop

Table of Contents

Recommendations for adults

Recommendations for children

Where to shop locally

Hi Raleigh. A lot of you have been reaching out to us, asking for additional resources to help educate + activate our community on the topic of racism.

Listed below are some book recommendations from local bookstores that aim to do just that: provide dialogue, stories + conversations about race, privilege, history, and social justice.

Recommendations for adults

📚 Heavy: An American Memoir
✍️ Kiese Laymon
🗨️ “Laymon’s gorgeous wordsmithing moves us beyond simple binaries of pleasure and pain, joy and trauma, toward a deeper love for communities too often flattened into one dimension. Heavy is a book for the ages.” — Hari Ziyad, author of Black Boy Out of Time

📚 Aaron McDuffie Moore: An African American Physician, Educator, and Founder of Durham’s Black Wall Street
✍️ Blake Hill-Saya
🗨️ “Dr. Aaron McDuffie Moore is a legend. Or he should be… Blake Hill-Saya has done us all a great service by capturing Dr. Moore’s incredible story for future generations.— Henry C. McKoy Jr., Lead Entrepreneurship Faculty and Director of Entrepreneurship at North Carolina Central University School of Business

📚 The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
✍️ Michelle Alexander
🗨️ “The book gives eloquent and urgent expression to deep feelings that the criminal justice system is stacked against [African Americans].” — Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times

📚 Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and the Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy
✍️ Ethan J. Kytle + Blain Roberts
🗨️ “...reveals that the long struggle over how Americans remember slavery has been inseparable from the long struggle for racial justice.” — Ibram X. Kendi, author of “Stamped from the Beginning”

📚 White Fragility: Why It’s so Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
✍️ Robin Diangelo
🗨️ “An indispensable volume for understanding one of the most important (and yet rarely appreciated) barriers to achieving racial justice.” — Tim Wise, author of White Like Me: Reflection on Race from a Privileged Son

📚 So You Want to Talk About Race
✍️ Iljeoma Oluo
🗨️ “...warm and foundational enough for people to begin their journey to understanding racism in America + thought-provoking and challenging enough for people who believe themselves to be well-versed on the subject.” — Emily V. Gordon, co-writer of The Big Sick film

📚 Between the World and Me
✍️ Ta-Nehisi Coates
🗨️ “Hailed by Toni Morrison as ‘required reading,’ a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by ‘the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race.’” — Rolling Stone