10 Self-Help Books Not Written by Middle-Class White Cis Men
The roots of self-help are in the struggle for social justice
Self-help can’t be one-size-fits-all advice. It must take personal and social context into account.
That’s why it matters who wrote the self-help book you picked. Their context will dictate whether they understand yours.
The problem is, the self-help industry today looks like its monopolized by authors of one narrow demographic. Take a look at my Google search results for ”top self help gurus.”
Nine out of nine top results are men. Only one of them isn’t white. This means that the bottom line of self-help industry is built on a limited perspective, not a diverse mix of voices.
It’s easy to assume it’s always been this way. But if you look beneath the surface, you’ll discover that self-help originated outside the bubble of white male privilege.
The Roots of Self-Help Are Not What You Think
In recent years, we’ve accepted that self-help is the domain of the privileged. Those we’ve read, listened to, and quoted often represented the same demographic: white, male-presenting, and with money.
But that’s not how self-help started. The origins of the genre are in the working class and social movements for civic rights.
Harvard professor Beth Bloom investigates the origins of self-help literature in her book The Self-Help Compulsion, where she traces it back to the 19th-century British anarchists and socialists. It’s understandable that we don’t see the connection. As Blum puts it, self-help today resembles more a “a force (…) that fosters privatized solutions to systemic problems.” But it hasn’t always been this way.
Jennifer Wilson writes in The Nation:
“Long before the publication of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and Abigail Van Buren’s “Dear Abby” columns, working people were reading manifestos like George Jacob Holyoake’s 1857 Self-Help by the People, which urged readers to acquire new skills so that they might be of better service to others.”
It seems that self-help wasn’t originally the hyper-individualistic venture it is today. Rather, it encouraged self-improvement for the sake of a better community and a better world.
Similarly, self-help fueled social activists during the civil rights movement. The Black Panther Party — a Black-led political organization founded in 1966 in California — is a one good example. Alongside challenging police brutality and advocating for class struggle, the BPP also left a legacy of wellness practices.
As Lenora E. Houseworth describes it:
“Trailblazers and former Black Panther leaders Angela Davis and Ericka Huggins adopted mindfulness techniques and movement arts like yoga and meditation while incarcerated. Following their release, they both began championing the power of proper nutrition and physical movement to preserve one’s mental health while navigating an inequitable, sociopolitical system (…).”
Self-help has been around for a while — and for a big chunk of that time, it wasn’t dominated by white middle-class men.
Today, we need to preserve diversity of voices in the self-help space. This diversity already exists — let’s bring it to the forefront with this list of books.
1. Rewriting the Rules by Meg-John Barker
Dr. Meg-John Barker describes themselves as “a queer therapeutic writer who supports folk in my communities around their creativity.” No longer practicing as a therapist, Barker puts their energy and talent into creating books, comics, and other resources that support self-exploration — especially around sexuality, gender, and relationships. Barker refers to their writing as “anti self-help,” suggesting that many human struggles have their source in the societal norms and structures — rather than in the individual.
Rewriting the Rules: An Anti Self-Help Guide to Love, Sex and Relationships is a great example of an “anti self-help” narrative. It challenges cultural messages around sex, love, and romantic relationships — and, offers guidance to exploring them on your own terms. Barker brings up topics such as non-monogamy, consent, communication, power dynamics, and self-care. In the end, they make it clear: we can all be in charge of our own relationship rules.
2. Self-Care for Black Women by Oludara Adeeyo
Spending a fair chunk of my time online, I notice Black women becoming more vocal about this: self-help advice coming from white men rarely works for them.
Oludara Adeeyo addresses this in Self-Help for Black Women: 150 Ways to Radically Accept & Prioritize Your Mind, Body, & Soul. As a clinical social worker, writer, and Black female influencer, she’s extremely aware of the repertoire of micro- and macro-aggressions Black women face in modern society. Adeeyo recognizes the impact of racial trauma on wellbeing and how radical it can feel to prioritize oneself as a Black woman.
In her book, she offers 150 exercises that will help Black, female-bodied people put themselves first when they need it the most. This includes mapping out feelings related to microaggressions, making a list of safe spaces, designing a full day dedicated to self-care — and more.
3. Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price, Ph.D.
Dr. Devon Price is a social psychologist, writer, and educator with a unique perspective on mental health and culture. As a transgender person on the autism spectrum, he’s experienced first-hand how society can limit non-conforming self-expression.
Laziness Does Not Exist originated as a viral Medium essay published in 2018. After enthusiastic responses, Price decided he had enough material to write a book. Its main point is to challenge the idea of laziness as a character trait, and explore underlying factors that contribute to behaviors labeled as “lazy.” He argues that what we easily write off as laziness is often an interplay of mental health, social pressure, systemic issues, and burnout.
In his own words, “if a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you, it is because you are missing a part of their context.”
4. Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey
When Tricia Hersey started The Nap Ministry, it was a radical move. She decided to honor her body’s need to rest, despite the demands that were piling up on her: studying and working at Emory University, doing an internship, and single-parenting her son. She found pockets of time to nap at school, on buses, and benches in between classes.
