Skip to main content

Recommended reads on race equity

Tuesday 9 November 2021
1 min read
LSE Blogs
Book covers from the race equity reading list
We asked members of the LSE community for their recommendations on books on race equity. This reading list, compiled in collaboration with the LSE Review of Books blog, brings together academic studies, biographies, memoirs, fiction and poetry and showcases some recent LSE-authored books on the topic.
  • Biased book cover

    Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudices That Shape Our Lives. Jennifer Eberhardt (Windmill Books, 2020)

    Recommended by Dr Saipriya Kamath, Assistant Professor of Accounting, Department of Accounting
    Biased by Dr Jennifer Eberhardt talks about unconscious racial biases at all levels of the society – in our neighbourhoods, schools, workplaces and criminal justice systems. Along with exposing the hidden biases, she also offers tools to address them. Dr Eberhardt's writing is based on solid research (hers and of others), but it is written in such a way that a lay person can easily understand it. She peppers it with her own experiences, which makes the book richer.

  • The Wretched of the Earth book cover

    The Wretched of the Earth. Frantz Fanon (Penguin Classics, 2001 [1961])

    Recommended by Dr Sara Salem, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology
    The Wretched of the Earth
    by Frantz Fanon, originally published in 1961, is one of the most important texts on decolonisation and anticolonialism. The book sketches out the stakes of liberation and what it might mean to truly fight for a world in which we are all free.

  • Poetics of Relation book cover

    Poetics of Relation. Édouard Glissant (translated by Betsy Wing, University of Michigan Press, 1997)

    Recommended by Rémy-Paulin Twahirwa, PhD student, LSE Department of Sociology
    "In a world increasingly marked by human division (racial, ethnic, class, gender, etc) and geographical fragmentation through borders, the Antillean poet and philosopher Professor Édouard Glissant invites us in his magnum opus to the creolisation of the world by looking to the world as whole – what he calls the 'Tout-Monde'. To 'open the world' is to enter in Relation. Thus, Glissant encouraged us to step away from the 'root identity' characterised by a desire to possess territory and to exclude, even eliminate, the Other."

  • Familiar Stranger book cover

    Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands. Stuart Hall (Penguin, 2017)

    Recommended by Dr Austin Zeiderman, Associate Professor of Geography, Department of Geography and Environment
    Professor Stuart Hall’s work is remarkable for its continued importance to those who seek to understand the cultural and economic logics, especially race and racism, that structure our world. This is somewhat ironic for a public thinker who always stressed the need to adjust one’s critical perspective to the changing times. But it speaks to the depth of Hall’s insight and to the vibrancy of his life, both of which are presented thoughtfully in this engaging memoir.

  • Their Eyes Were Watching God book cover

    Their Eyes Were Watching God. Zora Neale Hurston (Virago, 2020 [1937])

    Recommended by Professor Alpa Shah, Department of Anthropology
    Written by the Harlem renaissance writer and anthropologist, this is a story of sexual awakening, marriage and love, told by a 40-year-old African-American character Janie Crawford, and set in Florida just after the end of slavery. Their Eyes Were Watching God is unusual for laying bare the nuances and differences within the black community: it focuses on the grip of patriarchy and the fight for women’s liberation, including from within one’s own household. This book reminds us of the need to identify the conjoined axes of oppression as they bear upon but also within communities and hence the many-pronged struggles for liberation.

  • A Small Place book cover

    A Small Place. Jamaica Kincaid (Daunt Books Publishing, 2018 [1988])

    Recommended by Dr Ian Sanjay Patel, Visiting Fellow, LSE Human Rights, Department of Sociology
    This slim volume remains one of the most exquisitely rendered descriptions of colonial life and its inequalities ever written. In honest and arresting prose, Professor Jamaica Kincaid offers a series of vignettes about her early life growing up on the small island of Antigua, where the disparities of colonial life are overcome by the restive intelligence of Kincaid’s adolescent self.

