Reviews with content warning for Cancer - Como ser Antirracista

This is an important book, with themes and ideas that more people should read. However, I think its message may be harmed by the impression that this is more of a how-to book than it is. Yes, there are ideas of things we can do to become more anti-racist, things that we can do to try to create a more anti-racist society. And there is a lot of focus given to defining racism vs. anti-racism, which is very important. However, at its heart, this book read to me more like either a textbook or a memoir than anything else, and as such there were times I found myself floundering, not sure whether I was reading the book I thought I had picked up.

TL;DR: this is definitely worth reading, and I do recommend it. But know what type of book you're picking up before you start reading.

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emsim's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative reflective slow-paced

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daydreamermoonwalker's review against another edition

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informative reflective slow-paced

5.0

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moosegurl's review against another edition

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challenging informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

{l listened to the audiobook, so any mistakes in stylistic choices or punctuation are mine. Emphasis also mine.}

"Maybe, if I'd read history then, I'd have learned about the historical significance of the new town my family had moved to from New York City in 1997. I would have learned about all those Confederate memorials surrounding me in Manassas, Virginia, like Robert E. Lee's dead army. I would have learned why so many tourists trek to Manassas National Battlefield Park to relive the glory of Confederate victories at the battles of Bull Run during the Civil War. It was there that General Thomas J. Jackson acquired his nickname "Stonewall," for his stubborn defense of the Confederacy. Northern Virginians kept the Stonewall intact after all these years - did anyone notice the irony? That at this Martin Luther King Jr. Oratorical Contest, my free black life represented Stonewall Jackson High School?"

"Skinner shared how we came to worship an elite white Jesus Christ who cleaned people up through rules and regulations, a savior who prefigured Richard Nixon's vision of law and order. But one day, Skinner realized that he'd gotten Jesus wrong. Jesus wasn't in the Rotary Club, and he wasn't a policeman. Jesus was a radical revolutionary with hair on his chest and dirt under his fingernails. Skinner's new idea of Jesus was worn of and committed to a new reading of the Gospel. Any Gospel that does not speak to the issue of enslavement and injustice and inequality--any Gospel that does not want to go where people are hungry and poverty-stricken and set them free in the name of Jesus Christ--is not the Gospel."

"Assimilationists believe in the postracial myth that talking about race constitutes racism, or that if we stop identifying by race, then racism will miraculously go away. They fail to realize that if we stop using racial categories, then we will not be able to identify racial inequity. If we cannot identify racial inequity, then we will not be able to identify racist policies. If we cannot identify racist policies, then we cannot challenge racist policies. If we cannot challenge racist policies, then racist powers' Final Solution will be achieved: a world of inequity none of us can see, let alone resist. Terminating racial categories is potentially the last, not the first, step in the antiracist struggle."

"I recoiled in fear for days after the election. But not some of my peers at FAMU. They amassed the courage I did not have, that all antiracists must have. Courage is not the absence of fear but the strength to do what is right in the face of it, as the anonymous philosopher tells us. Some of us are restrained by fear of what could happen to us if we resist. In our naivety, we are less fearful of what could happen to us, or is already happening to us, if we don't resist."

"Americans lost trillions during the Great Recession, which was largely triggered by financial crimes of staggering enormity. Estimated losses from white-collar crimes are believed to be between $300 and $600 billion dollars per year, according to the FBI. By comparison, near the height of violent crime in 1995, the FBI reported the combined cost of burglary and robbery to be $4 billion dollars. Racist Americans stigmatize entire black neighborhoods as places of homicide and mortal violence, but don't similarly connect white neighborhoods to the disproportionate number of white males who engage in mass shootings, and they don't even see the daily violence that unfolds on the highways that deliver mostly white suburbanites to their homes."

"The opposite of the gender-racism of the unvirtuous, hypersexual black woman is the virtuous, asexual white woman, a racial construct that has constrained and controlled the white woman sexuality as it nakedly tainted the black woman's sexuality as 'unrapable.' White male interest in lynching black male rapists of white women was as much about controlling the sexuality of white women as it was the sexuality of black men."

"We arrive at demonstrations excited, as if our favorite musician is playing on the speaker stage. We convince ourselves we are doing something to solve the racial problem, when we are really doing something to satisfy our feelings. We go home fulfilled, like we dined at our favorite restaurant, and this fulfillment is fleeting, like a drug high. The problems of inequity and injustice persist. They persistently make us feel bad and guilty. We persistently do something to make ourselves feel better, as we convince ourselves we are making society better, as we never make society better."

"... when in fact if all my words were doing were sounding radical, then those words were not radical at all. What if we measure the radicalism of speech by how radically it transforms open-minded people, by how the speech liberates the anti-racist power within? What if we measure the conservatism of speech by home intensely it keeps people the same, keeps people enslaved by their racist ideas and fears, conserving the inequitable society?"

"I had been thinking all week about denial. Before the diagnosis, after the diagnosis, I still could not separate racism and cancer. I sat in the waiting rooms between medical meetings, tests, and procedures, writing an essay arguing that the heartbeat of racism is denial. The heartbeat of anti-racism is confession."

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gagne's review against another edition

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hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

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frillyflutee's review against another edition

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challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

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allisoncc's review against another edition

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challenging informative inspiring medium-paced

5.0

I cannot recommend this book enough. Kendi's writing style makes difficult topics easy access, despite calling everyone from you, himself, his own Momma, to Obama out (not to mention the more obvious offenders).

Each chapter starts with memoir portion of Kendi's own life to explain the topic at hand. He explains how his own racist ideas have impacted his life, and then goes on to explain the ideas from a more academic stand point, backing it up with historical and modern references. There's pages and pages and pages of footnotes at the end (the read is not the 350 page read labeled here because of it). I truly appreciated the honesty in Kendi's work, and that despite the fact that "Racist" has become a slur, if we are not actively working on dismantling racism, being anti-racist, Kendi argues, we are therefore signing off on the status quo, which, you guessed it, is racist. His ideas are not agreed upon by every leader and activist in these spaces, but I think as Kendi continues his research and work we'll come round.

Each chapter is relatively small, but I found myself reading only one and then sitting on it for a few days. While many many chapters were important and noteworthy, I want to especially highlight the chapter on Class. Kendi's imagery of racism and capitalism being conjoined twins really hit home. Capitalism, in the US, was founded on the backs of slaves, how could they not be connected? Our economic systems need far more work to make them equitable for all people than just the removal of slave labor and one could argue that the minimum wage not being a livable wage just simply continues slave labor in a different outfit.

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