Books like Race & economics by Williams, Walter E.

Glenn C. Loury investigates why Black Americans continue to face poverty, low wages, and inequities in health and education, arguing that stigmatizing social information sustains racial stereotypes and discrimination.

Joan C. Williams argues that the white working class in the United States, often mischaracterized as simply poor, is a distinct political force rooted in middle‑class values and community loyalty, shaping rising populist and nationalist movements.

"The United States is becoming a nation of rich and poor, with few families in the middle. In this book, MIT economist Peter Temin offers an illuminating way to look at the vanishing middle class. Temin argues that American history and politics, particularly slavery and its aftermath, play an important part in the widening gap between rich and poor. Temin employs a well-known, simple model of a dual economy to examine the dynamics of the rich/poor divide in America, and outlines ways to work toward greater equality so that America will no longer have one economy for the rich and one for the poor. Many poorer Americans live in conditions resembling those of a developing country--substandard education, dilapidated housing, and few stable employment opportunities. And although almost half of black Americans are poor, most poor people are not black. Conservative white politicians still appeal to the racism of poor white voters to get support for policies that harm low-income people as a whole, casting recipients of social programs as the Other--black, Latino, not like "us." Politicians also use mass incarceration as a tool to keep black and Latino Americans from participating fully in society. Money goes to a vast entrenched prison system rather than to education. In the dual justice system, the rich pay fines and the poor go to jail." -- Publisher's description

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.

Collection of columnist Thomas Sowell's controversial columns about issues ranging from homelessness, foreign policy, AIDS, environmentalism, education, law, race and nostalgia.

Thomas Sowell challenges single‑factor explanations for economic differences—such as discrimination, exploitation, or genetics—presenting a globally corroborated analysis that explains why many policy attempts have backfired.

American Work travels through 350 years of history to tell the epic, often tragic story of success and failure on the uneven playing fields of American labor. Here is the story of how virtually every significant social transformation in American history (from bound to free labor, from farm work to factory work, from a blue-collar to a white-collar economy) rolled back the hard-won advances of African Americans who had managed to gain footholds in various jobs and industries. It is not a story of simple ideological "racism," but of politics and economics interacting to determine - and determine differently in different times and places - what kind of work was "suitable" to which groups. Jacqueline Jones shows how racially divided workplaces developed, and how efforts to gain or preserve group advantages in certain jobs helped to foster racial hatred and contradictory stereotypes. Ultimately, she reveals in an unmistakable light how systematic forms of discrimination have denied whole groups of Americans the opportunity to compete for jobs, training, and promotions on an equal footing.