My Goodreads Review of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Vol. 23 by Koyoharu Gotouge

Two years after finishing this manga I still wish they did the ending over. I remember how much people complained about the finale of the last volume of My Promised Neverland, but I take that finale over this one anytime. Hopefully the movie adaptation does better. 

  Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Vol. 23 by Koyoharu Gotouge
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Talk about a hard-fought, bitter-sweet ending! To no-one's surprise, Muzan was defeated. But he made good on his vow to destroy the Demon Slayer Corps―specifically the elite Hashira fighters. It wasn't until this last volume that I picked-up on the analogue between the Hashira and the Seven Samurai. While the core team of Tanjiro and company survived, I wish Koyoharu Gotouge didn't see fit to kill-off every likeable supporting character in the story just for the drama.

Given that this last volume was written at the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic, it may explain the somber, but hopeful tone of the ending and afterward. Also, I felt that the story and art clearly drops-off in this volume, especially after Muzan is finally dealt with. I felt that the author is alternatively rushing and packing in filler at the end, and does not really feel like dealing with the story after the goal is achieved. The ending is suppose to be hopeful/happy, but it becomes corny (again, I think Gotouge was exhausted dealing with this book and COVID at the same time so I am not totally unsympathetic). We could've had Muzan defeated and everyone just go their separate ways—the time-skip feels painfully forced.

For me, overall, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba has been an amazing manga (and anime until late).I think the final arc is the last to be adapted and hopefully they do a little better than the recent adaptation of Swordsmith Village arc (volumes 12-15) and the snails-pacing of the story (back-story has always been the Achilles Heel of this book and shonen as a whole).

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My Goodreads Review of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Vol. 22: The Wheel of Fate by Koyoharu Gotouge

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Vol. 22: The Wheel of Fate by Koyoharu Gotouge
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

[I wrote this part after I had read the book on April 10, 2023, before I came back to Goodreads]

The penultimate volume of one of the greatest manga of all time. This is the first-half of the last battle against Muzan and it looks as bleak as ever for the surviving heroes, after Tamayo's death and Tanjiro is temporarily knocked-out by Muzan. Of course , Tanjiro recovers and they have to keep Muzan occupied for an hour until the sun comes out and kills him—the longest hour ever.

The dynamic art-style in this volume sees Koyoharu Gotouge operating at the height of his powers. Weirdly, we are still getting backstory this late in the game (this time for the Serpent Hashira Obanai Iguro and some more on the first demon slayer Yorichii).

[current note, January 2024]
I'm writing this having finished the series and I can say this volume and the preceding two volumes are the book at it's peak.

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My Goodreads Review of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Vol. 21: Ancient Memories

This review was written on Oct 29, 2021. I think this volume and the volumes before and after it was the series at it's peak. I know the trilogy of anime movies ending the franchise are covering manga volumes 17-23, but I think the last volume is one of the big let-downs and it makes me nervous for the final Demon Slayer film. By contrast, I am hype for the penultimate film and hope the studio gives it the same treatment they gave the last movie.

  Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Vol. 21: Ancient Memories by Koyoharu Gotouge
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This volume picks-up right where the last one left off. The most powerful Upper Moon demon is defeated, but he takes some crucial folks with him, and the ranks of the heroes are further thinned out...just in time for Muzan to break-out of Tamayo's hold and we lose her as well. Despite that the last Upper Moon Demon to die was actually No. 4 who was controlling the battlefield and she is used to push Muzan outdoors (as he can only be killed by sunlight), unfortunately it is still an hour and a half until dawn and given the casualty rate, it seems impossible for the Demon Slayers to hold out for that long. This is truly one of the great genre reads I've come across in the last few years and I can't wait to read the last volumes. Happy Halloween!

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My Goodreads Review of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Vol. 18: Assaulted by Memories by Koyoharu Gotouge

I decided to post the rest of my reviews of the six remaining volumes of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba to the blog. With the movies coming out over the next 2-3 years I thought I might as well share these.

