In the wake of the waves of police brutality at protests against the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other black people, Americans are turning to books to try to understand the United States’ history of structural and institutional racism. Over the past month, sales of books about anti-racism have surged dramatically. Every one of the 10 books on the New York Times’s combined e-book and print nonfiction best-seller list this week is about anti-racism. …
… Calls to read more, as many critics have said, cannot and should not replace active work to break down the systems that an anti-racist reading list can make apparent. They cannot be simple acts of virtue signaling.
But historically, enormous sales of political books have sometimes signified a shift in American culture. It was after Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique became a giant best-seller in 1963 that second-wave feminism really took off…
