The most recommended books about discrimination

I’m a law professor at Boston University who has studied and written about constitutional law, democracy, and inequality for over 20 years. I’m troubled by America’s rise to become the world’s leader in imprisoning its own citizens and the continued use of inhumane policing and punishment practices. These trends must be better understood before we can come up with a form of politics that can overcome our slide into a darker version of ourselves. 

Though my two doctorates and experience landed me in the arenas of education and data-sharing, I soon realized that merely sharing information was not the way to get people to embrace fact. My books and speaking (I’ve lectured at Cambridge, Columbia, Oxford, Comic-Con, etc.) now focus on how to persuade people to absorb, remember, care about, and act on new information. I teach everyone from scientists to parents about how to share information in ways that get around people’s mental blockades. I’m also a Mensan and Fulbright Specialist who writes for Psychology Today and was honored by the White House.

I think all romance writers have their favourite trope, and second chances has the strongest hold on me. I’m a person who makes mistakes, so I love to see equally fallible humans getting their second chance at a happy ever after too. People with a history always lend depth to a story too. At any point, you can pluck a moment from their past to show an element of their relationship. And angst. I love a good dose of angst. With second chances, it's likely been a rocky road. Then the clincher for me, that sense of fate and destiny of people who’ve gone separate ways but find themselves drawn back together.

I am a historian and a social geographer whose main interest is in examining why some of us are embraced (legally, politically, economically, culturally) by the society we live in while some others are excluded. Probably due to my status as someone who is an immigrant to Canada and also a person with a disability, the topic of belonging and exclusion fascinates me. 

I’m a Harvard professor of psychology and a cognitive scientist who’s interested in all aspects of language, mind, and human nature. I grew up in Montreal, but have lived most of my adult life in the Boston area, bouncing back and forth between Harvard and MIT except for stints in California as a professor at Stanford and sabbatical visitor in Santa Barbara and now, Berkeley. I alternate between books on language (how it works, what it reveals about human nature, what makes for clear and stylish writing) and books on the human mind and human condition (how the mind works, why violence has declined, how progress can take place).

I’m a law professor at Boston University who has studied and written about constitutional law, democracy, and inequality for over 20 years. I’m troubled by America’s rise to become the world’s leader in imprisoning its own citizens and the continued use of inhumane policing and punishment practices. These trends must be better understood before we can come up with a form of politics that can overcome our slide into a darker version of ourselves. 

I’ve spent my life in North American higher education as a student and professor, so I have experienced many of the cultural shifts associated with “woke” culture. These books share the virtues of deep scholarship, sensible advice, and sprightly writing—virtues I have tried to emulate in my own writing. I have tried hard over my career (I’m in my 60s now) to be open and fair toward even the most diverse of my students and colleagues. These books have helped me do so—and I hope they have improved my teaching and writing along the way. 

I’ve been studying China for almost 60 years and have visited the country 40 times. Around 1990 I became aware of the sad situation of migrants from the countryside trying to move to cities to earn a better living. There they are met with low wages, poor living conditions, and discrimination. I spent 6 or 7 years interviewing them and writing about them and the book I wrote won a prize for the best book on 20th century China published in 1999. Then I learned about the workers who were laid off as China modernized, and went to talk with them. The present book is full of empathy and concern for these people.

I’m an awkward academic who thinks, writes, and teaches about US immigration and imprisonment regimes and their growth out of racism, imperialism, and nationalism. I’m strongly motivated by things that I hate. I want to understand how and why we are facing such catastrophic problems, so that we can figure out how to undo them. My work is partly motivated by my personal history as the daughter of immigrants who moved to support their families and survive in the aftermath of war. As a privileged person in the US, I'm not directly affected by the state violence I study. I also know that we're not going to have a future unless we get there together. 

I grew up on a family farm surrounded by larger vegetable and dairy operations that used migrant labor. From an early age, my siblings and I were acquainted with the children of these workers, children whom we shared a school desk with one day and were gone the next. On summer vacations, our parents hauled us around in a station wagon with a popup camper, which they parked in out-of-the-way hayfields and on mountainous plateaus, shunning, much to our chagrin, normal campgrounds, and swimming pools. Thus, I grew up exposed to different cultures and environments. My writing reflects my parents’ curiosity, love of books and travel, and devotion to the natural world.