Today, Hersey talks about rest as sacred — and a form of resistance against hustle culture. Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto is her manifesto for a better future. She suggests the oppression of the 21st-century capitalism is rooted in the enslavement of Black bodies throughout American history. She calls upon her and other Black ancestors who stood up for their right to rest, and through them she connects to the “Dream Space” — the realm of possibility that opens when we’re well-rested.
5. Headcase edited by Stephanie Schroeder and Teresa Theophano
In the introduction to their book, Stephanie Schroeder and Teresa Theophano call themselves “out queer women living with what has been described as mental illness.” Schroeder works as a certified peer and housing specialist, while Theophano is a licensed clinical social worker.
Headcase: LGBTQ Writers & Artists on Mental Health is an anthology of essays, personal reflections, and stories told by those with non-conforming gender and sexual identities. They recount experiences from the intersection of mental wellness and LGBTQ+ identity in modern-day America. The contributors are writers, activists, educators, artists, students, and psychologists who navigate flawed healthcare system and the challenges it brings.
6. Queer Body Power by Essie Dennis
Essie Dennis is a social media influencer and writer who focuses on body positivity, queer social issues, and endometriosis awareness. In 2022, she got nominated as a Changemaker of the Year by the Blogosphere Magazine. She has a popular Instagram account where she challenges diet culture, mainstream beauty standards, and shares other empowering content.
Her 2022 debut, Queer Body Power: Finding Your Body Positivity, is a manifesto of someone who wants to feel good in their body without putting conditions on how it looks. Dennis spent years feeling inadequate — “too masculine to be non-binary (…) too feminine to be a lesbian.” In their book, they describe a personal journey to body acceptance that includes eating disorders, disability, and other challenges.
7. Trauma Stewardship by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky with Connie Burk
Laura van Dernoot Lipsky has been exposed to other people’s suffering a lot. At age 13 she lost her mother to lung cancer and at 18, she started volunteering at a homeless shelter. Later, she went on to work with survivors of trauma full-time. All these experiences led her to study the impact of secondary trauma on overall wellbeing.
Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others written with Connie Burk is an overview of her studies. The key topics she addresses involve compassion fatigue, secondary traumatic stress, and other implications of regularly holding space for the suffering of others.
The central concept of the book is “trauma stewardship,” which Lipsky understands as a profound responsibility and emotional toll at the same time. Her approach guides people in helping professions to transform their practice based on a new understanding of trauma.
8. Sisters of the Yam by bell hooks
Born Gloria Jean Watkins, bell hooks was a feminist Black American author, educator, and social critic. Her best-known writing and ideas revolved around the intersection of race, gender, and capitalism.
hooks described her own sexual identity as “queer-pas-gay” (meaning, queer not gay). In a 2014 panel discussion, she elaborated on what “queer” meant to her: “As the essence of queer, I think of Tim Dean’s work on being queer and queer not as being about who you’re having sex with — that can be a dimension of it — but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and it has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”
Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery is considered a classic in African American feminist literature. hooks takes a look at the emotional and mental health of Black women and how it’s impacted by systemic racism and sexism. The title draws on the metaphor of the yam — a nourishing root vegetable, the symbol of resilience and sustenance that Black women provide to their communities.
9. The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker
Priya Parker jokes that she was destined to be in the field of conflict and group facilitation. Born in Zimbabwe to an Indian mother and American father, she spent a fair chunk of her childhood and adolescence oscillating between two different worlds. As her parents divorced and remarried, she’d live between her “mother and stepfather’s Indian, liberal, vegetarian, meditating, Buddhist, Atheist (Agnostic on hopeful days), global household and travel the 1.4 miles to my father and stepmother’s white, American, Evangelical Christian, conservative, twice-a-week church-going, meat-eating, basketball-dribbling household.”
The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters is an aftermath of Parker’s upbringing and further professional experience. As a facilitator and mediator, she’s interested in how people gather and what purpose those gatherings serve. What makes good meetings good — and how to make more of them happen?
This book is a different kind of self-help — one that’s intentioned to improve not just yourself, but also the communities inside of which you operate.
10. Resistance and Hope edited by Alice Wong
Alice Wong is an extraordinary activist. She moves in a wheelchair and communicates through a text-to-speech device — and yet, her voice supports and encourages thousands of people around the world. As a founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project, her mission is to nurture “an online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture.”
Resistance and Hope: Essays by Disabled People she edited is an anthology of essays written by disabled individuals from diverse backgrounds. The contributors share their personal insights about living with different disabilities in the modern world. The collection aims to challenge ableism, dismantle stereotypes, and highlight the strength, resilience, and advocacy efforts of disabled people.
I hope these titles help you reconnect to what self-help was when it first started: a practical tool for social activists, civic leaders, and changemakers to support them in their efforts.
It’s time we remember that self-help isn’t just for the rich white men. It needs to be for everyone — and especially those who dedicate themselves to the struggle for a more just, equitable society.
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