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

In these chapters, Jewell expands her look at racism to go beyond individual experiences and into collective ones. She readily acknowledges that Racism and Systemic Injustices are often personal, and there are many ways for people to be racist in their personal lives. However, racism is also a systemic force that affects people around the world. By examining historical examples of personal and systemic racism, Jewell clarifies how racism has left lasting marks of trauma among many people of color, even generations after a given system (like the transatlantic slave trade) stops existing.

By asking readers to examine their own family history, Jewell connects to the theme of Identity, Privilege, and Intersectionality. People’s contemporary identities are shaped by their family histories, including the choices that their ancestors made. A person whose family members have experienced racism for generations will carry forward their connection to that oppression in the modern day. A person whose family has long benefited from the privileges associated with whiteness (and other privileged positions like wealth) will likely maintain ties to that privilege in the modern day. 

While it is true that people and whole countries carry forward the negative legacies of racism, they also carry histories of Allyship, Activism, and Social Change. Some parts of a person’s history, like a family’s or country’s relationship to race and racism, may be a source of pain. At the same time, anyone can connect to the long history of activism in their families, communities, countries, and around the world. Jewell makes it clear that readers can choose to align themselves with activist movements; they are not required to continue to uphold historical and contemporary systems of racism and racist attitudes.

Jewell discusses many historical periods and countries in this section as she details the history of racism and activism. Unfortunately, some of the information that she provides is either inaccurate or misleading. For instance, in Chapter 7, Jewell lists some countries that formerly held colonial control over other parts of the world. She says that “Denmark controlled Greenland and parts of Ghana” (85) in one example. While it is true that Greenland officially stopped being a Danish colony in 1953, it remains an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark today. Nearly 90% of the population of Greenland is Inuit (“The Inuit in Greenland Are Surviving Rapid Change.” Borgen Magazine, 24 Oct. 2016). Putting Denmark’s control over Greenland into the past tense erases current efforts on the part of the Inuit of Greenland to obtain greater control over their lands and lives.

Jewell’s description of the residential school system in the United States contains several inaccuracies or at best lacks clarity. She states that residential schools in the United States “started in 1860” (90) but later says that these schools were the model for similar schools in Australia and New Zealand, even though those schools were opened “in 1814” (92), several decades earlier. The United States did begin establishing boarding schools for Indigenous people in a broad and systematic manner in 1860, but it was empowered by the Civilization Fund Act of 1819 (Pember, Mary Annette. “Death by Civilization.” The Atlantic, 8 March 2019). This Act, in turn, stemmed from an already burgeoning effort to pressure and eventually force tribal societies to adopt American cultural and social norms (Holm, Tom. The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs: Native Americans and Whites in the Progressive Era. University of Texas Press).

In the same section, Jewell says that “the United States government had 60 schools where over 6,000 Indigenous youth were subjected to ‘learning’ the ways of the white man” (90). Both of these numbers are inaccurate. Current research estimates that hundreds of thousands of Indigenous students were sent to these schools in the US, with some individual years seeing over 60,000 students enrolled. There were at least 357 residential schools in operation in the United States, most of which received government funding and were run by Christian churches (usually Catholic) (Mejia, Melissa. “The U.S. History of Native American Boarding Schools.” The Indigenous Foundation). These inaccuracies understate the profound, widespread, and lasting impact of the residential school system in the United States alone.

When she describes residential schools in Australia and New Zealand, Jewell notes that “the last residential schools were finally closed down in the 1980s” (92). While that date is accurate for Australia and New Zealand, it obscures some other important information. In the United States, although “in 1978 Native American families were finally granted the right to choose the type of education their children received” (92), off-reservation boarding schools for Indigenous children actually still exist today. Some of them have been criticized for failing to provide an education on the level expected by the federal government. In Canada, which also had an extensive residential school system that Jewell does not mention, the last school did not close until 1996 (“Apology.” The University of British Columbia, Vancouver Campus).

These schools forcibly removed young people from their homes and alienated them from their cultures, and Jewell notes that “food was withheld as punishment” (92) in these schools. However, she does not mention that in the United States and Canada, many students died at residential schools. Causes of death varied: many students died of disease because of poor living conditions. Some died of the results of abuse and malnutrition. To date, the United States has determined that at least 500 students died at residential schools (Brewer, Graham Lee. “U.S. Counts Indian Boarding School Deaths for First Time But Leaves Key Questions.” NBC News, 11 May 2022). In Canada, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation has so far found records of 4,118 student deaths, but that number is expected to climb with further investigation.