Race and Ethnicity: Verso Student Reading

Book strip #1

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  What Is Antiracism?

  by Arun Kundnani

  Liberals have been arguing for nearly a century that racism is fundamentally an individual problem of extremist beliefs. Responding to Nazism, thinkers like gay rights pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld and...
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  Decolonial Marxism

  by Walter Rodney

  Foreword by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

  Early in life, Walter Rodney became a major revolutionary figure in a dizzying range of locales that traversed the breadth of the Black diaspora: in North America and Europe, in the Caribbean and o...
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  The Groundings With My Brothers

  by Walter Rodney

  In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, th...
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  Making the Revolution Global

  by Theo Williams

  Making the Revolution Global shows how black radicals transformed socialist politics in Britain in the years before decolonisation. African and Caribbean activist-intellectuals, such as Amy Ashwood...
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  Self-Defense

  by Elsa Dorlin

  Translated by Kieran Aarons

  Is violent self-defense ethical? In the history of colonialism, racism, sexism, capitalism, there has long been a dividing line between bodies "worthy of defending" and those who have been disar...
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  Darkwater

  by W. E. B. Du Bois

  Foreword by Manning Marable

  Introduction by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

  “I have been in the world, but not of it,” W.E.B. Du Bois begins this book, a continuation of the project he began in his celebrated work The Souls of Black Folk, describing the devastation of segr...
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  If They Come in the Morning

  by Angela Davis

  The trial of Angela Davis is remembered as one of America's most historic political trials, and no one can tell the story better than Davis herself. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Ange...
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  The Black Atlantic

  by Paul Gilroy

  In this ground-breaking work, Paul Gilroy proposes that the modern black experience can not be defined solely as African, American, Carribean or British alone, but can only be understand as a Black...
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  Organize, Fight, Win

  by Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean

  Black Communist women throughout the early to mid-twentieth century fought for and led mass campaigns in the service of building collective power in the fight for liberation. Through concrete mater...
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  Abolition Geography

  by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

  Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore's work from over three decades, Abolition Geography presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, of...
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  The Wages of Whiteness

  by David R. Roediger

  Preface by Priyamvada Gopal

  Introduction by Kathleen Cleaver

  An enduring history of how race and class came together to mark the course of the antebellum US and our present crisis. Roediger shows that in a nation pledged to independence, but less and less ab...
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  The Invention of the White Race

  by Theodore W. Allen

  When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no 'white' people there; nor, according to colonial records, would there be for another sixty years. Historical debate about the orig...
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  Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity

  by Noel Ignatiev

  Foreword by David R. Roediger

  Edited by Geert Dhondt, Zhandarka Kurti and Jarrod Shanahan

  For sixty years, Noel Ignatiev provided an unflinching account of “whiteness” — a social fiction and an unmitigated disaster for all working-class people. This new essay collection from the late fi...
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  Prophet against Slavery

  by David Lester

  Illustrated by David Lester

  Edited by Paul Buhle and Marcus Rediker

  Prophet against Slavery is an action-packed chronicle of a remarkable and radical individual. It is based on the award-winning biography by Marcus Rediker, which prompted the Quaker community that ...
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  Deadly and Slick

  by Sita Balani

  If race is increasingly understood to be socially constructed, why does it continue to seem like a physiological reality? The trickery of race, Sita Balani argues, comes down to how it is embedded ...
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  We're Here Because You Were There

  by Ian Sanjay Patel

  What are the origins of the hostile environment against immigrants in the UK? Patel retells Britain's recent history in an often shocking account of state racism that still resonates today. In a se...
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  Britain's Empire

  by Richard Gott

  As the call for a new understanding of our national history gets louder, this book turns the received imperial story of Britain on its head. Britain’s Empire recounts the long overlooked narrative ...
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  Connected History

  by Sanjay Subrahmanyam

  Sanjay Subrahmanyam is becoming well known for the same sort of reasons that attach to Fernand Braudel and Carlo Ginzburg, as the proponent of a new kind of history – in his case, not longue durée ...
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  Race, Place, Trace

  Edited by Susan Slyomovics and Lorenzo Veracini

  This edited collection celebrates Patrick Wolfe’s contribution to the study and critique of settler colonialism as a distinct mode of domination. The chapters collected here focus on the settler-co...
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  Racecraft

  by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields

  Praised by a wide variety of people from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Zadie Smith, Racecraft "ought to be positioned," as Bookforum put it, "at the center of any discussion of race in American life." Most p...
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  The South

  by Adolph L. Reed Jr.