  • African Europeans book cover

    African Europeans: An Untold History. Olivette Otele (Hurst Publishers, 2020)

    Recommended by Adeola Akande Pierre-Noël, Centre Manager, Phelan United States Centre and Dr Joanna Lewis, Associate Professor, Department of International History
    Professor Olivette Otele offers a new history that celebrates the lives of African Europeans through tracing a long African European heritage, drawing connections across time and space and debunking persistent myths. This ‘‘thrilling and informative read’’ provides an excellent introduction to scholars and those new to exploring these histories. Read the review on LSE Review of Books.

  • How Europe Underdeveloped Africa book cover

    How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Walter Rodney (Verso, 2018 [1972])

    Recommended by Rémy-Paulin Twahirwa, PhD student, LSE Department of Sociology
    How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is a masterly work demonstrating in detail the process of "underdevelopment" of the African continent initiated by the European colonial empires in extractivist projects aimed at transferring resources from Africa to Europe. How can it be explained that the continent richest in natural resources is still today hit by the most extreme misery? For the Guyanese scholar and activist Professor Walter Rodney, Africa's "underdevelopment" is the consequence of centuries of exploitation, interference and (neo)colonial domination by the West.

  • The White Man's World book cover

    The White Man’s World. Bill Schwarz (Oxford University Press, 2012)

    Recommended by Dr Ian Sanjay Patel, Visiting Fellow, LSE Human Rights, Department of Sociology
    Professor Bill Schwarz’s book dramatically brings to life the frontier worlds of the British empire, not least the settler-colonial experiences of global Englishmen, and the ways in which these worlds and experiences came to redefine the meaning and purpose of empire itself. In The White Man’s World, Schwarz brilliantly draws our awareness to the connections between British imperial thought and attendant imperial theories of what he terms "racial whiteness".

  • In the Wake book cover

    In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Christina Sharpe (Duke University Press, 2016)

    Recommended by Rémy-Paulin Twahirwa, PhD student, LSE Department of Sociology
    The past is never just the past. In this valuable contribution to Black studies, Professor Christina Sharpe interrogates how slavery, particularly the slave ship, continues to haunt the daily lives of the black diaspora through the analysis of textual, audiovisual and performance works. Using metaphors and concepts such as "the wake", "the asterisk" and "wake work", In the Wake: On Blackness and Being interrogates what survives out of humanities trapped in the "hold" of history.

  • India's First Diplomat book cover

    India’s First Diplomat: V S Srinivasa Sastri and the Making of Liberal Internationalism. Vineet Thakur (Bristol University Press, 2021)

    Recommended by Dr Ian Sanjay Patel, Visiting Fellow, LSE Human Rights, Department of Sociology
    Dr Vineet Thakur’s latest book is an important and exciting contribution to our understanding of race and the global colour line in the British imperial world of the 1920s. India’s First Diplomat is meticulously researched and delivers a rich and compelling story of the foundational role that the early Indian diplomat V S Srinivasa Sastri played in promoting a rights-based vision of the British empire. Amid a series of diplomatic missions to every corner of the British imperial world, Sastri deftly challenged the idea that Indian British subjects could be denied the full repertoire of political rights on the basis of race.

Further readings

Recommended by Adeola Akande Pierre-Noël, Centre Manager, Phelan United States Centre

Thanks to all LSE staff and students who helped with putting together this reading list, which was compiled by Dr Rosemary Deller, Managing Editor of LSE Review of Books.

Download a PDF version of this article

Subscribe to LSE Research for the World

Interested in more research like this? Sign up to receive our newsletter: a bi-monthly digest of the latest social science research articles, podcasts and videos from LSE.

LSE Research for the World Subscribe

LSE Blogs

LSE Blogs

LSE Blogs is the world’s largest dedicated social sciences blogging platform, publishing open and accessible research and commentary from world-leading experts to inform global debates.