15 Books To Remind You Of The Struggle For Freedom In America

1. Freedom is a Constant Struggle - Angela Davis

"It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism." (Goodreads)

2. The Shock Doctrine - Naomi Klein

"There is no humane way of ruling people against their will." (Goodreads)

3. The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan

"Chosen motherhood is the real liberation. The choice to have a child makes the whole experience of motherhood different, and the choice to be generative in other ways can at last be made, and is being made by many women now, without guilt.” (Goodreads)

4. Citizen: An American Lyric - Claudia Rankine

"Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers. We suffer from the condition of being addressable. Our emotional openness, she adds, is carried by our addressability. Language navigates this. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present." (Goodreads)

5. Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates

“To yell “black-on-black crime” is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding.” (Goodreads)

6. The New Jim Crow - Michelle Alexander

"All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.” (Goodreads)

7. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America - Barbara Ehrenreich

"I grew up hearing over and over, to the point of tedium, that "hard work" was the secret of success: "Work hard and you'll get ahead" or "It's hard work that got us where we are." No one ever said that you could work hard - harder even than you ever thought possible - and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt." (Goodreads)

8. And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic - Randy Shilts

"How very American, he thought, to look at a disease as homosexual or heterosexual, as if viruses had the intelligence to choose between different inclinations of human behavior." (Goodreads)

9. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name - Audre Lorde

"All our storybooks were about people who were very different from us. They were blond and white and lived in houses with trees around and had dogs named Spot. I didn't know people like that any more than I knew people like Cinderella who lived in castles. Nobody wrote stories about us, but still people always asked my mother for directions in a crowd." (Goodreads)

10. Hell is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement - Lisa Guenther

"When does the convicted criminal cease to be a subject of law and a member of the common world? At what point does the (non) position of the prisoner converge with that of the stateless person, or the "enemy combatant", or the "illegal alien", or any of the other euphemisms we have invented for civil death in the twenty-first century?" (Goodreads)

11. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison

"Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat." (Goodreads)

12. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian - Sherman Alexie

"Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor." (Goodreads)

13. Custer Died for Your Sins - Vine Deloria Jr.

"Never has America lost a war ... But name, if you can, the last peace the United States won. Victory yes, but this country has never made a successful peace because peace requires exchanging ideas, concepts, thoughts, and recognizing the fact that two distinct systems of life can exist together without conflict. Consider how quickly America seems to be facing its allies of one war as new enemies." (Goodreads)

14. A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism - Phyllis Goldstein

"A stereotype is more than a label or judgment about an individual based on the real or imagined characteristics of a group. Stereotypes dehumanize people by reducing them to categories..." (Goodreads)

15. The Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan

"A little knowledge withheld is a great advantage one should store for future use. That is the power of chess. It is a game of secrets in which one must show and never tell." (Goodreads)