This Book Is Anti-Racist: 20 Lessons on How to Wake Up, Take Action, and Do the Work

by Tiffany Jewell

wrote these words for you while carrying a heavy heart. It aches for Emmett Till, Tamir Rice, Korryn Gaines, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Bobby Hutton, Antwon Rose Jr., Stephon Clark, Rekia Boyd, Stephen Lawrence, Charleena Lyles, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and Trayvon Martin, and for all those who we honor with hashtags, our tears, our frustration and rage, our exhaustion and the fire to move on.

YOU ARE EVERYTHING WITHIN YOU AND EVERYTHING THAT SURROUNDS YOU.

Female, cis female

daughter

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in Between the World and Me: “BUT RACE IS THE CHILD OF RACISM, NOT THE FATHER.”

Racism is personal prejudice and bias AND the systemic misuse and abuse of power by institutions.

RACISM IS PERSONAL PREJUDICE AND BIAS AND THE SYSTEMIC MISUSE AND ABUSE OF POWER BY INSTITUTIONS

Everyone has prejudices or biases. These are our judgments: the things we discriminate against. Some of our prejudices are conscious and some are not. They are things we’ve learned and assumed from everything around us. This includes the stereotypes we’ve witnessed. Whether you are in the dominant culture or not also contributes to your prejudices. We begin to form prejudices when we are two years old.5 Our biases are absorbed, we take them in, and they become a part of our belief system. But they can change.

We have been conditioned to the bias of whiteness. We can undo this. People play a big role in keeping racism going. If we do not work to recognize our prejudices, we remain a part of the problem. When we become aware of our biases and our role in racism, then we can begin to understand how we are a part of a system that is much bigger than us.

When you only read one account of history through a single lens, you do not have the whole truth.

Because of that we, like many students in the United States, believed Native Americans only existed in history.

stories of resistance and accomplishments are purposefully left out of our history books or told from the perspective of those in the dominant culture, we have no voice. No one knows who we are and that we exist. The legacy we are left with is one that has been shaped by the oppressors.

Remember: institutions rely on people to maintain or change racism.

My history begins before me. It begins before the stories I know and the ones I long to know. My history begins hundreds and hundreds of years ago… and so does yours.

The results of the Macpherson Report led to over 70 recommendations on how to have “zero tolerance” for racism. Some of the suggestions were to change laws, improve the attitudes of the mostly white police force, and recruit and retain police that represent the population of folx they serve.

“TRANSFORM YOURSELF FIRST… BECAUSE YOU ARE YOUNG AND HAVE DREAMS AND WANT TO DO SOMETHING MEANINGFUL, THAT IN ITSELF, MAKES YOU OUR FUTURE AND OUR HOPE.”

Today, those of us who were born after the Loving case can call ourselves the “Loving Generation.” I much prefer this to being called mixed. I am able to not only honor Mildred and Richard Loving when I refer to myself as a person of the Loving generation, I am also able to center love within my identity.

If you do nothing, everything stays the same.

COMFORT WILL NOT END RACISM.

Remember, racism is personal prejudice AND the systemic misuse and abuse of power by institutions. So, I can have a prejudice against white people, but there is no system that has been put in place for centuries to keep white people oppressed.

“BY NOT ALLOWING YOURSELF TO SEE SOMEONE’S RACE, YOU ARE NOT SEEING THEM AS A WHOLE PERSON. YOU ARE LOOKING AT THEM THROUGH A SKEWED LENS. YOU SEE THEM ONLY HOW YOU WANT TO SEE THEM. YOU ARE LOOKING AT THEM THROUGH YOUR LENS OF COMFORT. YOU ARE NOT SEEING YOUR STUDENTS AND THEIR FAMILIES HOW THEY WANT TO AND NEED TO BE SEEN.”

You can address their claim of not being racist with the quote from political activist, scholar, and author Angela Davis: “In a racist society, it’s not enough to be nonracist, we must be anti-racist.”