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Vol. 18: Assaulted by Memories by Koyoharu Gotouge
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This volume was a bit more heavy on plot-contrivances and back-story, but it was still really good on the art. One battle with one of the main antagonist-lieutenants finally comes to an end. This guy was one of the most notorious villains of the series besides the big bad since the end of the Demon Train-arc. Meanwhile, the most hated of the Upper Moon lieutenants since this final arc began is still giving one of the protagonists a hard time, but then my favorite of the protagonists and the best child shows-up ready to rumble. I hate that Gotouge had to concoct a contrived backstory between Inousuke and the demon to give some motivation to the heroes (this is a meta-problem with Demon Slayer that I may comment on further when I review the series as a whole for the last volume, but safe to say that the concept of "women in refrigerators" plot-laziness that was so well articulated by Gail Simone is in full-effect throughout this series—sometimes justified as a part of the world of the story, but often not). Besides that, this volume is still really good–if not as strong as the last volume–and I can't wait to read the next volume.

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Read on Dec 26, 2020

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Vol. 19: Flapping Butterfly Wings by Koyoharu Gotouge

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Vol. 19: Flapping Butterfly Wings by Koyoharu Gotouge
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Need to start the year off right with a good manga. Well, with the Upper Moon 2 demon defeated by a very long gambit, it only leaves 2 more lieutenants before the big bad. Upper Moon 2 was truly the most purely evil of the Upper Moon demons, the narrative doesn't even give him a post-death woobie sympathy scene like with all the other demons. The Upper Moon 4 is controlling the actual setting of the battlefield and Upper Moon 1 is pretty-much Mike Tyson-ing every one who he goes against (view spoiler)[which is understandable since it is all but confirmed that he is the first Demon Slayer swordsman turned into a demon—he even uses Demon Slayer sword techniques aka "breathing" instead of blood-demon-art (hide spoiler)]. The last part of the manga has 4 different Demon Slayers (3 of them "hashira" aka Demon Slayer generals) trying to just put a dent in him while he is dog-walking them. We got until at least August 2021 until the last English translation wraps up and it will be wild from what I can guess. The art is as good as it has been since I have been reading the manga (the anime really excels in this department).

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Read Jan 1, 2021

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Vol. 20: The Path of Opening a Steadfast Heart by Koyoharu Gotouge

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Vol. 20: The Path of Opening a Steadfast Heart by Koyoharu Gotouge
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is one of the best volumes of the book and Tanjiro & co. are not (really) in it. The battle with the Upper Moon 1 demon (view spoiler)[who turns out to be the second swordsman to use demon slaying techniques taught to him by his twin brother: the first demon slayer (hide spoiler)]. This volume is interesting because we learn just how long the big bad has been doing his thing and we learn the origin of the sword techniques of the demon slayers. The effort used to fight this guy was just amazing. I can't imagine what will happen next.

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 Read Feb 15, 2021

My Goodreads Review of Black Skin, White Masks by Franz Fanon

I have been so focused on working on my film criticism/review game (I'm on Letterboxd, if you wish to follow me) that I have been neglecting my book reading and anime watching (not even reading manga lately). On the flipside I do have some Goodreads reviews that I have not published here yet—this review being one of them. I had posted this back in February of last year and I feel it may be one of my most controversial reviews I have done on Goodreads at the time as I did not partake in the Fanon worship as other's in my old Goodreads circle have (something that made me hype to read the book). One unexpectedly positive thing about the review is that it got the attention of the rapper Noname and that was an unexpectedly cool surprise. 

 Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"There are three intertwined themes in Fanon’s writing: a critique of ethnopsychiatry (which aimed to provide an account of the mental life, in sickness and in health, of colonized peoples) and of the Eurocentrism of psychoanalysis; a dialogue with Negritude, then the dominant system of thought among black francophone intellectuals, in which he challenges its account of the mental life of black people; and the development of a political philosophy for decolonization that starts with an account of the psychological harm that colonialism had produced." - from the introduction by Kwame Anthony Appiah


So this was an interesting read. I don't read as much psychology as I do philosophy so the book is a bit of a change-up for me. This book is the landmark text to explain the effects that colonization has on the colonizer and the colonized. He is basing this from his experience as a Black Martinican in France and the people he treats and reads about as psychologist. The books reputation had long preceded it and I decided to give it a read this year to kick-off a series of reads that I plan to read. He speaks a lot in the royal "we", but is talking from his point-of-view and that of the people he reads around him. There is a lot to get through with this book and I am going to do my best to give my impressions, both good and bad.

Let me start with the good. I think this book really brought a lot of necessarily uncomfortable looks at the mind of white supremacy using psychoanalyses. I think he really does a good job in the first and most of the fourth chapter of the book in talking about this book. I like how he goes so hard in stating how absurd the approval of white people had in the life of Black Francophones.

All colonized people—in other words, people in whom an inferiority complex has taken root, whose local cultural originality has been committed to the grave—position themselves in relation to the civilizing language: i.e., the metropolitan culture. The more the colonized has assimilated the cultural values of the metropolis, the more he will have escaped the bush. The more he rejects his blackness and the bush, the whiter he will become. In the colonial army, and particularly in the regiments of Senegalese soldiers, the “native” officers are mainly interpreters. They serve to convey to their fellow soldiers the master’s orders, and they themselves enjoy a certain status.

It is clear that while he is greatly influenced by people like W.E.B. Du Bois and his high school teacher Aimé Césaire (some of the best quotes of the book are from Césaire). But the three dominate men of this book are Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud, and, while least referenced the most important and where I'll be tearing into him from, Richard Wright.

While I think this book takes-off well, when it gets in-flight the journey is shaky and I do not think it sticks the landing. The criticism of Black consciousness (in the form of the Négritude movement) is a key part of the book. Fanon is one of these "color-blind" leftist at the end of the day. He wants the post-racial society that so many folks foolishly triumphed after the election of Barack Obama. This is what really holds back the book for me (I will mention that yes, he does not do justice to Black women in this book and his zealous adherence to classical Freudian and Adlerian psychoanalyzes greatly influenced his views on homosexuality. Others have done much to cover his misogynoir and homophobia so I am focusing on the whitewashing "universalizing" of Black culture). I have no problem with having a humanist approach to the world, but I don't think that I should have to sacrifice my culture and history for it. Black people tend to always be the one to have to give up their history for the current struggle, but no one else. I say no to this.

I am an African-American, I am not a Martinican or French West Indian (who Fanon calls Antilleans in this book) or an Afro-French/Black Francophone at all. This book looks at a lot of different people, but it is focused on Black Francophones. The idea of the post-racial society is very seductive in the way that most idealistic schools of thought are. Alas, such is wasted on me and I may well be one of the scumbags that Fanon talks about. I agree with Fanon that using reductive-stereotypes against an antagonist is unrealistic, but I think that Fanon does risk over-correcting in order to create a perfect Marxist-humanist utopia. There is a lot to criticize about different forms of cultural and historical movements. I think Fanon makes the same mistakes that James Baldwin criticizes Richard Wright for in Notes of a Native Son & Nobody Knows My Name. One can acknowledge that they are a man without having to justify it with the past, but having a past is still a good thing. Human rights are human rights, but we don't have to go and reject our past however noble or painful to justify are present.

This book was a lot, both interesting and frustrating in turns. I may add more to this review later, but this is what I have so far. Read this book, but read it critically! Fanon is not a saint, but a human being like you and me.

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My Goodreads Review of My Love Story with Yamada-kun at Lvl. 999, volume 3 by Mashiro

 First review of the year is one I have been wanting to talk on for awhile.