  Foreword by Barbara J. Fields

  The last generation of Americans with a living memory of Jim Crow will soon disappear. They leave behind a collective memory of segregation shaped increasingly by its horrors and heroic defeat but ...
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  The Reckoning

  by Robin Blackburn

  The Age of Revolution (1776–1848) destroyed the main slave regimes of the Caribbean but a ‘Second Slavery’ surged in the US South, Cuba and Brazil, powered by demand for plantation produce and a sy...
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  The Panthers Can't Save Us Now

  by Cedric G. Johnson

  In the wake of the mass protests over the police murder of George Floyd, nearly every major consumer brand proclaimed their commitments to antiracism, often with new ad campaigns to match their Twe...
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  We Uyghurs Have No Say

  by Ilham Tohti

  In Xinjiang, the large northwest region of China, the government has imprisoned more than a million Uyghurs in re-education camps. One of the incarcerated--whose sentence, unlike most others, has n...
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  Mistaken Identity

  by Asad Haider

  Whether class or race is the more important factor in modern politics is a question right at the heart of recent history’s most contentious debates. Among groups who should readily find common grou...
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  Insurgent Empire

  by Priyamvada Gopal

  Much has been written on the how colonial subjects took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination. The possibility of reverse...
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  Hostile Environment

  by Maya Goodfellow

  Longlisted for the 2019 Jhalak Prize. From the 1960s the UK’s immigration policy - introduced by both Labour and Tory governments - has been a toxic combination of racism and xenophobia. Maya Good...
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  Latinx

  by Ed Morales

  “Latinx” (pronounced “La-teen-ex”) is the gender-neutral term that covers the largest racial minority in the United States, and the poorest but fastest-growing American group, whose political empow...
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  Heart Of The Race

  by Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe

  Introduction by Lola Okolosie

  Heart of the Race is a powerful corrective to a version of Britain’s history from which black women have long been excluded. It reclaims and records black women’s place in that history, documenting...
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  Elegy for Mary Turner

  by Rachel Marie-Crane Williams

  In late May 1918 in Valdosta, Georgia, ten black men and one black woman, Mary Turner, eight months pregnant at the time, were lynched and tortured by mobs of white citizens. Through hauntingly det...
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  Reactionary Democracy

  by Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter

  Democracy is not necessarily progressive, and will only be if we make it so. What Mondon and Winter call ‘reactionary democracy’ is the use of the concept of democracy and its associated understand...
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  Algiers, Third World Capital

  by Elaine Mokhtefi

  Introduction by Jeremy Harding

  Mokhtefi (née Klein), a Jewish American from Long Island, has had an exhilarating life. In the 1960s, she served as a press adviser to the National Liberation Front in postwar Algiers, before going...
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  Traces of History

  by Patrick Wolfe

  Traces of History presents a new approach to race and to comparative colonial studies. Bringing a historical perspective to bear on the regimes of race that colonizers have sought to impose on A...
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  Policing the Planet

  Contributions by Mizue Aizeki, Kafui Attoh, Breanna Champion, Becky Dennison, Martín Espada, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Craig Gilmore, Christina B. Hanhardt, Justin Hansford, Rachel Herzing, Brian Jordan Jefferson, Anjali Kamat, Robin D.G. Kelley, Hamid Khan, Arun Kundnani, Marisol Lebrón, George Lipsitz, Page May, Don Mitchell, Naomi Murakawa, Steven Osuna, Vijay Prashad, Asha Rosa Ransby-Sporn, Alex Sanchez, Lynn A. Staeheli, Alex S. Vitale and Pete White

  Edited by Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton

  Combining firsthand accounts from activists with the research of scholars and reflections from artists, Policing the Planet traces the global spread of the broken-windows policing strategy, first e...
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  Futures of Black Radicalism

  Edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin

  Black rebellion has returned, with dramatic protests in scores of cities and campuses, bringing with it a renewed engagement with the history of Black radical movements and thought. Here, key schol...
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  Annihilation of Caste

  by B.R. Ambedkar

  Introduction by Arundhati Roy

  B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste is one of the most important, yet neglected, works of political writing from India. Written in 1936, it is an audacious denunciation of Hinduism and its caste ...
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  De Colores Means All of Us

  by Elizabeth Sutherland Martînez

  Foreword by Angela Davis

  Introduction by Karma R. Chavez

  Elizabeth Martínez’s unique Chicana voice arises from over thirty years of experience in the movements for civil rights, women’s liberation, and Latina/o empowerment. In De Colores Means All of Us,...
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  The Black Romantic Revolution

  by Matthew F. Sandler

  During the pitched battle over slavery in the United States, Black writers - enslaved and free - allied themselves with the cause of abolition and used their art to advocate for emancipation and to...
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  The Common Wind

  by Julius S. Scott

  The Common Wind is a gripping and colorful account of the intercontinental networks that tied together the free and enslaved masses of the New World. Having delved deep into the gray obscurity of o...
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  The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain

  by Ron Ramdin

  This is the first comprehensive historical perspective on the relationship between Black workers and the changing patterns of Britain’s labour needs. It places in an historical context the developm...
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  Class, Race, and Marxism

  by David R. Roediger

  Seen as a key figure in the critical study of whiteness, US historian David Roediger has sometimes received criticism, and praise, alleging that he left Marxism behind in order to work on questions...

