47 pages • 1 hour read
Tiffany JewellThis Book Is Anti-Racist: 20 Lessons on How to Wake Up, Take Action, and Do the Work
Nonfiction | Book | Middle Grade | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Ideological Context: Anti-Racist Literature
Literature, both fiction and non-fiction, is one of many ways for activists to teach others about the importance of anti-racism. Books can raise awareness of historical and contemporary realities of racism around the world. They can explain complex ideas, like the development of racial categories as social constructs, in straightforward terms. Many anti-racist texts provide concrete, actionable strategies for people to work toward dismantling personal and institutional racism. Anti-racist books can be written for any audience; some are aimed at people of color, some are aimed at white people, and some are aimed at certain age groups, like adults, teenagers, or children. This Book Is Anti-Racist is written for young people, but it is not written specifically for people of color or for white people. Instead, it focuses on how anti-racism can help everyone and how all people can become anti-racist activists. It is an introductory text that aims to explain the most important concepts in anti-racist discourse and activism in straightforward terms.
Some anti-racist books focus on the experiences of a particular group of people, like An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, which centers Indigenous perspectives in American history. The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward E. Baptist uses historical data to examine the connection between American enslavement of Black people and the creation of modern capitalism. Some older texts, like Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by abolitionist Frederick Douglass were written at a time when racism looked different in the United States; these older texts are still relevant and worth reading today. They show how racism has changed over time and how it ultimately took the form that many people will recognize today. While This Book Is Anti-Racist is a starting point for younger readers who might not be familiar with anti-racism, it is just one of many books that can help people understand how racism works and how they can help dismantle it through anti-racist activism.
Socio-Historical Context: Racism and the Construction of Race
Tiffany Jewell explains in This Book Is Anti-Racist that race is not something inherent to people, but rather a socially constructed set of categories. People are assigned to different races on the basis of appearance (physical traits like skin color, facial features, and hair texture), and also on the basis of their family background and history. When Jewell says that race is socially constructed, she does not mean that people do not have these different physical features. She means that ascribing social meaning to those differences and creating categories for people based on their appearance and background is a social construction that is not inherent to human societies. The idea that there is a hierarchy among racial groups and that people considered to be white are superior to people in other racial categories is also a social construction with no basis in reality. Racism preceded the concept of race, not the other way around. For several centuries, racism has been one way for the dominant culture to maintain power over the subordinate culture. Jewell talks about how European scientists “created a hierarchy of humans, which placed Europeans with the lightest skin at the top” (38), in order to justify racial discrimination, slavery, and colonization, and to institutionalize the power that white people wielded over people of color.
Jewell also mentions that for some people (like Jewell herself), racial categories can be fluid. Jewell describes herself as a Black biracial woman, but throughout her life, some people have read her as Black, some as white, and some have been unsure how to place her. A great way to understand race as a social construct is to look at Jewell’s experiences. Some people whose race is ambiguous may sometimes gain the privileges associated with whiteness and sometimes lose them, depending on how they are perceived. The groups of people who hold the most power in society construct racial categories to uphold and reinforce that power.
Jewell says that “the term ‘white’ includes people with ancestors from Europe, in particular, Northern Europe. They have the least amount of pigmentation” (39). While this is, broadly speaking, true in countries like America today, it has not always been the case. For example, in many parts of Europe and in many historical periods (including but not limited to Nazi Germany), Jewish people were not considered white, even if they had very light skin and European ancestry. Racism is about upholding power, so racial categories can change to serve the specific goals of whoever is in power in a given place and time. A single individual might find that how their race is perceived or categorized differs depending on who they are interacting with, what they are wearing, which country they are in, which language they are speaking, and even how they behave.
