It is not possible to be anti-racist as a white person, without listening to, learning from, and accepting pain from a person of colour. Reading books that describe the experience of Africanized people does not come close to the experience of a lived life, but it is one of the things that I can do, to do the work of understanding what it feels like to not be the “expectation”. For example, in this book she discusses the role fiction authors have played in telling stories where whiteness is the assumption and blackness is the Other. If an other does not expressly say that a character has dark skin, or kinked hair, then the reader assumes that the character has a pale complexion.
As much as I love Toni Morrison’s fiction, her non-fiction work belongs to my list of lifelong learning. The work that it takes for a Métis (mixed First Nations) woman, with pale skin, green eyes and generically brown hair, to understand, is more than what can be found in a slim volume by a Nobel prize winning author, but as post of a curriculum, it is at least a start.
This book will be added to the As Seen On The Blog List in my Storefront!
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Kali J Desautels 
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