- A Few Thousand Dollars: Sparking Prosperity for Everyone. Author and Prosperity Now founder Bob Friedman makes the case for a revised tax code that could fund a universal savings program in order to close the racial wealth divide in America.
- The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, by Richard Rothstein. Debunks myths about racial discrimination and explores how government at all levels systematically imposes segregation.
- Money Rock: A Family’s Story of Cocaine, Race, and Ambition in the New South. Former Charlotte Observer reporter Pam Kelley tells the true story of a reformed ‘80s cocaine dealer whose life illuminates our city’s legacy of segregation.
- Color and Character: West Charlotte High and the American Struggle over Educational Equality, by Pamela Grundy. The complicated history of West Charlotte, once a model of integration but now segregated and low-performing.
- Sorting Out the New South City: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875-1975. Charlotte historian Tom Hanchett traces the city’s evolution over the course of a century, illustrating that segregation was not always the norm.
- Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir. Examines compelling research from behavioral science and economics to explain, among other things, why poverty persists.
- The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die. Psychologist Keith Payne examines how inequality creates not only differences in economics but also in life expectancy, work performance, and family size.
- Shortchanged: Why Women Have Less Wealth and What Can Be Done About it, by Mariko Lin Chang. Explores why, despite women now earning more college degrees than men and steadily narrowing the wage gap, the typical woman has only 36 cents for every dollar of wealth owned by the typical man.
- Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Matthew Desmond that explores the complexities of unstable housing and offers possible solutions.
- The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander. Argues that our criminal justice system “functions as a contemporary system of racial control.”
What We’re Reading: Our Top 10 Discussion-Provoking Books
A Few Thousand Dollars: Sparking Prosperity for Everyone. Author and Prosperity Now founder Bob Friedman makes the case for a revised tax code that could fund a universal savings program in order to close the racial wealth divide in America.