I bounced between the ebook and the audiobook for this one. I'd mostly listen in the car, which means there were a lot of interesting tidbits that I didn't have a chance to highlight. Reading the book allowed me to use the highlighter and note-taking tools. 

I'll share a couple of things that caught my attention late in the book because they gave me pause and made me think. They challenged my conceptions of racism and/or activism. 

The quote:
Moral and educational suasion breathes the assumption that racist minds must be changed before racist policy, ignoring history that says otherwise. Look at the soaring White support for desegregated schools and neighborhoods decades after the policies changed in the 1950s and 1960s. Look at the soaring White support for interracial marriage decades after the policy changed in 1967. Look at the soaring support for Obamacare after its passage in 2010. Racist policymakers drum up fear of antiracist policies through racist ideas, knowing if the policies are implemented, the fears they circulate will not come to pass. Once the fears do not come to pass, people will let down their guards as they enjoy the benefits. Once they clearly benefit, most Americans will support and become the defenders of the antiracist policies they once feared.

My note on this section: 
This challenged my initial thoughts on the matter. I thought hearts had to be changed before policy, but he's right. More hearts were changed after policies were implemented than before. Hmmm.

That hmmm is me battling with myself and trying to let go of a fairly strongly held belief. To my mind, no one changes a policy unless they recognize the harm being perpetrated. Mind you, I still believe this might be true at an individual level for those people in a position that actually allows them to propose and pass policy changes. Yet, for the average person outside that power structure, it was the policy that made the changes more common and more acceptable, even if it took a generation or two for acceptance to become widespread. 

Here's another quote: 
We use the terms “protest” and “demonstration” interchangeably, at our own peril, like we interchangeably use the terms “mobilizing” and “organizing.” A protest is organizing people for a prolonged campaign that forces racist power to change a policy. A demonstration is mobilizing people momentarily to publicize a problem. Speakers and placards and posts at marches, rallies, petitions, and viral hashtags demonstrate the problem. Demonstrations are, not surprisingly, a favorite of suasionists. Demonstrations annoy power in the way children crying about something they will never get annoy parents. Unless power cannot economically or politically or professionally afford bad press—as power could not during the Cold War, as power cannot during election season, as power cannot close to bankruptcy—power typically ignores demonstrations.

My reaction: 
Ouch. It makes all the effort and outrage that I have been witnessing in my social media threads seem pointless and ineffective. That's insulting, not to me, but to the passionate and motivated people putting themselves in harm's way just to bring attention to a problem. 

And when does a demonstration of protest become a catalyst for change? I'm thinking back to some of the student protests on campuses across the country concerning the Isreal/Palestine conflict. Some effectively changed their college's or university's financial engagement with Israel. I remember the headlines. So, surely those student demonstrations became problematic enough that the powerful universities had no choice but to capitulate. 

This is still rather nuanced and I'm still parsing. So forgive me if I've misrepresented or misinterpreted something. I'm learning. And unlearning.