In these fraught times, rife with disinformation and grift, one thing we can do is turn to radical books to deliver perspective, catharsis, and strength for the fight ahead. We’ve selected six of the year’s best to help us (and you) think more critically about how race works (and doesn’t work) in America.

We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance

by Kellie Carter Jackson

Some of us still believe that slavery lasted as long as it did because our ancestors lacked the spirit or courage to rebel. Historian Kellie Carter Jackson’s new book “We Refuse” shines a light on the truth of African American survival. Recognizing that “Our culture’s fixation on nonviolence has caused us to miss entire histories of Black responses to white supremacy,” “We Refuse” reexamines a whitewashed historical record and sets it straight. In doing so, it reconsiders a range of tools for Black liberation and full Black humanity, the ways that Black Americans “have successfully engaged white supremacy beyond nonviolence.” In this engrossing volume, Jackson groups acts of resistance into five categories: “revolution, protection, force, flight and joy.” The text highlights the legacy and power of myriad acts of refusal — all the ways Black folks have of saying, “Nah. Nope,” “Not today, Satan,” or  “Oh hell no,” to deference and oppression and “yes” to liberation. As a prominent historian of African American history, she powerfully reframes the past and braces us for action in the present.

If We Are Brave: Essays from Black Americana

by Dr. Ted Johnson

Americans have built an entire mythology around the Founding Fathers’ revolutionary resistance to tyranny when they “destroyed private property by dumping the contents of a British East India Company shipment into the Boston Harbor.” And yet, a fight for freedom and democracy is not what most White Americans (and also too many people of color) conjure when they see Black folks protesting in the streets. In his essay collection, “If We Are Brave” Ted Johnson argues, “the destruction of property becomes more concerning than human rights violations” when Black people fight for themselves as they did in 2020​,​ in response to the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and many others. Johnson’s new book confronts these double standards and offers a multifaceted reflection on Black citizenship and American democracy, helping readers untangle the ways race confounds us today.

Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism

by Jenn M. Jackson

Framed as a “love letter to them and to us,” “Black Women Taught Us” explores the diversity of the contributions of Black women writers and leaders to Black freedom. As a political scientist who writes for both Teen Vogue and academic journals, Jenn Jackson has the range to make this crucial subject widely accessible and without sacrificing depth. This work feels more necessary than ever this November. “Black Women Taught Us” is a bold, beautifully written, and edifying tribute to generations of Black women who laid the foundations of Black liberation. Some of these figures are well known — like the first African American Congresswoman Shirley Chisolm, anthropologist, filmmaker and writer Zora Neale Hurston, and poet Audre Lorde — but even then, the breadth and impact of their work isn’t widely known. This book should change that. It’s a gorgeous and accessible corrective to unheralded and understudied Black feminist achievement. 

The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates 

After several years of writing fiction — from Black Panther comic books to the acclaimed magical realist novel “The Water Dancer” — celebrated author Ta-Nehisi Coates returns to his nonfiction roots with “The Message,” a sharp volume of interconnected essays chronicling revelations fueled by his recent travels to Senegal, South Carolina and Palestine. He aims to help us better understand the relationship between storytelling and power, and between “language and politics.” As Coates learned at Howard, a university founded to combat the legacy of American slavery, writing could never be purely “for the craft itself.” Rather, we “must necessarily believe our practice to be in service of that larger emancipatory mandate.” Coates’ trajectory from a Howard University student to dropout to celebrated writer and professor, may be circuitous, but its throughline was certain from the start: “when you live as we have, among a people whose humanity is ever in doubt, even the small and particular — especially the small and particular — becomes political. For you there can be no real distance between writing and politics.” With “The Message,” Coates has quickly burned through what The Emancipator reviewer Victor Ray called his “accrued cultural capital” by daring to tell the truth as he observed it, about the way Jim Crow lives on in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.

Colored Television

by Danzy Senna

Danzy Senna is a stylish satirist of the dysfunctional multiracial American condition. On one level, her fiction is a transportive respite from day-to-day reality. But make no mistake: she has much to say about race and class that is not only relevant to identity in America today, but also subtly, sneakily subversive of faulty conventional wisdom. In her new satirical novel “Colored Television,” Senna plumbs the experiences and psyche of a biracial striver innocuously named Jane. An ambitious, struggling novelist living in the shadow of Hollywood excess, when her epic second novel (jokingly dubbed “a mulatto War and Peace”) doesn’t sell, Jane hustles to pivot to writing television instead. Jane isn’t looking for glamour, she’s trying to lift her family out of the genteel lower-middle-class-near-poverty they’ve been stuck in for years. Such is the all too real and relatable plight of a highly educated Black couple who supplement their earnings and support two children with contingent university employment. Soon she finds swimming in waters teeming with vipers. Senna’s voice is acerbic and relentless, and her targets are legion. A riotous romp of all-too-real Hollywood misadventures, the race talk is reminiscent of old-school Chappelle’s Show and The Boondocks. And right now, smart analysis cloaked in sardonic wit feels like the perfect delivery system for what ails us.

This Great Hemisphere

by Mateo Askaripour

This futuristic dystopian thriller is creative soul food for the revolution. Both a quest story and an astute political thriller about power and identity, Askaripour’s sophomore novel is radically inventive, delivering the intellectual heft, emotional power, and much needed diversion we need post-election. “This Great Hemisphere” is set 500 years into the future when the United States no longer exists. Governance, the landscape, and human biology have all evolved. Due to a strange twist of evolutionary biology on the land that the USA once occupied, now sits an apartheid-like nation where humanity is organized not by color but by whether your skin is visible to the naked eye. The way that race renders humanity illegible is made concrete. This novel’s emotional punch comes from the depth of the character but also from the specificity and vividness of the heroine Sweetmint’s struggles. Using invisibility as a metaphor for race, the author delivers a forceful epic about love and family wrapped in a twisty political thriller.

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