Books like The history of White people by Nell Irvin Painter

Between the World and Me is a memoir‑essay in letter form, where Ta‑Nehisi Coates addresses his teenage son about the history, violence, and ongoing reality of being Black in America.

Michelle Alexander argues that mass incarceration has become a contemporary system of racial control, striking disproportionately at African‑American men and other disadvantaged groups while perpetuating a new form of Jim Crow.

Ibram X. Kendi examines the long history of anti‑black racist ideas in America, revealing how intellectuals have shaped and justified racial inequality.

Richard Rothstein’s *The Color of Law* uncovers how federal, state, and local policies deliberately created and maintained racial segregation in U.S. cities.

The Warmth of Other Suns is a non‑fiction study of the Great Migration, tracing the journey of nearly six million African Americans from the South to northern and western cities between 1915 and 1970.

Edward E. Baptist shows how slavery’s expansion from 1777 to 1847 powered America’s shift to industrial capitalism, turning the South into a cotton empire and reshaping the nation’s economy.

Cornel West’s Race Matters delivers a penetrating examination of racism, black consciousness, and civil society in the United States, offering essays that remain timely and relevant for every reader in the new millennium.

Explores how the United States has defined and redefined race, showing how immigrant groups have been reshaped into the nation’s racial categories over time.

Many mid 20th century American government programs created to help citizens survive and improve ended up being heavily biased against African-Americans. Katznelson documents this white affirmative action, and argues that its existence should be an important part of the argument in support of late 20th century affirmative action programs.

In this unflinching look at white supremacy, George Lipsitz argues that racism is a matter of interests as well as attitudes, a problem of property as well as pigment. Above and beyond personal prejudice, whiteness is a structured advantage that produces unfair gains and unearned rewards for whites while imposing impediments to asset accumulation, employment, housing, and health care for minorities. Reaching beyond the black/white binary, Lipsitz shows how whiteness works in respect to Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans.Lipsitz delineates the weaknesses embedded in civil rights laws, the racial dimensions of economic restructuring and deindustrialization, and the effects of environmental racism, job discrimination and school segregation. He also analyzes the centrality of whiteness to U.S. culture, and perhaps most importantly, he identifies the sustained and perceptive critique of white privilege embedded in the radical black tradition. This revised and expanded edition also includes an essay about the impact of Hurricane Katrina on working class Blacks in New Orleans, whose perpetual struggle for dignity and self determination has been obscured by the city's image as a tourist party town.

An examination of the psychological and social forces that shape European American identities, exploring how childhood experiences and class dynamics influence perceptions of race, self‑esteem, and belonging in the United States.