Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates · 2015
A letter to his son on Black masculinity and survival. The site's spine text for fatherhood and racial reality — no other book gets cited more often in our circles.
Reading list
Books we pass between us.
The shelf the circles keep coming back to — fatherhood, mental health, mentorship, the Black-male canon. No hustle bros, no red pill. Every book has been worked through in at least one circle on the site. The links go to Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores.
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Curated shelf
The full shelf lives on Bookshop.
Every book here, plus more on fatherhood, mental health, and the Black-male canon, is curated under our Bookshop shop. Browsing there supports independent bookstores and helps cover the cost of running african.men.
The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates
Wes Moore · 2010
Two Black men with the same name and opposite outcomes. The single most-quoted text in the mentorship circles — proof that the men who showed up made the difference.
Notes of a Native Son
James Baldwin · 1955
The American canon on Black masculinity, sons, and fathers. Every mentor on the site has either read it or been told to. Non-negotiable on this list.
Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own
Eddie Glaude Jr. · 2020
A Black professor reading Baldwin into the present — mentorship by text, the way we use it when in-person mentors are scarce.
Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education
Mychal Denzel Smith · 2016
Coming of age in the Obama-Trayvon-Ferguson decade. The mental health and manhood narrative the site centers — written from the inside, no flinching.
Heavy: An American Memoir
Kiese Laymon · 2018
Honest writing on weight, abuse, gambling, his mother, addiction. The mental health text on this list — the one we give to brothers who say therapy isn't for them.
New Black Man
Mark Anthony Neal · 2005
Neal's argument for a Black masculinity defined by feminism, fatherhood, and emotional honesty rather than the patriarchal scripts. The bridge text between our circles and the books our sisters recommend.
Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond
Marc Lamont Hill · 2016
Black men and state violence — the policing reality every reader has to reckon with. Used in the site's hard-conversations track.
All Boys Aren't Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto
George M. Johnson · 2020
A queer Black man's memoir of family, masculinity, and finding yourself in spaces built to erase you. The site's queer-brothers shelf-anchor.
What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays
Damon Young · 2019
Pittsburgh, anxiety, father loss, marriage — Young's memoir is the funny one on the list, which is exactly why it lands the mental health point so hard.
We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity
bell hooks · 2003
A Black woman's compassionate critique of patriarchal scripts for Black men. Sharper than anything in the genre and the text we hand the brothers who think feminism isn't for them.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Frederick Douglass · 1845
About a hundred pages, the foundational autobiography. The site references it constantly — Douglass on literacy as freedom is still the starting point.