Thank you to NetGalley and Sourcebooks Kids for an ARC of this book. All opinions in this review are my own.
I have been doing my absolute best to read more books that are about systemic issues like white supremacy and sexism, as well as discussing LGBTQIA+ acceptance/understanding. I have found that I am drawn to reading ones that are geared towards “kids” or at least young adults, and while by conventional standards I am very much an adult (whatever that means), I find that these are the books that are able to give me all of the same information while not triggering any of my personal trauma. I am fully of the belief that you do not need to harm yourself just to improve yourself, and these are deep issues. You cannot help others if you cannot help yourself, and (re)traumatizing yourself in the sake of allyship feels wrong to me. But I digress. While there are clearly aspects of the book that are applicable to a 9-year-old and not a 29-year-old, the primary core of the messages still shine through. As I have been taking classes to work in mental health & advocacy, reading these books is more important than ever.
That being said, this book is one of the best books to tackle what white supremacy is, and how it manifests in all of its different facets (tone policing, white fragility, white feminism, etc.) that I have read yet. This book managed to take these huge concepts and break them down into chapter sized chunks, with recalling and reflection sections, and still managed to identify that the differences between a BIPOC child and a white child in even reading this book will be different. This book doesn’t pull punches with all of the spaces white supremacy can infiltrate unaware, but it doesn’t do it in a way that would make someone shut down – which is important when you are trying to discuss these types of topics with groups that get defensive immediately (i.e. white men when confronted with any version of the pay gap).
Here are some of the quotes I highlighted:
Fighting anti-Blackness is fighting white supremacy.
Prejudice + Power = Racism
Accountability is about what we do, not who we are.
I also really appreciated how LGBTQIA+ was broken down, as I have always seen the + just kind of brushed off as everything else not listed. This explains LGBTQIA+ as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual, pansexual, two-spirit. I know that this is always growing and changing but this was a nice way to see it written.
So much of this book was amazing, that there is only one criticism I have and I want to call it out, because I feel like it is an important thing to address in all of the books that are discussing issues like this – especially when geared for children. Layla does an amazing job breaking down the differences between race, ethnicity, and nationality – hard concepts for people of any age to understand the nuances of – but there is one problem with her examples, she put Jewish under ethnicity. Judaism is a religion and has culture/history surrounding it – and under the definition of ethnicity she gives (a grouping of humans based on shared social traits such as language, ancestry, history, place of origin, or culture), Judaism would fit this. However, I am always concerned when Judaism is closely quantified with things that are genetic/biological as it is not of the same caliber. I could write an entire essay about the slippery slope of a religion being tied to genetic factors, comparing it to how the Nazis were able to kill millions of people and how neo-Nazi’s can still thrive now, but that is not the point of this book. This was an offhand comment in the book, but it stuck with me, and if I learned anything from the book it was to speak out if something bothers you. This is not a new thing for me to see/read and I don’t think it is going to change any time soon, but it definitely will not change if no one speaks out against it.
This is not something that will be ending soon. We will have constant work to do. But as long as Layla, and others like her, continue to write such powerful moving books (because I know I couldn’t do it), maybe we can start to make a change. 4.75/5