Many Americans might not know the more polemical side of race writing in our history. The canon of African-American literature is well established. Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin are familiar figures. Far less so is Samuel Morton (champion of the obsolete theory of polygenesis) or Thomas Dixon (author of novels romanticizing Klan violence). It is tempting to think that the influence of those dusty polemics ebbed as the dust accumulated. But their legacy persists, freshly shaping much of our racial discourse.<\/p>\n
On the occasion of Black History Month, I\u2019ve selected the most influential books on race and the black experience published in the United States for each decade of the nation\u2019s existence \u201d\u201d a history of race through ideas, arranged chronologically on the shelf. (In many cases, I\u2019ve added a complementary work, noted with an asterisk.) Each of these books was either published first in the United States or widely read by Americans. They inspired \u201d\u201d and sometimes ended \u201d\u201d the fiercest debates of their times: debates over slavery, segregation, mass incarceration. They offered racist explanations for inequities, and antiracist correctives. Some \u201d\u201d the poems of Phillis Wheatley, the memoir of Frederick Douglass \u201d\u201d stand literature\u2019s test of time. Others have been roundly debunked by science, by data, by human experience. No list can ever be comprehensive, and \u201cmost influential\u201d\u009d by no means signifies \u201cbest.\u201d\u009d But I would argue that together, these works tell the history of anti-black racism in the United States as painfully, as eloquently, as disturbingly as words can. In many ways, they also tell its present.<\/p>\n