Xolo Books’ Back-to-School Syllabus: 3 Books We’d Assign in Intro to Decolonized Reading
Back-to-school season usually means new notebooks, fresh schedules, and figuring out which classes you’re going to rush to in the mornings. But if Xolo Books were designing a college syllabus, we’d make sure the reading list went beyond the traditional canon.
For an introductory course in history, identity, race, and liberation, these are three books we’d put on the syllabus. Each one offers a different perspective on how race, culture, gender, and power shape the stories we tell about the United States, and whose stories get left out.
Consider this your unofficial Intro to:
Decolonized Reading 101
No midterm!
Week 1: An African American and Latinx History of the United States
First on the syllabus is An African American and Latinx History of the United States by Paul Ortiz.
If a typical U.S. history course begins with a familiar timeline of presidents, wars, and political milestones, Ortiz asks readers to reconsider that framework entirely. Drawing connections between African American and Latinx histories, the book explores the United States through the experiences of communities whose struggles for freedom have often been treated as separate stories.
Ortiz connects movements, people, and events across racial and national boundaries, showing how Black and Latinx communities have continually influenced one another's fights for liberation. From slavery and abolition to labor movements, immigration, and contemporary activism, the book challenges the idea that American history can be understood through a single narrative.
What makes this such a strong introductory read is the way it encourages readers to see history as interconnected. The fight for racial justice, workers' rights, sovereignty, and equality doesn't happen in isolation. Different communities have built solidarity, shared strategies, and learned from one another across generations.
Class discussion: What changes when we stop teaching U.S. history as a collection of separate stories and start looking at the connections between them?
Week 2: Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
Part memoir, part cultural criticism, and part examination of race and identity, Hong's collection explores what it means to navigate American life as an Asian American. Through personal experiences, cultural analysis, and reflections on art and history, she examines the complicated emotions that can emerge from living between cultural expectations and American ideas about race.
The concept of “minor feelings” is central to the book. Hong examines the ways racialized experiences can create feelings that are difficult to articulate: shame, anger, alienation, frustration, and the sense that your experiences are somehow being minimized or misunderstood.
The result is an intellectually engaging collection that asks readers to question the assumptions surrounding the so-called “model minority” myth and the ways Asian Americans have been positioned within the American racial hierarchy.
For our imaginary syllabus, this would be the week where everyone leaves class with a lot to think about. Because sometimes understanding identity means sitting with the uncomfortable feelings we don't always know how to name.
Class discussion: Who gets to define what an “American” experience looks like?
Week 3: How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the
Combahee River Collective
For our final week, we're reading How We Get Free, edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.
The book centers on the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black feminists whose groundbreaking work in the 1970s helped shape Black feminist thought and articulated connections between race, gender, class, and sexuality.
Taylor brings together essays and interviews with members of the Collective alongside reflections from contemporary activists. The result is a conversation across generations about liberation, organizing, and the continued relevance of Black feminist politics.
One of the most important ideas throughout the book is that liberation can't be understood by looking at a single form of oppression in isolation. The experiences of Black women, particularly those navigating multiple forms of marginalization, reveal how systems of power overlap and reinforce one another.
For an introductory course, How We Get Free would be essential reading because it gives students the opportunity to engage directly with the ideas behind movements for collective liberation, and to consider how those ideas continue to shape activism today.
Class discussion: What does liberation look like when we consider the needs and experiences of the most marginalized?
Final Exam: Read Beyond the Canon
If these three books were on our syllabus, the final assignment would be simple: keep reading.
There is no single book that can teach us everything about race, identity, history, or liberation. These three titles offer different perspectives, communities, and frameworks, but together they encourage readers to question whose histories are centered, how identities intersect, and what becomes possible when we make room for voices that have traditionally been pushed to the margins.
So as you head back to school, or simply back into your regular fall reading routine, consider adding a little Xolo Books to your curriculum.
Class dismissed! Don't forget your reading.
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