Political Science Reading Lists for Undergraduates

By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control—relegating millions to a permanent second-class status—even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness.

Warns citizens to examine the actual state of America, the role of blacks, and race relations after a century of Emancipation.

Coates shares with his son--and readers--the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children's lives were taken as American plunder.

The counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality.

In honor of the 150th anniversary of W. E. B. Du Bois's birth in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the University of Massachusetts Library has prepared a new edition of Du Bois's classic, The Souls of Black Folk. Originally published in 1903, Souls introduced a number of now-canonical terms into the American conversation about race, among them double-consciousness, and it sounded the ominous warning that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line."

Ian Haney Lopez offers a sweeping account of how politicians and plutocrats deploy veiled racial appeals to persuade white voters to support policies that favor the extremely rich yet threaten their own interests.

Although Sojourner Truth was born into bondage and oppression, in liberation she emerged as a leader in the most radical causes of her era. Accompanied by primary source documents including political records, speech transcripts, and selections from her autobiography, Richman's biography provides a rich and accessible narrative of Truth's life and legacy.

Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Richard Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.

Tyranny Comes Home unveils a new aspect of the symbiotic relationship between foreign interventions and domestic politics. It gives us alarming insight into incidents like the shooting in Ferguson, Missouri and the Snowden case--which tell a common story about contemporary foreign policy and its impact on our civil liberties.