A review by molliesafran
Everything I Learned About Racism I Learned in School by Tiffany Jewell

informative

3.5

I felt confused about the writing. A lot of the sentence structure and descriptive word choices are simple. I thought this was because it is for a juvenile audience, but then words like disproportionate will be used without definition. I think I’ve realized that the author was going for a conversational tone, which isn’t my preference in memoir. The structure of the book is also confusing. It is more a series of essays than anything else, and it progresses through the author’s experiences in school, kinda? For example, there is a chapter which starts with a story of her and her classmates being searched for weapons in high school which then turns into an info dump about student’s privacy rights. The next chapter then drops the notion of personal story and starts off by describing Tinker v Des Moines and then just lists like 30 things students have rights to. I understand both chapters are related in that they are both about student rights, but it’s a good example of how clunky and preachy a lot of the writing comes off.
I appreciated the depth of research woven in with the memoir, but I feel like traditional nonfiction is a bigger strength for Jewell than memoir-writing.
I’m not aware of another nonfiction book written for a Young Adult audience specifically about systematic racism in schools, so I appreciate that this book fills that gap.