These DEI book lists include a little bit of everything: literature, history, sociology, art, music, biology, political science, legal issues, critical theory, identity issues, race and ethnic studies, LGBTQ+ topics, selected women's and gender issues, disability culture, books by and about people of color and other marginalized groups. Topics covered will of course vary each month as books published and acquired each month vary.
Please note these lists may not contain ALL of the potentially relevant new DEI titles received for a given month. You can search the Library's entire list of New Titles and also use Quick Search to find other items of interest.
A Compelling Journey from Peking to Washington: Building a New Life in America by
A Compelling Journey from Peking to Washington follows the life of Chi Wang. We are first introduced to Wang as a young child fleeing with his family through China from encroaching Japanese forces. We see the ravages of the Sino-Japanese war from the eyes of someone who lived through it, only to have the post-war peace quickly overshadowed by a growing civil war between the Nationalists and Communists. During this tumultuous period, Wang's father served as an important Nationalist general, allowing a deeper picture of these conflicts to emerge. Wang then decides to leave China for the United States just before the People's Republic of China is formed. His new life in America begins as the China he grew up in is changed forever. As Wang adapts to living in America, he also has to come to terms with the increasing distance from his homeland due to the ongoing Cold War. He yearns to stay connected with the land where his family still lives while giving back to his adopted home. He accomplishes this through a long career where he is actively involved in fostering U.S.-China understanding and educational exchanges. Some of the major highlights of his career include a groundbreaking trip to China on behalf of the U.S. State Department in 1972, shortly after Nixon's own trip; nearly 50 years working at the U.S. Library of Congress where he became the head of the Chinese and Korean Section, successfully growing its collection from 300,000 volumes to over 1 million; and the founding of the U.S.-China Policy Foundation in 1995.
From Equity Talk to Equity Walk: Expanding Practitioner Knowledge for Racial Justice in Higher Education by
A practical guide for achieving equitable outcomes From Equity Talk to Equity Walk offers practical guidance on the design and application of campus change strategies for achieving equitable outcomes. Drawing from campus-based research projects sponsored by the Association of American Colleges and Universities and the Center for Urban Education at the University of Southern California, this invaluable resource provides real-world steps that reinforce primary elements for examining equity in student achievement, while challenging educators to specifically focus on racial equity as a critical lens for institutional and systemic change. Colleges and universities have placed greater emphasis on education equity in recent years. Acknowledging the changing realities and increasing demands placed on contemporary postsecondary education, this book meets educators where they are and offers an effective design framework for what it means to move beyond equity being a buzzword in higher education. Central concepts and key points are illustrated through campus examples. This indispensable guide presents academic administrators and staff with advice on building an equity-minded campus culture, aligning strategic priorities and institutional missions to advance equity, understanding equity-minded data analysis, developing campus strategies for making excellence inclusive, and moving from a first-generation equity educator to an equity-minded practitioner. From Equity Talk to Equity Walk: A Guide for Campus-Based Leadership and Practice is a vital wealth of information for college and university presidents and provosts, academic and student affairs professionals, faculty, and practitioners who seek to dismantle institutional barriers that stand in the way of achieving equity, specifically racial equity to achieve equitable outcomes in higher education.
Growing Older As a Trans and/or Non-Binary Person by
Drawing on the experiences of older trans people and those transitioning later in life, this is a definitive guide to ageing as a trans and/or non-binary person. It covers the key health concerns and social issues affecting older trans people, including care homes, pensions, inheritance and funeral planning, as well as hormone use and physical changes, isolation and dementia. Kermode also provides guidance for professionals looking to better meet the needs of these individuals and highlights the important factors that need to be considered at an institutional level to provide the best care for people across the gender spectrum.
Iranian Identity, American Experience by
"This multidisciplinary book brings the topics of rights, identity, and race together to examine what it means to be oppressed, how oppression works, and what we both as individuals and as a community can do about it, using the Iranian American community as a case study"
I Was Their American Dream by
Malaka's upbringing will look familiar to anyone who grew up in the pre-internet era, but her particular story is a heartfelt tribute to the American immigrants who have invested their future in the promise of the American dream. The daughter of parents with unfulfilled dreams themselves, Malaka navigates her childhood chasing her parents' ideals, learning to code-switch between her family's Filipino and Egyptian customs, adapting to white culture to fit in, crushing on skater boys, and trying to understand the tension between holding onto cultural values and trying to be an all-American kid. I Was Their American Dream is at once a journal of growing up and a reminder of the thousands of immigrants who come to America in search for a better life for themselves and their children.