My Love Story with Yamada-kun at Lv999, Vol. 3 by Mashiro
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A winter storm and black-out means that it was a perfect time for my first completed read of the year. Which is not exactly a re-read, but sort-of is. This volume recounts episodes 7-10 of the anime. I ended-up following the manga and even going back and purchasing a physical copy of this volume because of chapter/part 30 of the manga that ends this volume. To me it is one of the most startling mature philosophical expressions of love that I have seen in anime or manga.

I won't do a full-recap, but to give some backstory: this series is a shoujo romance manga about about a college student named Akane whose life is sort-of a mess after a recent break-up as she falls in love with a professional gamer named Akito Yamada—the title character (her ex was a gamer as well). In this volume she and Yamada are not yet a couple, but we are all but assured by the end of the chapter that they will become a couple (I am currently on volume 8 in which a lot more pivotal things have happened).

I want to highlight this volume because of chapter 30. During the typical "sick day" trope where one love interest becomes sick and the other takes care of them. Akane overworks herself and becomes sick, so Yamada comes over takes her to the doctor and stays by her side while she is resting. When Akane wakes-up and her and Yamada are talking about what happens they come to talk about love. Yamada has never fell in-love with anyone and instead has turned-down many girls pretty-coldly during his life and as he does finally fall in-love with Akane—he feels intense guilt for the people whose feelings he has hurt. Akane, whose ex left her for somebody else he met while online gaming, surprisingly has compassion for Yamada and Yamada questions why given her experience with her boyfriend. She states that she was glad that her ex was up-front to her about the fact that he loved someone else and didn't try to just two-time her (most of what she says here we see in happen in volume 1/episode 1 where she accepts the breakup stoicly and with a pained-smile despite being hurt by it as we would see later, but now we learn what she was thinking as this awkward/painful episode transpired). What she says next is the moment I knew this was one of the best shoujo series I have ever encountered:

"No matter what I said, I knew it wouldn't change anything, so when he broke up with me, I accepted it right away.

If he ever thinks about me or feels nostalgic, I want him to remember me smiling not bawling.

I want him to think that he had a great woman, and that he regrets leaving me. Don't you think it's better that way?"

Yamada thinks over his past, and easily agrees. While Akane is not a perfect protagonist, she is the heroine required for this story. Despite this obviously being a story of the soujo demographic-category, our lead has a lot of shounen hero personality traits. I tell you I was knocked out of my seat when I first heard those lines from above, and I still get chills reading them now. A lot of "serious" novels can't give you insight on how to deal with the end of a relationship that is equal to this. I have much that I can say about this series in its totality, but I just wanted to highlight this pivotal scene which would be a foreshadowing to another scene that would occur later on in the story (view spoiler)[when the two finally consummate their relationship (hide spoiler)]. It was nice looking back on this early part of the story again.

Al Green - For The Good Times
The irony of posting a breakup song on a review of a book that is leading to the main couple actually getting together is unusual, but I feel it works on what I was talking about.

In the Afterword, the author says that this was the volume where it started being a true romance manga. Amen

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2024 on Goodreads for Me

 Happy New Years🎊

A lookback at what I was and was not reading in 2024:

2024 on Goodreads by Various


My 2024 Year in Books

Been wanting to do one of these again for awhile. Nothing fancy here, just going to do a staight report.

I read 13 "books" this year on Goodreads. After barely reading anything in 2023 and 2022, I wanted to get back into reading-shape. I started the year out strong by reading The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison. This book was penultimate book published during her lifetime based on a series of lectures and serves as a meta-bookend to Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. I had been wanting to read it for awhile and decided to do so in January.

