Books About Racism Dominates Best-Seller Lists Amid Protests

All of the top 10 books on The New York Times’s Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction bestseller list are about racism, including titles like “So You Want To Talk About Race” by Ijeoma Oluo, “How To Be An Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi, and “Me And White Supremacy” by Layla F. Saad. 

Topping both The New York Times’ and Amazon’s lists (and temporarily out of stock) is “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism,” a 2018 book by Robin DiAngelo that explores how white people react when their assumptions about race are challenged.

On Amazon’s list, previously released books about racism like Kendi’s “Stamped From The Beginning” are outselling new releases with famously large followings, such as Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games prequel, “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.”

An industry tracker reports a 330% jump in sales for political science civil rights titles from the week of May 17 to the week of May 23, and a 245% jump for books about discrimination. 

Even fiction has felt the force of anti-racism protests with Toni Morrison titles like “Beloved” and “The Bluest Eye,” which artfully address the experience of being black in America, resurfacing on The New York Times’s Paperback Trade Fiction list. 

In the U.K., Reni-Eddo-Lodge became the first and only black woman to top the non-fiction paperback charts with her 2017 book, “Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race.”