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER * A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousness "Brilliant . . . To read this book is to become more human."--Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen One of Time's 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year * Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, New Statesman, BuzzFeed, Esquire, The New York Public Library, and Book Riot Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative--and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world. Binding these essays together is Hong's theory of "minor feelings." As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality--when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they're dissonant--and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her. With sly humor and a poet's searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche--and of a writer's search to both uncover and speak the truth. Praise for Minor Feelings "Hong begins her new book of essays with a bang. . . .The essays wander a variegated terrain of memoir, criticism and polemic, oscillating between smooth proclamations of certainty and twitches of self-doubt. . . . Minor Feelings is studded with moments [of] candor and dark humor shot through with glittering self-awareness."--The New York Times "Hong uses her own experiences as a jumping off point to examine race and emotion in the United States."--Newsweek "Powerful . . . [Hong] brings together memoiristic personal essay and reflection, historical accounts and modern reporting, and other works of art and writing, in order to amplify a multitude of voices and capture Asian America as a collection of contradictions. She does so with sharp wit and radical transparency."--Salon
Notes on Grief by
"A devastating essay on loss and the people we love from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the bestselling author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun." - Publisher
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by
Lizzie doesn't like the way she looks. Though she dates guys online, she's afraid to send pictures: no-one wants a fat girl. So Lizzie starts to lose weight. With punishing drive she counts almonds consumed and pounds dropped, navigating double-edged validation from her mother, her friends, her husband and her own reflection in the mirror. But no matter how much she loses, will she ever see herself as anything other than a fat girl?
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Beyond binaries : trans identities in contemporary culture by 
Black Magic: what Black leaders learned from trauma and triumph by
A powerful exploration of Black achievement in a white world based on honest, provocative, and moving interviews with Black leaders, scientists, artists, activists, and champions. "I remember the day I realized I couldn't play a white guy as well as a white guy. It felt like a death sentence for my career." When Chad Sanders landed his first job in lily white Silicon Valley, he quickly concluded that to be successful at work meant playing a certain social game. Each meeting was drenched in white slang and the privileged talk of international travel or folk concerts in San Francisco, which led Chad to believe he needed to emulate whiteness to be successful. So Chad changed. He changed his wardrobe, his behavior, his speech--everything that connected him with his Black identity. And while he finally felt included, he felt awful. So he decided to give up the charade. He reverted back to the methods he learned at the dinner table, or at the Black Baptist church where he'd been raised, or at the concrete basketball courts, barbershops, and summertime cookouts. And it paid off. Chad began to land more exciting projects. He earned the respect of his colleagues. Accounting for this turnaround, Chad believes, was something he calls Black Magic, namely resilience, creativity, and confidence forged in his experience navigating America as a Black man. Black Magic has emboldened his every step since, leading him to wonder: Was he alone in this discovery? Were there others who felt the same? In moving essays, Chad dives into his formative experiences to see if they might offer the possibility of discovering or honing this skill. He tests his theory by interviewing Black leaders across industries to get their take on Black Magic. The result is a revelatory and very necessary book. Black Magic explores Black experiences in predominantly white environments and demonstrates the risks of self-betrayal and the value of being yourself.
Codex Sierra : a Nahuatl-Mixtec book of accounts from colonial Mexico by
One of the earliest texts written in a Native American language, the Codex Sierra is a sixteenth-century book of accounts from Santa Catalina Texupan, a community in the Mixteca region of the modern state of Oaxaca. Kevin Terraciano’s transcription and translation, the first in more than a half century, combine with his deeply informed analysis to make this the most accurate, complete, and comprehensive English-language edition of this rare manuscript.
The sixty-two-page manuscript, organized in parallel columns of Nahuatl alphabetic writing and hand-painted images, documents the expenditures and income of Texupan from 1550 to 1564. With the alphabetic column as a Rosetta stone for deciphering the phonetic glyphs, a picture emerges of indigenous pueblos taking part in the burgeoning Mexican silk industry—only to be buffeted by the opening of trade with China and the devastations of the great epidemics of the late 1500s. Terraciano uses a wide range of archival sources from the period to demonstrate how the community innovated and adapted to the challenges of the time, and how they were ultimately undermined by the actions and policies of colonial officials.
The first known record of an indigenous population’s integration into the transatlantic economy, and of the impact of the transpacific trade on a lucrative industry in the region, the Codex Sierra provides a unique window on the world of the Mixteca less than a generation after the conquest—a view rendered all the more precise, clear, and coherent by this new translation and commentary.
Critical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogy: The US-Dakota War Re-examined by 
The Design of Race: how visual culture shapes America by
Peter Fine's innovative study traces the development of a mass visual culture in the United States, focusing on how new visual technologies played a part in embedding racialized ideas about African Americans, and how whiteness was privileged within modernist ideals of visual form. Fine considers the visual and material manifestations of this process through the history of three important technologies of the art of mechanical reproduction - typography, lithography, and photography, and then moves on to consider how racialized representation has been configured and contested within contemporary film and television, fine art and digital design.
