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

In the Author’s Note, Tiffany Jewell outlines some of the terminology choices she has made when writing This Book Is Anti-Racist. She uses the term “folx” instead of “folks” as “it is a gender neutral term created by activist communities” (7). She also capitalizes the words “Black, Brown, Indigenous, People of Color, and Folx of the Global Majority” (7) in order to “center the voices and lives who have been marginalized, silenced, and purposefully left out of our history for so long” (7). Jewell hopes to inspire young readers to learn about the history and contemporary reality of racism around the world. She directly addresses the reader and invites them on a journey toward anti-racist activism.

In the first chapter, Jewell asks the reader to think about their identity. She defines identity as “everything within you and everything that surrounds you” (16) and argues that individuals get to decide how much of their identity they want to share with others. Jewell introduces the concept of the dominant culture, which is an “imaginary box” that includes people who are “white, upper middle class, cisgender male, educated, athletic, neurotypical, and/or” who don’t have a disability (20).