Books like This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

01

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates · Memoir

Between the World and Me is a letter from Ta-Nehisi Coates to his teenage son, Samori, about what it means to live in a Black body in the United States.

A kindred history read.

02

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Isabel Wilkerson · Memoir

Isabel Wilkerson's second book proposes a reframing of American racial hierarchy: rather than thinking of racism primarily as prejudice, she argues that the United States has operated as a caste society, with Black Americans at the bottom of a rigidly maintained hierarchy similar in its structure — though different in its specific mechanisms — to the caste systems of India and Nazi Germany.

A kindred history read.

03

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Michelle Alexander · Politics

Michelle Alexander's central argument is stark: the United States has not ended racial caste, it has merely redesigned it.

A kindred history read.

04

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Malcolm X and Alex Haley · Memoir

The Autobiography of Malcolm X was assembled from a series of conversations between Malcolm X and the journalist Alex Haley, conducted over two years before Malcolm's assassination in February 1965.

A kindred history read.

05

Long Walk to Freedom

Nelson Mandela · Memoir

Nelson Mandela's autobiography traces his life from a rural Xhosa childhood in the Transkei to his release from prison in 1990 after twenty-seven years of incarceration, and ends with his election as South Africa's first democratically chosen president in 1994.

A kindred history read.

06

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

Dee Brown · History

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, published in 1970, is Dee Brown's account of the systematic dispossession of Native American peoples across the American West between 1860 and 1890.

Both dig into colonialism.

07

Empire of Cotton: A Global History

Sven Beckert · History

Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton argues that cotton was not just the raw material of the Industrial Revolution but the commodity through which modern capitalism was invented.

Both dig into colonialism.

08

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches

S. C. Gwynne · History

Empire of the Summer Moon, published in 2010, follows the rise of the Comanche empire on the southern Great Plains and the long, brutal conflict between the Comanches and the expanding United States.

Both dig into colonialism.

09

The Black Jacobins

C.L.R. James · History

The Black Jacobins is C.L.R.

Both dig into colonialism.

10

The Feminine Mystique

Betty Friedan · History

The Feminine Mystique is Betty Friedan's 1963 diagnosis of a cultural crisis she called "the problem that has no name" — the pervasive unhappiness of educated American women who had, by all social measures, everything they were supposed to want: a house in the suburbs, a devoted husband, healthy children, and freedom from paid work.

Both dig into feminism.

11

The Wretched of the Earth

Frantz Fanon · History

The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961 shortly before Fanon's death from leukemia, is a political and psychiatric analysis of colonialism and the conditions required for genuine decolonization.

Both dig into colonialism.

12

Americanah

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · Literary fiction

Americanah follows Ifemelu, a young Nigerian woman who leaves Lagos for America as a university student and spends fifteen years navigating a country that insists on categorizing her in ways Nigeria never did.

Both dig into race and identity.