Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness
by Toure andForeword by Michael Eric Dyson

Journalist Touré turns his ear to 100 prominent black Americans to create a provocative look at the state of race in America.

Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America
by Melissa V. Harris-Perry

In this groundbreaking book, Melissa V. Harris-Perry uses multiple methods of inquiry, including literary analysis, political theory, focus groups, surveys, and experimental research, to understand more deeply black women's political and emotional responses to pervasive negative race and gender images. Not a traditional political science work concerned with office-seeking, voting, or ideology, Sister Citizen instead explores how African American women understand themselves as citizens and what they expect from political organizing. Harris-Perry shows that the shared struggle to preserve an authentic self and secure recognition as a citizen links together black women in America, from the anonymous survivors of Hurricane Katrina to the current First Lady of the United States.

Is Marriage for White People?

by Ralph Richard Banks

During the past half century, African Americans have become the most unmarried people in our nation. More than two out of every three black women are unmarried, and they are more than twice as likely as white women never to marry. The racial gap in marriage extends beyond the poor. Affluent and college educated African Americans are also less likely to marry or stay married than their white counterparts. That harms black children and adults, and imperils the growth and stability of the black middle class.

My Long Trip Home: A Family Memoir

by Mark Whitaker

In a dramatic, moving work of historical reporting and personal discovery, Mark Whitaker, an award-winning journalist, sets out to trace the story of what happened to his parents, a fascinating but star-crossed interracial couple, and arrives at a new understanding of the family dramas that shaped their lives—and his own.

His father, “Syl” Whitaker, was the charismatic grandson of an enslaved African who grew up the child of black undertakers from Pittsburgh and went on to become a groundbreaking scholar of Africa. His mother, Jeanne Theis, was a shy World War II refugee from France whose father, a Huguenot pastor, helped hide thousands of Jews from the Nazis and Vichy police. They met in the mid-1950s, when he was a college student and she was his professor, and they carried on a secret romance for more than a year before marrying and having two boys.

The Girl with Three Legs: A Memoir

by Soraya Mire, Foreword by Eve Ensler

In The Girl with Three Legs, Soraya Miré reveals what it means to grow up in a traditional Somali family, where girls’ and women’s basic human rights are violated on a daily basis. A victim of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and an arranged marriage to an abusive cousin, Miré was also witness to the instability of Somalia’s political landscape: her father was a general for the military dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, and her family moved in the inner circles of Somalia’s elite. In her journey to recover from the violence done to her, Miré realizes FGM is the ultimate child abuse, a ritual of mutilation handed down from mother to daughter and protected by the word “culture.”

Miré’s tale is a dramatic chronicle of the personal challenges she overcame, a testament to the empowerment of women, and a firsthand account of the violent global oppression of women and girls. Despite the horror she experienced, her words resonate with hope, humanity, and dignity. Her life story is one of inspiration and redemption.

Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships, and Motherhood among Black Women

By Mignon R. Moore

In Invisible Families, Mignon R. Moore brings to light the family life of a group that has been largely invisible--gay women of color--in a book that challenges long-standing ideas about racial identity, family formation, and motherhood. Drawing from interviews and surveys of one hundred black gay women in New York City, Invisible Families explores the ways that race and class have influenced how these women understand their sexual orientation, find partners, and form families. In particular, the study looks at the ways in which the past experiences of women who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s shape their thinking, and have structured their lives in communities that are not always accepting of their openly gay status. Overturning generalizations about lesbian families derived largely from research focused on white, middle-class feminists, Invisible Families reveals experiences within black American and Caribbean communities as it asks how people with multiple stigmatized identities imagine and construct an individual and collective sense of self.

Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes

by Adilifu Nama

Super Black places the appearance of black people as superheroes alongside broad and sweeping cultural trends in American politics and pop culture, which reveals how black people as superheroes are not disposable pop products, but rather a fascinating phenomenon through which futuristic expressions and fantastic visions of black people and symbolic political meaning are presented. Adilifu Nama sees the value--and finds new avenues for exploring black people as superheroes who are often dismissed as sidekicks, imitators of established white heroes, or are accused of having no role outside of white supremacy.

Nama examines seminal black people in comic books as superheroes such as Black Panther, Black Lightning, Storm, Luke Cage, Blade, the Falcon, Nubia, and others, some of whom also appear on the small and large screens, as well as how the imagery of black people as superheroes has come to life in the image of President Barack Obama. Super Black explores how black people as superheroes are a powerful source of  narrative, and imagination in "American society" that express a myriad of political perspectives, and fantastic (re)imaginings of the identity of black people.

The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency

by Randall Kennedy

In Persistence of the Color Line, Kennedy tackles such hot-button issues as the nature of racial opposition to Obama, whether Obama has a singular responsibility to African Americans, electoral politics and cultural chauvinism, black patriotism, the differences in Obama’s presentation of himself to blacks and to whites, the challenges posed by the dream of a post-racial society, and the far-from-simple symbolism of Obama as a leader of the Joshua generation in a country that has elected only three black senators and two black governors in its entire history.
Eschewing the critical excesses of both the left and the right, Kennedy offers a gimlet-eyed view of Obama’s triumphs and travails, his strengths and weaknesses, as they pertain to the troubled history of race in America.

The Wealth Cure: Putting Money in Its Place

by Hill Harper

Using his own journey as a parable, Harper inspires the reader to evaluate their values while explaining the importance of laying a sound financial foundation and how to recognize the worth of your relationships and increase the value of your interactions with the people in your life. Drawing on his personal recollections and true stories from family and friends, Harper helps readers begin to see money not as a goal but as a tool that provides freedom for following their passions. The keys include investing in yourself, tapping the resources you need, and taking responsibility for how those resources are used. Far from a get-rich-quick primer, The Wealth Cure brims with inspired wisdom for building a lasting bounty from the experiences, loved ones, and achievements that really matter.