Black Males Left Behind edited by Ronald Mincy (2006)

A collection of think-tank policy papers by the Urban Institute? Wonder why this one didn’t exactly get around? Yet it is one of the most valuable books I have ever read. It’s one thing to say that things aren’t easy for uneducated young black men. But to just say it implies, via omission, that nothing can be done short of transforming how America operates and thinks—which will never happen. The articles in this book, in accessible language, outline what we can do to help, here in the real world. What are the jobs a man without a college degree can seek? What helps a man from the streets keep a job once he has one? Just read, say, one of Mincy’s essays a day—and afterwards, you’ll feel like almost anything the typical race man-type says is fundamentally incomplete.

American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare by Jason DeParle (2004)

Few people seem to get that the reform of welfare administration into a five-year program in 1996 was a signpost development in black history. The liberal take on it, today, is that erstwhile welfare moms are still poor—and they are. The conservative take is that they are less poor than they once were—which they are. DeParle’s book gave us the closest thing I can imagine to a truth we can use. He resisted his visceral distrust of the Republican-led policy, followed three black women grappling with its effects and gave us the facts. His conclusion: Welfare reform has created no utopia at all—but is better than the old days. The moms doing without it will never be middle-class, but, he argues, they are happier making it so that their kids might be one day. The book would make for a great dramatized miniseries, in fact—Mo’Nique, in my mind, is the lead character.

Come On, People: On The Path From Victims to Victors by Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint (2007)

This book hasn’t taken the place it should have, partly because the year before, Tyler Perry’s Don’t Make a Black Woman Take Off Her Earrings, a shorter and jollier advice book on making the best of the worst, had flown off the shelves. But if it were up to me, Cosby and Poussaint’s book would be required reading for all HBCU freshmen and an audiobook version would be provided for free to every black family in the United States. A particularly useful lesson: The idea that four years of college is the only way to a middle-class life is a myth. Cosby and Poussaint lay out how to make use of community colleges and vocational schools to make for a comfortable existence—those not up for the policy papers in Black Males Left Behind would get much of the same thing from this book.

Getting Under the Skin of “Diversity”: Searching For the Color-Blind Ideal by Larry Purdy (2008)

This one was published by a small press, is far from P.C. and was written by a white guy. You’ll never see it at the front of a bookstore. However, it’s one of the best books on affirmative action ever written. Purdy, a lawyer, calmly and without rancor, dismantles the typical defenses of racial-preference policies on the basis of diversity (as opposed to disadvantage) and shows how all would be better off if we got back down to specific cases. Purdy has no irritated conservative rancor against “the blacks”—he just doesn’t see coherence in how racial preferences started being defended in the ’80s. The book is especially good on the University of Michigan Supreme Court cases. During which, you may recall, black studies pioneer John Hope Franklin, when informed of affirmative action policies based on lowered test score and grade cutoffs for black students, was appalled.

Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle For Civil Rights In The North by Thomas Sugrue (2008)

Sugrue is best known for his chronicle of what led to the riots in Detroit, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race And Inequality in Postwar Detroit, now established as a go-to source on black urban history and often assigned in college courses. Sweet Land Of Liberty will never occupy that kind of place: It doesn’t have the advantage of a single-line narrative thrust. Yet it is well worth a look. We know about Montgomery, Atlanta and Selma. But how often do we learn about the desegregation of schools in Westchester County, or moves to integrate Levittowns? This book shows what a serious kick-butt organization the NAACP used to be, and also teaches us that the black “militant” mood didn’t begin in 1966, but was very much in the air—just minus the Afros—as early as the late ‘40s. Lots of important stories here about ordinary people who worked just as hard as the rock stars down South.

John McWhorter is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a Lecturer at Columbia University, and a blogger for The New Republic.