Down the Warpath to the Cedars : Indians' first battles in the revolution by 
Empowering African Women for Sustainable Development Toward Achieving the United Nations' 2030 Goals by 
Entangled Coercion African and Indigenous Labour in Charcas (16th–17th Century) by
This book investigates the phenomenon of slavery and other forms of servitude experienced by people of African or indigenous origin who were taken captive and then subjected to forced labor in Charcas (Bolivia) in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Giving up Whiteness: One Man's Journey by
"Jeff James was one of the good white guys. At least that's what he thought. But when he asked a black friend how to become an antiracist, he had to think again. "Simple," she shot back, "get rid of whiteness."Thus began his journey to discover, name, and dismantle the racial category that had defined and advantaged him for a lifetime. In Giving Up Whiteness, James leads readers on an intimate, humble, and disorienting investigation of what it means to be white in twenty-first-century America. He begins to wonder what forces shape his own and other white people's choices: about where to live, who to marry, and what church to join. With a blend of honest storytelling and incisive critique, James guides readers through the questions he encountered: What privileges accrue to people categorized as white? How have some Christians bolstered white supremacy through misreading of Scripture? How does whiteness make itself invisible? And is it possible to give it up?The things we can't see yield the most power, so it's time to take a hard look at whiteness. Ultimately, James writes, white people like him have a lot of work to do, and it's past time to get started." -Publisher
A Line of Blood and Dirt : Creating the Canada-United States border across indigenous land by 
Madam C. J. Walker: The Making of an American Icon by
Madam C. J. Walker--reputed to be America's first self-made woman millionaire--has long been celebrated for her rags-to-riches story. Born to former slaves in the Louisiana Delta in the aftermath of the Civil War, married at fourteen, and widowed at twenty, Walker spent the first decades of her life as a laundress, laboring in conditions that paralleled the lives of countless poor and working-class African American women. By the time of her death in 1919, however, Walker had refashioned herself into one of the most famous African American figures in the nation: the owner and president of a hair-care empire and a philanthropist wealthy enough to own a country estate near the Rockefellers in the prestigious New York town of Irvington-on-Hudson. In this biography, Erica Ball places this remarkable and largely forgotten life story in the context of Walker's times. Ball analyzes Walker's remarkable acts of self-fashioning, and explores the ways that Walker (and the Walker brand) enabled a new generation of African Americans to bridge the gap between a nineteenth-century agrarian past and a twentieth-century future as urban-dwelling consumers.
The Memorykeepers: Gendered Knowledges, Empires, and Indonesian American History by
Dorothy Fujita-Rony's The Memorykeepers: Gendered Knowledges, Empires, and Indonesian American Historyexamines the importance of women's memorykeeping for two Toba Batak women whose twentieth-century histories span Indonesia and the United States, H.L.Tobing and Minar T. Rony. This book addresses the meanings of family stories and artifacts within a gendered and interimperial context, and demonstrates how these knowledges can produce alternate cartographies of memory and belonging within the diaspora. It thus explores how women's memorykeeping forges integrative possibility, not only physically across islands, oceans, and continents, but also temporally, across decades, empires, and generations. Thirty-five years in the making, The Memorykeepersis the first book on Indonesian Americans written within the fields of US history, American Studies, and Asian American Studies.
Revolutionary Women of Texas and Mexico: Portraits of Soldaderas, Saints, and Subversives by 
Rez Metal: inside the Navajo Nation heavy metal scene by
Rez Metal captures the creative energy of Indigenous youth culture in the twenty-first century. Bridging communities from disparate corners of Indian Country and across generations, heavy metal has touched a collective nerve on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona in particular. Many cultural leaders--including former Navajo president Russell Begaye--have begun to recognize heavy metal's ability to inspire Navajo communities facing chronic challenges such as poverty, depression, and addiction. Heavy metal music speaks to the frustrations, fears, trials, and hopes of living in Indian Country. Rez Metal highlights a seminal moment in Indigenous heavy metal: when Kyle Felter, lead singer of the Navajo heavy metal band I Dont Konform, sent a demo tape to Flemming Rasmussen, the Grammy Award-winning producer of several Metallica albums, including Master of Puppets. A few months later, Rasmussen, captivated by the music, flew from Denmark to Window Rock, Arizona, to meet the band. Through a series of vivid images and interviews focused on the venues, bands, and fans of the Navajo Nation metal scene, Rez Metal provides a window into this fascinating world.
