47 pages • 1 hour read
This Book Is Anti-Racist: 20 Lessons on How to Wake Up, Take Action, and Do the Work
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Key Figures
Tiffany Jewell (The Author)
Tiffany Jewell is a Black biracial American author. Her mother is white and an English immigrant to the United States; her father is Black. She has a twin sister, a husband, and two children. Jewell uses her own experience to inform her writing throughout This Book Is Anti-Racist. She often uses her own life as an example when explaining journal prompts, listing aspects of her own identity to inspire readers to create their own lists. She notes that like many people, some aspects of her identity afford her privilege (being cisgender and having light skin, for example), while others do not (being Black and biracial, being a woman, and so on).
Jewell has spent much of her career working as an educator for children and families, especially in Montessori schools. She specializes in anti-racist and anti-bias education, aiming to make these important concepts accessible to younger generations. Jewell makes frequent references to other anti-racist works rather than relying exclusively on her own experiences. She acknowledges that she is always learning, just like everyone else. This Book Is Anti-Racist is Jewell’s debut book. She has since published The Antiracist Kid (2022) and is slated to publish a new book, Everything I Learned About Racism I Learned in School, in 2024.
The Reader
This Book Is Anti-Racist often addresses its readers directly. Jewell says that her book is for everyone, emphasizing that “it is okay for you to continue on with this book and I am so proud of you for picking this up and opening these pages” (10). While anyone can read this book, the implied reader is a young person, probably around the age of 14. Jewell explicitly describes what she was like at 14 as a way to connect with readers. Jewell often encourages readers to examine their own lives, identities, families, and communities to learn where they fit in, how racism privileges or disadvantages them, and how they can help others.
The text is partly interactive, incorporating several journal prompts to help young readers integrate the text’s ideas into their own life. As Jewell notes, anti-racism is about action. The book itself is only a starting point; the successful reader will take what they have learned and make real changes in their own life and community to help dismantle both personal and institutional racism, ultimately making the world more equitable for everyone. Through this framing, Jewell makes the reader an instrumental part of the book itself. This is not a work of theory; it is explicitly participatory.
Tiffany’s Teacher
Jewell describes one of her elementary teachers, a woman who taught her when she was nine years old. This teacher was a white woman who taught a class where most students were people of color. The school did not have particularly good funding. The teacher’s sons attended a predominantly white school and got to go on lots of field trips, which the teacher would describe to Jewell and her classmates without any sensitivity to the fact that their school could not offer such events. This teacher was openly racist, and she used her authority in the classroom to make things more difficult for her students of color. Her “prejudice was overt […] she had power. It was easy to see, hear, and feel. We could name it” (70). Through her display of power, Jewell and her classmates were able to see that this teacher “didn’t like Black and Brown children” (70).
Jewell regrets not doing more to stand up to her teacher when she was a child, though she acknowledges that she was very young at the time. She imagines an alternate past where she was able to stand up to her teacher, and the teacher did face consequences for her racism. This teacher is an example of how personal racism can intersect with institutional racism, each upholding and bolstering the other. She is also the kind of person that readers of the book might one day need to stand up to. Jewell acknowledges that standing up to figures of authority is not always easy, but it is necessary if things are going to change.
Tiffany’s Parents
Like all people, Jewell has been strongly influenced by her parents and her upbringing. Her parents’ experiences form part of her history. Her mother is a white woman from England, and her father is a Black man from America. As a result, Jewell describes herself as a Black biracial woman and a first-generation American. She explains that some of her parents’ experiences were dictated to some extent by their respective races. For instance, her father was drafted into the Vietnam War, and “as a young Black man, he was not able to easily dodge the draft as some young white men were able to” (102).
Because one of Jewell’s parents is white, and because she has light skin, she was listed as white when she was in school. Jewell’s family structure connects her to specific parts of history. In particular, she refers to herself as a member of the “Loving Generation” (114), a reference to Richard and Mildred Loving. The Lovings were a couple who married in 1958. Richard was white, and Mildred was Black and Indigenous. They petitioned the Supreme Court to legalize interracial marriage across the country, and they won their case. This history is particularly important to Jewell because it directly affected her own family and is reflected in the legality of her parents’ relationship.
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