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What to Read When the World Feels Like It's Moving Backwards
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items Some moments demand that you understand them — not just feel them. This is one of those moments. Whether you're watching federal funding disappear from organizations you care about, trying to make sense of DEI rollbacks, or just feeling the weight of...
Sections
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Understanding Race & Power
History They Don't Want You to Know
Power, Philanthropy & the Bigger Picture
Understanding Race & Power
These are the foundational texts — the books that explain how racism operates through systems and policy, not just personal prejudice. If you want to understand what's being dismantled right now and why, start here.
A lawyer fights for people the system gave up on. Will break your heart and put it back together with something stronger.
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
Breaks down how racism operates through policy and power — gives you the exact language for what you're watching happen right now.
How to Be an Antiracist:
The most accessible book on this list. Direct, warm, and unflinching — the one I'd hand to literally anyone.
So You Want to Talk About Race
The definitive argument that residential segregation was deliberate government policy. Connects the dots on why the funding gap exists.
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Mass incarceration as a racial caste system — one of the most important books on race and criminal justice written in the last two decades.
The New Jim Crow
A philanthropy insider exposes how the sector perpetuates the same colonial dynamics it claims to dismantle — and offers a healing framework for what comes next. Required reading for anyone who works in or around philanthropic spaces.
Decolonizing Wealth
Moves beyond performative inclusion toward what real equity actually looks like inside organizations — including how they give, who they fund, and who gets left out.
Authentic Diversity
History They Don't Want You to Know
The books that reframe American history by telling the parts that got left out — or are being actively erased. Read these especially right now.
The story of the Great Migration — and a reminder that Black communities have always found a way when systems fail them.
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
A poet travels to American landmarks to examine how slavery is remembered, misremembered, and deliberately erased. Hits different right now.
How the Word Is Passed
Reframes American history by placing slavery at its center. The fact that it's being banned tells you everything about why it matters.
The 1619 Project
I actually read this one and it genuinely shifted how I think. Reframes racism as a caste system — one of the most perspective-changing books I've ever encountered.
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
A letter to his son about what it means to live in a Black body in America. Raw, lyrical, and necessary.
Between the World and Me
One of the most important books ever written about Black self-determination and collective power. Malcolm X's entire philosophy was rooted in the idea that Black communities must invest in themselves — which is exactly what Black Philanthropy Month i...
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
The biography of Madam CJ Walker — America's first self-made female millionaire and one of the most strategic Black philanthropists in history. A reminder that Black wealth and Black giving have always gone hand in hand.
On Her Own Ground
Power, Philanthropy & the Bigger Picture
These books zoom out — examining who controls resources, how wealth perpetuates inequality, and what it actually costs all of us when we let inequity persist.
Racism doesn't just hurt Black people — McGhee shows how it costs everyone and drains public goods across the board.
The Sum of Us
Essays on Black America that somehow feel more relevant now than when they were written. Essential for understanding the moral tradition behind this fight.
Race Matters: West, Cornel
How the wealthy use philanthropy to maintain power while appearing to solve the world's problems. Required reading during Black Philanthropy Month.
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
Racial trauma isn't just intellectual — it lives in our bodies. If you work in equity spaces and wonder why the work feels physically exhausting, this book explains it.
My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
A physician examines how racial resentment is being used against the very people who support it. Eye opening doesn't cover it.
Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland
A Black woman reimagining what philanthropy looks like when it actually centers the communities it claims to serve. Practical, grounded, and written for nonprofit professionals who are tired of the way things have always been done.
Empowering Charity: A New Narrative of Philanthropy