How to Be an Antiracist is a hard book to read, really in two different ways.

For the first, we live in a deeply screwed up world, where people (white, black, and everything else) are people, for better or for worse. People are racist, both patently and obviously and subconsciously. And it’s not enough to just ignore it and be ‘colorblind’, you have to be actively anti-racist. Thus the title on the book. There are a pile of fascinating thoughts in here and ideas for how to be better.

On the other hand, man is it a dense read. The author really does seem to love words and takes rather a while to make a point. There are quite a number of personal stories from their life, but it takes time to figure out how they necessarily rate to the given topic of the time.

Either way, it’s worth a read.