ACADEMIC WRITING
How Do We Listen to the Dead?
“Her tragic death marks the end of the story of a pretty small town girl who usually only in books goes to a big city and returns a corpse.”
“Protect Black women and girls while we are living,” we cry. Not some of us: those who you may find attractive, those who ascribe to god’s beauty, educational, career, and family standards. Protect all of us—trans, disabled, abused, unloved, poor, loud, unruly, fat, sassy, ordinary, magical and nonmagical—from police, sexual, domestic, and other forms of violence. A movement, inside and outside of the academy, that does not address our conditions while we are living will never be liberatory.
Taking up residence on antiracist reading lists everywhere, How to Be an Antiracist professes to bring new insights on the systemic power of race and racism. At first glance, it would appear that Kendi’s book may lay out some instructions on the process of becoming anti-racist, but in actuality, the reader encounters a quasi-historical and autobiographical work with very little proscription for antiracist actions.