Ibram X. Kendi Likes to Read at Bedtime
Credit...Jillian Tamaki
Published Feb. 25, 2021Updated March 1, 2021
“I don’t remember the last time the pages of a book were not the final thing I saw before departing off for sleep,” says the author, professor and editor, with Keisha Blain, of “Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019.”
What’s the last great book you read?
I can’t just name one. I want to highlight three great books I recently read on America’s political economy. The first, “Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership,” by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, is an expertly told history of the post-civil rights emergence of what Taylor terms “predatory inclusion.” The second, “From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century,” by William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, is the best booklong case for reparations. The third, “The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States,” by Walter Johnson, adroitly examines a U.S. history of imperial racial capitalism with its crosswinds centered in St. Louis.