Thank you to netgalley for this advance review copy. (For reference I read this during Covid 19 lockdown)

The formatting of this book - definition, historical context and autobiographical context made it compelling and easy to digest. I appreciated the Intersectionality of the book.

With protests over George Floyd taking place as I type, this book could hardly be more timely. Kendi's intervention into current race debates is to expose any assumed position of neutrality as subterfuge: there is and can be no position of 'non-racist', 'colour-blind', 'post-racial', he argues: the only viable opposition to racism is to be actively and consciously antiracist.

What makes this such a strong book is that it is also a confession: Kendi's antiracist stance is hard-won and actively striven for. Part memoir, he discusses his own upbringing and indifferent schooldays when he internalised anti-black racism, when he grew up imbibing sexist and homophobic ideologies, and recounts with honesty his struggles at university to free himself from his own prejudices. It's this humility combined with a scholar's critical intelligence (his PhD was in African-American studies) that give this book its heft.

While it is based on primarily the particularities of America's history of race based on chattel slavery (and Kendi is himself the descendant of slaves), this is a book which speaks to other geographies and also other -isms - many of the arguments could be applied to sexism, for example, to offer another strand to activism. Kendi is also attentive to intersectionality which, he generously admits, came to him relatively late as a doctoral student.

There may be some simplicities of analysis at times, but Kendi is a charismatic writer: an inspiring and hopeful book based on honesty and intelligence.