Book strip #11

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  If They Come in the Morning

  by Angela Davis

  The trial of Angela Davis is remembered as one of America's most historic political trials, and no one can tell the story better than Davis herself. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Ange...

Book strip #12

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  Traces of History

  by Patrick Wolfe

  Traces of History presents a new approach to race and to comparative colonial studies. Bringing a historical perspective to bear on the regimes of race that colonizers have sought to impose on A...

Book strip #13

Book strip #14

Book strip #15

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  Serve the People

  by Karen L. Ishizuka

  Foreword by Jeff Chang

  The political ferment of the 1960s produced not only the Civil Rights Movement but others in its wake: women's liberation, gay rights, Chicano power, and the Asian American Movement. Here is a defi...

Book strip #16

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  Policing the Planet

  Contributions by Mizue Aizeki, Kafui Attoh, Breanna Champion, Becky Dennison, Martín Espada, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Craig Gilmore, Christina B. Hanhardt, Justin Hansford, Rachel Herzing, Brian Jordan Jefferson, Anjali Kamat, Robin D.G. Kelley, Hamid Khan, Arun Kundnani, Marisol Lebrón, George Lipsitz, Page May, Don Mitchell, Naomi Murakawa, Steven Osuna, Vijay Prashad, Asha Rosa Ransby-Sporn, Alex Sanchez, Lynn A. Staeheli, Alex S. Vitale and Pete White

  Edited by Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton

  Combining firsthand accounts from activists with the research of scholars and reflections from artists, Policing the Planet traces the global spread of the broken-windows policing strategy, first e...

Book strip #17

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  Futures of Black Radicalism

  Edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin

  Black rebellion has returned, with dramatic protests in scores of cities and campuses, bringing with it a renewed engagement with the history of Black radical movements and thought. Here, key schol...

Book strip #18

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  For the Muslims

  by Edwy Plenel

  Translated by David Fernbach

  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, leading intellectuals are claiming “There is a problem with Islam in France,” thus legitimising the discourse of the racist National Front. Such claims...

Book strip #19

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  Annihilation of Caste

  by B.R. Ambedkar

  Introduction by Arundhati Roy

  B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste is one of the most important, yet neglected, works of political writing from India. Written in 1936, it is an audacious denunciation of Hinduism and its caste ...

Book strip #20

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  De Colores Means All of Us

  by Elizabeth Sutherland Martînez

  Foreword by Angela Davis

  Introduction by Karma R. Chavez

  Elizabeth Martínez’s unique Chicana voice arises from over thirty years of experience in the movements for civil rights, women’s liberation, and Latina/o empowerment. In De Colores Means All of Us,...

Book strip #21

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  Darkwater

  by W. E. B. Du Bois

  Foreword by Manning Marable

  Introduction by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

  “I have been in the world, but not of it,” W.E.B. Du Bois begins this book, a continuation of the project he began in his celebrated work The Souls of Black Folk, describing the devastation of segr...

Book strip #22

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  The Black Romantic Revolution

  by Matthew F. Sandler

  During the pitched battle over slavery in the United States, Black writers - enslaved and free - allied themselves with the cause of abolition and used their art to advocate for emancipation and to...

Book strip #23

• 

  The Common Wind

  by Julius S. Scott

  The Common Wind is a gripping and colorful account of the intercontinental networks that tied together the free and enslaved masses of the New World. Having delved deep into the gray obscurity of o...

Book strip #24

• 

  The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain

  by Ron Ramdin

  This is the first comprehensive historical perspective on the relationship between Black workers and the changing patterns of Britain’s labour needs. It places in an historical context the developm...

Book strip #25

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  The Invention of the White Race, Volume 1

  by Theodore W. Allen

  Introduction by Jeffrey Perry

  When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no “white” people there. Nor, according to colonial records, would there be for another sixty years. In this seminal two-volume work,...

Book strip #26

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  The Invention of the White Race, Volume 2

  by Theodore W. Allen

  Introduction by Jeffrey Perry

  On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, Martin Luther King outlined a dream of an America where people would not be judged by the color of their skin. That dream has yet to be realized, but s...

Book strip #27

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  Class, Race, and Marxism

  by David R. Roediger

  Seen as a key figure in the critical study of whiteness, US historian David Roediger has sometimes received criticism, and praise, alleging that he left Marxism behind in order to work on questions...

Book strip #28