Listen, Learn, and Take Action

I know this isn't like most my other books, and I realize this might be uncomfortable for some, but that means you are being challenged. This review will, of course, be different than my others and be a true reflection of the impact this book had on me. With a lot of the books I read, I have the ability to turn my brain off and just read while not looking in at my own biases (not always though. Get a Life, Chloe Brownis a wonderful example of a time I could not do this.) This was not one of those books. I went into this book very intentionally, which is part of the reason it took me so long to get through. I wanted to bet sure that as I read I was being critical, especially of myself. I wanted to be sure that I was not just glossing over the words on the page, but truly absorbing them.

I saw this book over a year ago and bought it upwards of six months ago. I needed to be sure I was in a place I could receive this criticism and take it and reflect on it rather than be defensive. Over the past three to four years, I have worked on myself and my internal biases as much as I could as they reared their ugly heads. This was a case of me being scared to be called out.

Despite this fear, once I dove into this book, I found myself being receptive to Kendall rather than pushing back or digging in my heals as I thought I would. There were a few points in the book where I had to hit pause and stop to reflect on the way I saw things. I found myself asking, "But why would something like this continue to happen?" and ignoring my own brain when it screamed that while it doesn't happen to me, that doesn't mean it can't be happening to anyone.

Kendall does a good job of making her points easily digestible for women like me who come from my own privilege and only recently started recognizing it. One of my favorite points Kendall states toward the end of the book was that by sharing her experiences, we are able to see her with more humanity, but not Black people as a whole and that is something I experienced up until a few years ago. I was bad about crying over injustices I heard of, and yet was still a hardcore Trump supporter well into my senior year of high school. I'm not sure what it took for me to start seeing Black people's experiences as a whole rather than singular interactions that happened to them. I do remember heavilyarguing with a friend over the unjust persecution of Cyntoia Brown. I remember vehemently defending her, citing the fact that if she had been a white girl instead, no one would even bat an eye and we would not be remotely having this discussion because she never would have been arrested. 

So at some point, my views obviously changed. And yet, there is still room for me to learn, as I saw with this book. And there always will be room to learn because I will never understand what it's like to be a Black woman, so I need to learn to be the best ally I can.