Books White People Need To Read Right Now

On Tyranny

Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

By: Timothy Snyder
Narrated by: Timothy Snyder
Length: 1 hour 47 minutes

“A quick snippet of a book to keep at the ready. Snyder uses real life examples, references past times in history, and quotes major figures and philosophers, all of this giving the listener even more places to go if the point resonates. And providing some maybe new voices for those in your life whom you want to guide. Set up as key lessons with... Read more

The 1619 Project

A New Origin Story

By: Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman & Jake Silverstein
Narrated by: Nikole Hannah-Jones & Full Cast
Length: 18 hours 56 minutes

“This new landmark work of U.S. history, criticism, and art is forged of 18 essays that consider the relevance of slavery to contemporary America through the prism of such subjects as capitalism, music, and healthcare and poems and fiction that focus on key moments in the oppression, resistance, and liberation of Black people in America. Riveting... Read more

Not "A Nation of Immigrants"

Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion

By: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Narrated by: Shaun Taylor-Corbett
Length: 12 hours 21 minutes

“Most of us have heard America referred to as a “melting pot” or a “nation of immigrants.” While these self-congratulatory phrases paint a rosy picture of our past and present, they obscure or downright ignore some of the core tenets of this nation: white supremacy, settler colonialism, and capitalist exploitation of land and bodies. True to... Read more

The Color of Law

A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

By: Richard Rothstein
Narrated by: Adam Grupper
Length: 9 hours 32 minutes

“This is one of the most informative and thought-provoking books I’ve ever read. Rothstein masterfully delivers information on the way local and federal governments reinforce segregated neighborhoods, racial zoning, and support violence to keep African Americans out of certain areas. Full of eye-opening research, this is the kind of book everyone... Read more

The White Wall

How Big Finance Bankrupts Black America

By: Emily Flitter
Narrated by: Emily Flitter
Length: 9 hours 36 minutes

A deeply reported, “important, and infuriating” (The Guardian) look at the systemic racism inside the American financial services industry, from acclaimed New York Times finance reporter Emily Flitter.

In 2018, Emily Flitter received a tip that Morgan Stanley had fired a Black employee without cause. Flitter had been searching for a way to... Read more

Medical Apartheid

The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

By: Harriet A. Washington
Narrated by: Ron Butler
Length: 19 hours 1 minute

Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted... Read more

A Terrible Thing to Waste

Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind

By: Harriet A. Washington
Narrated by: Ron Butler
Length: 10 hours 13 minutes

“A terrifying book when it comes down to it, but an important one. Washington is careful and methodical in her statements, emphasizing lives, generations, and ability lost, not merely the wrongs that were committed. If the first step is awareness, then Washington has hopefully pushed us a couple of steps up the stairs. Read more

Torn Apart

How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World

By: Dorothy Roberts
Narrated by: Dorothy Roberts & Janina Edwards
Length: 11 hours 49 minutes

An award-winning scholar exposes the foundational racism of the child welfare system and calls for radical change 
 
Many believe the child welfare system protects children from abuse. But as Torn Apart uncovers, this system is designed to punish Black families. Drawing on decades of research, legal scholar and sociologist Dorothy Roberts reveals... Read more

Cutting School

Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education

By: Noliwe Rooks
Narrated by: Robin Eller
Length: 8 hours 44 minutes

What do public schools have in common with the pyramid schemes of Amway? Absolutely nothing, yet Trump's education secretary Betsy DeVos—part of the family at the helm of this corporation and a fierce advocate for vouchers, school choice, and free market competition in the education system—may soon be deciding the fate of American children. The... Read more

The New Jim Crow

Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 10th Anniversary Edition

By: Michelle Alexander
Narrated by: Karen Chilton
Length: 16 hours 56 minutes

Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.
Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been
adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of
the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the
winner of... Read more

A Black Women's History of the United States

ReVisioning History: Book #5

By: Daina Ramey Berry & Kali Nicole Gross
Narrated by: Janina Edwards
Length: 10 hours 2 minutes

The award-winning Revisioning American History series continues with this “groundbreaking new history of Black women in the United States” (Ibram X. Kendi)—the perfect companion to An Indigenous People’s History of the United States and An African American and Latinx History of the United States.

An empowering and intersectional history that... Read more

Asian American Histories of the United States

ReVisioning History: Book #7

By: Catherine Ceniza Choy
Narrated by: Cindy Kay
Length: 7 hours 57 minutes

An inclusive and landmark history, emphasizing how essential Asian American experiences are to any understanding of US history

Original and expansive, Asian American Histories of the United States is a nearly 200-year history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the US. Reckoning with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the... Read more

Central America's Forgotten History

Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration

By: Aviva Chomsky
Narrated by: Aida Reluzco
Length: 10 hours 41 minutes

Restores the region’s fraught history of repression and resistance to popular consciousness and connects the United States’ interventions and influence to the influx of refugees seeking asylum today.

At the center of the current immigration debate are migrants from Central America fleeing poverty, corruption, and violence in search of refuge in... Read more

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

By: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Narrated by: Laural Merlington
Length: 10 hours 18 minutes

Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the U.S. settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history.




Roxanne... Read more

An African American and Latinx History of the United States

ReVisioning History: Book #4

By: Paul Ortiz
Narrated by: JD Jackson
Length: 9 hours 3 minutes

An intersectional history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil rights

Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the “Global South” was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar... Read more

An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

ReVisioning History: Book #6

By: Kyle T. Mays
Narrated by: Shaun Taylor-Corbett
Length: 8 hours 17 minutes

The first intersectional history of the Black and Native American struggle for freedom in our country that also reframes our understanding of who was Indigenous in early America

Beginning with pre-Revolutionary America and moving into the movement for Black lives and contemporary Indigenous activism, Afro-Indigenous historian Kyle T. Mays argues... Read more

A Different Mirror

A History of Multicultural America

By: Ronald Takaki
Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
Length: 18 hours 35 minutes

Upon its first publication, A Different Mirror was hailed by critics and academics everywhere as a dramatic new retelling of our nation's past. Beginning with the colonization of the New World, it recounts the history of America in the voice of the non-Anglo peoples of the United States—Native Americans, African Americans, Jews, Irish Americans,... Read more

A Queer History of the United States

ReVisioning History

By: Michael Bronski
Narrated by: Vikas Adams
Length: 10 hours 28 minutes

Winner of a 2012 Stonewall Book Award in nonfiction

The first book to cover the entirety of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, from pre-1492 to the present.

In the 1620s, Thomas Morton broke from Plymouth Colony and founded Merrymount, which celebrated same-sex desire, atheism, and interracial marriage. Transgender evangelist Jemima... Read more

A Disability History of the United States

ReVisioning History

By: Kim E. Nielsen
Narrated by: Erin Bennett
Length: 7 hours 35 minutes

The first book to cover the entirety of disability history, from pre-1492 to the present

Disability is not only the story of someone we love or the story of whom we may become; rather it is undoubtedly the story of our nation. Covering the entirety of US history from pre-1492 to the present, A Disability History of the United States is the first... Read more

Freedom is a Constant Struggle

Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement

By: Angela Y. Davis
Narrated by: Angela Y. Davis & Coleen Marlo
Length: 5 hours 47 minutes

“A must read on the interconnection of all liberation struggles that has only become more relevant since its publication in 2016. Angela Davis is one of the most steadfast voices of our time, and her background as a public speaker makes for excellent narration. Read more