Books for Social Advocacy and Self-Education
Below, you'll find lists of book titles, mostly nonfiction books, that I found to educate myself on the social issues on which I found my information lacking. Our public schools left many of us with gaping holes of information. By no means are these exhaustive lists; they are just starting points in your own educational journey. You'll find that many of these overlap in subject matter or themes; all are interconnected, multifaceted, and intersectional.
Black History Month
"Freedom is a Constant Struggle" by Angela Y. Davis
"A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance" by Hanif Abdurraqib
"White Rage" by Carol Anderson
"Caste" by Isabel Wilkerson
"Hood Feminism" by Mikki Kendall
"Rock My Soul: Black People and Self Esteem" by Bell Hooks
"Rest is Resistance" by Tricia Hersey
"Refusing Compulsory Sexuality" by Sherronda J. Brown
"The Assassination of the Male Black Image" by Earl Ofari Hutchinson
"The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander
"The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in Amerca" by Aaron Robertson
LGBTQ+ history and theory
"Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality" by Julia Shaw
"This Arab is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers" by Elias Jahshan
"Hijab Butch Blues" by Lamya H
"Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex" by Angela Chen
"Who's Afraid of Gender" by Judith Butler
"Dear Cisgender People: A Guide to Trans Allyship and Empathy" Kenny Ethan Jones
"The ABC's of LGBT+" by Ash Hardell
"I'm Afraid of Men" by Vivek Shraya
"The Stonewall Reader" by The New York Public Library
"Queer Intentions: A (Personal) Journey Through LGBTQ+ Culture" by Amelia Abraham
Government and American History
"The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World" by Noam Chompsky
"On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century" by Timothy Snyder
"The People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn
"Surviving Autocracy" by Masha Gessen
"The Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein
"Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite The Past to Control The Future" by Jason Stanley
"Lies My Teacher Told Me" by James W. Loewen
"Autocracy Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World" by Anne Applebaum
"Shock Values: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy" by Carola Binder
Feminsim
"Leadership Recreated: A Woman's Guide to Surviving and Thriving in Patriarchical Academia" by Kem Grambrell
"Greater Than The Sum of Our Parts" by Nada Elia
"All in Her Head" by Elizabeth Comen PHD
"On Our Best Behavior" Elise Loehnen
"White Tears/ Brown Scars" by Ruby Hamad
"Women Who Run With The Wolves" by Clarissa Pinkola Estés Ph.D
"The Witches Are Coming" by Lindy West
"Reinventing Love: How the Patriarchy Sabotages Heterosexual Relations" by Mona Chollet
"The Movement: How Women's Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973" by Clara Bingham
Immigration
"Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands" by Kelly Lytle Hernández
"Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City" by Mike Davis
Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition" by Silky Shah
"Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America" by Laila Lalami
"Arab Routes: Pathways to Syrian California" by Sarah Gualteri
"The Undocumented Americans" by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
Disability Awareness
"Disability Visibility" Alice Wong
"Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space" by Amanda Leduc
"How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom" by Johanna Hedva
"Demystifying Disability" by Emily Ladau
"Disability Pride: Dispatches from a Post-ADA World" by Ben Mettlin
"Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement" by Ashley Shew
"Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire" Edited by Alice Wong