Thinking While Black is a book about the work and ideas of two celebrated and controversial writers who have invited and challenged their readers to do some deeper and fresher thinking about politics and popular culture. It pays particular attention to the prominent British intellectual Paul Gilroy, the notorious American journalist Armond White, and a political and cultural generation that came of age in the 1960s and ‘70s consuming rebel music, revolutionary film, and other forms of expressive culture created by world citizens and the descendants of enslaved individuals.  

To accompany a book about intellectually promiscuous writers, this reading list features ten books from multiple disciplines, periods and cultures. To supplement a dual biography or duography that places two critics in conversation with each other, it also acts as a matchmaker and forms the books into pairs.