I followed that major read with some lighter fair: Diana's Tree by Alejandra Pizarnik, Chihayafuru, Vol. 3 by Yuki Suetsugu, and The Malefector by Anton Chekhov. A volume of poetry, a volume of manga, and a short story, respectively. The poetry here and later in the year were to-do items that I got to cross off my list after a few years of wanting to get to them. I liked Diana's Tree, but it did not hit me with the same intensity that I got from reading here for the first time in The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: An Anthology. Chihayafaru, volume 3 was the last book from the series that I decided to read befor watching the series' anime adaptation (I have watched season one, so far, and plan to hopefully watch season 2 this year) when I have finished the anime adaptations I will pick-up the manga from where the anime stops. Every year I read at least on Chekhov sort story on his birthday and this year I decided to read The Malefector. I can't say I really remember what it was about besides something to do with how the Russian Imperial judiciary treated Russian peasants.

The second major read that I completed this year was Black Skin, White Masks by Franz Fanon. Though I always think myself too seasoned a bibliophile veteran to get caught in the expectations-trap, it still happens. I feel various intellectual-types and hoteps have sold this book as one thing, and it read to me as a very different thing and I was slightly disappointed, but I think I understood what Fanon was saying...I just didn't fully agree with it. One interesting thing about that review is that it got attention from some interesting places.

After that I took a break from Goodreads (and reading anything not manga-related) for about 10 months. I was persuaded to come back on here after the hype and controversy over what would become my favorite read of the year: The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The outrage over this book is legendary at this point, but it convinced me to start reading again. Though I knew and agreed with much of what Coates talked about in the book already, reading it in journalistic detail on the page made me angry and as outraged as he was. It had been awhile since I read a book that struck me to care in such a way. I have to say that while I was keeping up at the controversies on this site over fake reviews, review-bombing, and sock-puppet accounts with the different YA books—seeing all three methods being utilized by right-wing trolls for this one book was startling and something I had never seen happen in real time since I first joined this site in December 2010. That's how you know this book was the read deal!

Since then I have been back on my reading grind. Not a lot of big literature was read by me, but more of the lighter-stuff as I gradually get back to using Goodreads again. I read Copacetic by Yusef Komunyakaa, the other volume of poetry for this year and it was decent. I had been curious to read Komunyakaa for awhile, and after reading his selections in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, I decided to read a short volume of poetry by him and came upon this book.

Al the other books I closed the year on where comic books that I had in my backlog to read. I tend to mostly read manga that I like and find as they are translated. And I mostly read them digitally unless it is a volume I really like in which case I will buy a physical copy like I did with American comic books. I have a physical manga volume that I bought over the holiday and plan to re-read and review this year (a little preview for y'all). I don't keep-up with superhero comics anymore, but I have enough of a backlog in my Comixology Kindle archives that I will continue reading and putting out reviews when I get to them.

Of the comics I read to close-out the year, I will spotlight two here:

Marvel Masterworks: The Uncanny X-Men, Volume 2 by Chris Claremount, Dave Cockrum, and John Byrne. This is the second volume of Marvel Comics' special trade paperback collection of Chris Claremont's 15 year tenure on the Uncanny X-Men comics with illustrators/co-writers John Byrne & Dave Cockrum (among others). This was a good look at the stories that are now part of contemporary American mythology at this point (and bein saturized to death by Hollywood). It was good to read these stories myself as they were originally meant to be read and I look forward to reading more.

The Promised Neverland, Volume 20. This is the last volume of one of the best-selling manga of the century, so-far. Despite the catastrophe of the second season anime adaptation, the manga itself remained just good-enough to keep me coming back for more and ended on a bittersweet, but hopeful note. This manga, along with One-Punch Man and Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, got me to start reading manga seriously in the first place so finishing this was a special milestone for me. I do hope they include the actual epilogue chapter in an official English volume one day.

Well, besides a very cynical Christmas short story by Langston Hughes, that was my year in books according to Goodreads. I was glad to keep doing this and not totally give-up on reading. I am currently reading Black Theology and Black Power by James H. Cone and hope to have it finished by the end of January. Happy New Year.

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My Goodreads Review of The Promised Neverland, Volume 20 (and the series as a whole).