Run Home If You Don't Want to Be Killed: The Detroit Uprising of 1943 by
In the heat of June in 1943, a wave of destructive and deadly civil unrest took place in the streets of Detroit. The city was under the pressures of both wartime industrial production and the nascent civil rights movement, setting the stage for massive turmoil and racial violence. Thirty-four people were killed, most of whom were Black, and over half of these were killed by police. Two thousand people were arrested, and over seven hundred sustained injuries requiring treatment at local hospitals. Property damage was estimated to be nearly $2 million. With Run Home If You Don't Want to Be Killed, Rachel Marie-Crane Williams delivers a graphic retelling of the racism and tension leading up to the violence of those summer days. By incorporating firsthand accounts collected by the NAACP and telling them through a combination of hand-drawn images, historical dialogue, and narration, Williams makes the history and impact of these events immediate, and in showing us what happened, she reminds us that many issues of the time--police brutality, state-sponsored oppression, economic disparity, white supremacy--plague our country to this day.
Stop Trying to Fix Policing: Lessons learned from the front lines of black liberation by 
Surviving the Americas: Garifuna Persistence from Nicaragua to New York City by
This book directly engages vital social justice issues of diaspora, exclusion, and resilience through an ethnographic study with the Garifuna, a Central American afro-indigenous group with roots in western Africa and the Caribbean. Today, the Garifuna are concentrated on the Caribbean coast of Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Belize, and about 50,000 Garifuna live in the US. The primary focus is the resilience of Garifuna communities on the southeastern Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, through an in-depth study of Garifuna commitment to community and place, bolstered by interviews with recent Garifuna migrants to the U.S. who keep their culture alive in the Bronx and elsewhere through language, food, annual trips home, and spiritual connection with their ancestors.
Thick : And Other Essays by
FINALIST FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD Named a notable book of 2019 by the New York Times Book Review, Chicago Tribune, Time, and The Guardian As featured by The Daily Show, NPR, PBS, CBC, Time, VIBE, Entertainment Weekly, Well-Read Black Girl, and Chris Hayes, "incisive, witty, and provocative essays" (Publishers Weekly) by one of the "most bracing thinkers on race, gender, and capitalism of our time" (Rebecca Traister) "Thick is sure to become a classic." --The New York Times Book Review In eight highly praised treatises on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom--award-winning professor and acclaimed author of Lower Ed--is unapologetically "thick": deemed "thick where I should have been thin, more where I should have been less," McMillan Cottom refuses to shy away from blending the personal with the political, from bringing her full self and voice to the fore of her analytical work. Thick "transforms narrative moments into analyses of whiteness, black misogyny, and status-signaling as means of survival for black women" (Los Angeles Review of Books) with "writing that is as deft as it is amusing" (Darnell L. Moore). This "transgressive, provocative, and brilliant" (Roxane Gay) collection cements McMillan Cottom's position as a public thinker capable of shedding new light on what the "personal essay" can do. She turns her chosen form into a showcase for her critical dexterity, investigating everything from Saturday Night Live, LinkedIn, and BBQ Becky to sexual violence, infant mortality, and Trump rallies. Collected in an indispensable volume that speaks to the everywoman and the erudite alike, these unforgettable essays never fail to be "painfully honest and gloriously affirming" and hold "a mirror to your soul and to that of America" (Dorothy Roberts).
White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America by
The American political scene today is poisonously divided, and the vast majority of white evangelicals play a strikingly unified, powerful role in the disunion. These evangelicals raise a starkly consequential question for electoral politics: Why do they claim morality while supporting politicians who act immorally by most Christian measures? In this clear-eyed, hard-hitting chronicle of American religion and politics, Anthea Butler answers that racism is at the core of conservative evangelical activism and power. Butler reveals how evangelical racism, propelled by the benefits of whiteness, has since the nation's founding played a provocative role in severely fracturing the electorate. During the buildup to the Civil War, white evangelicals used scripture to defend slavery and nurture the Confederacy. During Reconstruction, they used it to deny the vote to newly emancipated blacks. In the twentieth century, they sided with segregationists in avidly opposing movements for racial equality and civil rights. Most recently, evangelicals supported the Tea Party, a Muslim ban, and border policies allowing family separation. White evangelicals today, cloaked in a vision of Christian patriarchy and nationhood, form a staunch voting bloc in support of white leadership. Evangelicalism's racial history festers, splits America, and needs a reckoning now.
Women, Islam and Familial Intimacy in Colonial South Asia by
Women, Islam and Familial Intimacy in Colonial South Asiahighlights the rich tradition of protest and defiance among the Muslim women of colonial India. Bringing together a range of archival material including novels, pamphlets, commentaries and journalistic essays, it narrates a history of Muslim feminism conversing with, and confronting the dominant and influential narratives of didactic social reform. The book reveals how discussion about marriage and family evoked claims of women's freedom and rights in a highly charged literary and cultural landscape where lesser-known female intellectuals jostled for public space alongside well-known male social reformers. Definitions of Islamic ethics remained central to these debates, and the book illustrates how claims of social obligation, religious duty and freedom balanced and negotiated each other in a period of nationalism and reform. By doing so, it also illuminates a story of Muslim politics that goes beyond the well-established accounts of Muslim separatism and the Pakistan movement.
