From my perspective, Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist, pairs well with White Fragility (you can see my review here).
In How to Be an Anti-Racist, Kendi addresses 16 spaces and concepts where everyone has one of three views: racist, segregationist, and anti-racist. The book endorses practical ways to identify racist and segregationist thinking, as well as what it looks like to be anti-racist in that specific space and concept.
In all honesty, the title How to Be an Anti-Racist is exactly what this book details: the detailed HOW to the question of what do Anti-Racist people do in the areas of culture, power, biology, or success (to name a few).
In my experience, the most powerful chapter of the book was on behavior (chapter 8). Chapter 8 explored what has happened historically in the United States as well as how people’s behaviors are interpreted differently (racially). Kendi focuses on how people are judged based on their skin as opposed to relationships to interpret or contextualize their actions.
How to Be an Anti-Racist also provided language to the complexities of systemic racism as well as how descriptors are compounded to further define that person. In an Anti-Racist view is then set to see people as layered persons with experiences as valid and not descriptors. So in terms of education, race, gender, religion, financial status all these are layers to the human experience not descriptors to pigeon hole someone into. I think that if you are getting started with the race conversation, this is a great book to start out reading.
I think that if you have read a few other books in this topic space, that you will benefit from Kendi’s direct, kind and enlightening language to describe and identify racism.
I would also encourage anyone to take on Kendi’s process of exploring racism as it models many of the pieces of self-exploration, kindness, and non-judgmental attitudes we endorse in counseling. As White Fragility posed the reframe: it is not about if we are racist, it is about exploring to what degree we are being racist, Kendi also endorses this thinking and reveals details from his life where he sees himself as being anti-racist as well as racist at different times.
"when we believe that a racial group's seeming success or failure redounds to each of its individual members, we've accepted a racist idea. Likewise, when we believe that an individual's seeming success or failure redounds to an entire group, we've accepted a racist idea… individual stories are only proof of the behavior of individuals” (Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Anti-Racist, p.95-96).
Here is the link to get a physical copy of How to Be an Anti-Racist on Amazon.
Here is the link to get a digital version of How to Be an Anti-Racist on Kindle.
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