The Community for Understanding and Hope Book Group held our annual potluck and book selection meeting this week. Our book club has been meeting since the summer of 2008, in the aftermath of a tragic shooting in our town that opened the topic of race in our community and in our country. Eleven years and 104 books later, we’re still going and we’re not running out of books.

We selected 10 books out of 55 proposals. I’ll share, first, the ten books we’ll be reading this year and, then, the books that we left on the table last night — that list is always a good starting point for books that we might want to propose next year. At the end of this post, I’ll link back to similar posts from previous years.

Here are our 2019-20 selections:

We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom by Bettina L. Love

Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland by Jonathan M. Metzl

Becoming by Michelle Obama

They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations by Toni Morrison

On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family by Lisa See

Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters

Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth by Josh Levin

Here are the other 45 books that we considered. I’ll list first the books that made it to the third round of voting, then the second round, then the first round, and then the rest. So, the first dozen books are, roughly, in order of our collective preference.

Under the Gun: A children’s hospital on the front line of an American crisis by Stu Durando

Them: Why We Hate Each Other – and How to Heal by Ben Sasse

Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America
by George Yancy

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine by Emily Bernard

The Yellow House: A Memoir by Sarah M. Broom

One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy by Carol Anderson

Don’t Label Me: An Incredible Conversation for Divided Times by Irshad Manji

A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America’s Schools
by Rachel Devlin

The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism by Jemar Tisby

They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement by Wesley Lowery

The Black Calhouns: From Civil War to Civil Rights with One African American Family by Gail Lumet Buckley

The Secrets of Mary Bowser by Lois Leveen

Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People by Mahzarin R. Banaji, Anthony G. Greenwald

Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist by Eli Saslow

The Black and the Blue: A Cop Reveals the Crimes and Racism in America’s Law Enforcement and the Search for Change by Matthew Horace

13 Days in Ferguson by Ronald Johnson

On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope by DeRay Mckesson

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass

The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois

For Black Girls Like Me by Mariama J. Lockington

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive by Stephanie Land

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison

A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

Dear White People by Justin Simien

Truth Has a Power of Its Own: Conversations about A People’s History by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen

For the Sake of All: A Report on the Health and Well-Being of African Americans in St. Louis—And Why It Matters for Everyone

What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays by Damon Young

The Mother of Black Hollywood: A Memoir by Jenifer Lewis

Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson

The Last Thing You Surrender by Leonard Pitts Jr.

We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team That Dismantled Jim Crow by Margaret Edds

Black Boy by Richard Wright

Grace Will Lead Us Home: The Charleston Church Massacre and the Hard, Inspiring Journey to Forgiveness by Jennifer Berry Hawes

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

A Wreath for Emmett Till by Marilyn Nelson

No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America by Darnell L. Moore

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi

Racism: A Short History by George M. Fredrickson

The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row by Anthony Ray Hinton

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean

Do you want more lists of books? Here are posts about our annual potluck and book selections meetings for the last few years:

• 2018
• 2017
• 2016
• 2015
• 2013
• 2012
• 2011

 

Now that you’ve seen the sort of books we like, do you have recommendations for our book group?