Reviews with content warning for Hate crime - How to Be an Antiracist

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Reviews tagging 'Hate crime'

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

27 reviews

tiernanhunter's review against another edition

5.0

challenging hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

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emflipspages's review against another edition

5.0

challenging hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

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alyssa_s10's review against another edition

5.0

challenging informative medium-paced

I read this book as part of the ABC book challenge. I am glad I picked this one. It is a must read and I couldn't put it down. I love how he frames his talking points and his thesis.

I liked the ending allegory of racism to cancer.

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anniereads221's review against another edition

5.0

challenging emotional informative sad

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brookey8888's review against another edition

4.0

challenging dark hopeful informative inspiring reflective slow-paced

I found this very interesting and thought provoking. I learned a lot. That being said I don’t know if I fully agree with some of the things mentioned. I am a white person and I don’t think you can be fully racist towards white people(obviously you can be hateful and mean), but I do think that will turn people off from reading this book because people don’t believe that. I do think it was interesting and I understand why he said that. Know this isn’t really a how to guide on how to be anti racist, it’s more of a here’s things that are racist and then what is considered anti racist. So if you listen to that you will learn how to be more anti racist. I do recommend this because I did learn a lot and I think it would benefit people to read this.

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rickjones's review against another edition

4.0

hopeful informative reflective tense

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bluejayreads's review against another edition

5.0

challenging informative

This book is intense and absolutely bursting with ideas about racism and anti-racism that I’ve never heard before.

In many ways it feels like a topical memoir, as the ideas contained are illustrated and expanded through the author’s life in a mostly-chronological order. Mr. Kendi discusses his struggles with external, systemic, and internalized racism, and to a lesser degree homophobia and sexism, and now reckoning with those forces led to these ideas.

This book heavily emphasizes definitions, with each topical chapter opening with a definition of a term. At first I thought that was kind of silly, because of course I know what racism is, otherwise why would I have picked up this book? But Mr. Kendi uses these definitions – and he defines these words much differently than I would have, and for good reasons which he explains – to tackle everything from intersectionality to the idea that Black people can’t be racist. The ideas he presents are radically different from most of what I’ve heard about race and racism, and the difference is eye-opening. He makes it clear why most movements against racism today have accomplished little to nothing.

In the early hours of reading this book, I was afraid this would have to go in my “the title promised me actionable things to do but it lied to me” pile, as it was focusing more on explaining what racism and anti-racism were more than how to be an anti-racist. But it gets there. Mr. Kendi wants to make sure we’re on the same page concerning the ideas he’s presenting, but once he’s sure of that he digs into the practical, actionable stuff. And don’t think you can skip over the first sections and go straight to the practical stuff, because the actionable items won’t make half as much sense if you don’t have the context built up in the earlier parts of the book.

This book is amazingly valuable. The perspectives on racism and anti-racism are much different than mainstream ideas about race and racial activism (or at least way different from the twenty-teens Tumblr social justice ideas where I was introduced to these things). I feel like my mind has been expanded, and of course I always appreciate actionable steps. This book and the radical ideas inside are absolutely worth reading.

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starlight63's review against another edition

5.0

informative inspiring reflective slow-paced

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jojo_'s review against another edition

4.5

informative medium-paced

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leah_alexandra's review against another edition

3.5

emotional informative reflective fast-paced

This book was fine. I would say it's definitely on the introductory level in terms of books about racism/American racism, but lots of people are looking for that, and all power to them! This book is best appreciated as Kendi's internal examinations of his own journey grappling with the pervasiveness of racism and its intersections with other kinds of identity-based oppression as opposed to a guidebook for other people. There are two substantive points he makes that I take issue with: I think the chapter discussing racism within non-white groups has a misplaced assumption when it critiques the idea that "Black people can't be racist." It delves into the ways that Black folks (and other non-white folks) can perpetuate anti-Black racism through thoughts and actions, which certainly is a thing that happens. But I feel like that statement is better understood as people saying that POC cannot perpetuate racism against white people, not other POCs, because of how the power dynamics are structured. So I think that argument was a bit disingenuous. I also have been learning from folks in disability activism who critique the comparisons of racism to cancer or other diseases. I understand that Kendi was and is facing cancer in very personal ways, but the analogy of an illness that was not imposed by choice to a societal problem that very much was has its limitations. People do not choose to give others cancer (although there's an argument that racist and classist policies actually have given people cancer or higher rates) but many people make the choice every day to uphold racism.

Small nit-pick: the definitions that introduce each chapter were a bit too schtick-y for me, and I thought they actually were a bit alienating.

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