This is baby white liberals first insight into racial inequality. It screamed that white liberals were the audience, but the “white” chapter screamed it the loudest. I think it could be a supplemental read to other anti-racist works like White Fragility and it’s a good intro to intersectionality but I would never recommend it by itself. I think Kendi’s analysis was only surface deep and it felt like topics such as “anti-white racism” weren’t handled properly. 

I think he had a limited view point and didn’t recognize WHY Black Americans would have prejudice against white people, or when he brought up Black govt officials assisting racist white officials, his main focus was basic abuse of power rather than the power found within white supremacy, upholding white supremacy and weaponizing it against other marginalized groups.

I did like that his language was accessible to non academic understanding, I liked his definition of racism as a marriage between racist policy and racist ideas, I enjoyed his anecdotes and I liked that he included intersectionality. 

I just wish he took racism in America more than surface deep analysis. I hated his analysis of the Latine community and how he defined it as a race rather than ethnicity, effectively leaving Afro Latine people out of conversations of the victims of racism and the way white Latine people uphold white supremacy. I also dont think that prejudice and racism are interchangeable because the systems of oppression lasting centuries will never be equal to having a few negative ideas about white people. I wish I had gained more from reading this, but I think if you go in thinking it’ll be “how Dr. Kendi unlearned internalized racism” it’s a much better book.