Books on workforce equity
New business books from Mehrsa Baradaran, Maya Rupert and Lisa Nakamura are being spotlighted for practical guidance on workforce diversity and the racial wealth gap (journalrecord.com). Reviewers say these titles offer actionable steps for leaders aiming to diversify hiring and improve retention — timely reading for executives rebuilding culture (journalrecord.com).
Mehrsa Baradaran’s The Racial Wealth Gap: A Brief History was published by W. W. Norton on Feb. 3, 2026. (wwnorton.com) Baradaran traces policy decisions from Reconstruction through the subprime-mortgage era and makes an explicit case for reparations while highlighting that the median white household has roughly six times the wealth of the median Black household. (amazon.com) (wwnorton.com) Maya Rupert’s The Real Ones: How to Disrupt the Hidden Ways Racism Makes Us Less Authentic was released Feb. 10, 2026 by Dutton/Penguin Random House and is listed at 256 pages. (penguinrandomhouse.com) Rupert — a political strategist who is the third Black woman in U.S. history to run a presidential campaign and currently an executive vice president at Blue State — combines campaign memoir, pop-culture examples and workplace advice to argue that authenticity functions as a constrained privilege for people of color. (penguinrandomhouse.com) (mayarupert.com) Lisa Nakamura’s The Inattention Economy: Seeing the Digital Labor of Women of Color was published by the University of Minnesota Press on March 24, 2026, runs about 200 pages, and documents contributions from Navajo microchip workers to early social-media creators. (upress.umn.edu) (projectmuse.jhu.edu) Nakamura explicitly calls for both formal recognition and material compensation for the unpaid and uncredited digital labor of women of color, while reviewers have described Baradaran’s book as “infuriating and compelling” and Rupert’s debut as earning a “Rave” aggregate on BookMarks. (upress.umn.edu) (kirkusreviews.com) (bookmarks.reviews)