 My farewell to this series. There is always a sense of reward and sorrow when a good series you read or watch come to an end and you are done with it. That is me now with The Promise Neverland. My love of manga is partly because of the franchise so I feel I owe a debt to it. So here are my thoughts:

The Promised Neverland, Vol. 20 by Kaiu Shirai
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Around now, seven years ago...
I was drawing the prototype storyboards of The Promised Neverland that I would later submit to the Shōnen Jump editorial department. I was confident about my idea. But there were many elements of the story that didn't have the standard "Jump" traits. It had a female protagonist, and it was plot driven instead of character driven.
Even as I look back on it now, I strongly believe that depending on the editor, my submission could have been rejected on the spot." - Kaiu Shirai, October 2, 2020

Aquí se Puede

[I will get to the actual volume in this review, but this is the meta-portion:]

The Promised Neverland, along with One-Punch Man & Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, got me to read manga after spending so long avoiding the format despite being an anime fan for most of my life. Now manga makes-up the near-majority of the sequential-art that I read. That was not true in April 2019 when I decided (very correctly in hindsight) not to wait for a second season of the anime and read the manga from where the first season ended. This story was a very interesting look into the dystopian/horror genre in anime/manga. It was also a very interesting look into two things that I tend to note on in anime/manga/light-novels: the depictions of Black people in the format and the use of involuntary servitude (e. g. slavery, serfdom, etc.). The use of those elements in the plot were different and predictable in this story.

To quickly address the former: Despite the standard-line of manga abiding by the artistic concept of Mukokuseki (無国籍), which is to say of no one ethnic o national origin, it has always been clear that in-practice this just meant making characters look generic and white (interestingly, you don't see a lot of characters drawn with "Asian" features unless they are from China or Southeast Asia). When Black characters did appear in the early days of anime & manga, it was usually in the blackface minstrelsy style. This only started changing in the 1980s—and it was a slow change. Nowadays, it is expected of Japanese illustrators to draw more realistic depictions of Black/dark-skin characters—but every so often there are relapses. While I think that the artist Posuka Demizu did a good job at drawing most of the Black characters in this book (this was a very ethnically diverse non-mecha series), I still can't get my head over why she retreated back to the old stereotypes for Sister Crone. The character was dead before I started reviewing the manga, but I was planning to lodge my complaint on that when I reviewed the series in-full.

I have to say I was more fascinated in how it depicted slavery. Technically, it does not really depict slavery as the kids are technically raised as livestock on farms rather than chattel on slave plantations, but the way that places like Grace Field were organized in the story were plantation-adjacent (especially when we learn what their true purpose was). I think The Promised Neverland, along with Shadows House (can't wait to review this book on Goodreads one day. Another dystopian/horror series that uses serfdom instead of slavery), are some of the better analogues to involuntary servitude as oppose to most depictions you see from series originating from light-novels (a Japanese media format with much less quality control) that tend to depict slavery through the lens of male power-fantasy. I think the display of how othered and de-humanized the humans in the demon world were was especially well-done.

[Ok, now on to the actual volume]

With all that said, the finale was less about a final battle, but with the final reckoning of the price of freedom for the stories heroine. While most of the resolutions for the characters are satisfactory (unless you're Isabella), Emma's luck of getting out of all obstacles in the story unscathed ends here, and she is forced to give-up something substantial (view spoiler)[her memories (hide spoiler)] to the deity that controlled the over-arching events of the story in order to obtain the passage of the humans from the demon world to Earth (which in the current day of this volume is uncomfortably looking like where our current world is headed). Despite this price, Emma agrees that the bigger goal of liberation is the most important. The last line from that other comic—The Complete Persepolis—rings true here ("Freedom had a price"). I may have wished for something happier and not bittersweet, but the ending we have here is solid.

I think that The Promised Neverland will always have a mixed reception because of the second season of the anime. If you only watched it through the anime, than you view it along with the Matrix sequels as the sequel tainting the whole franchise or season 2 of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya as one of the great disappointments of anime. But if you only read the manga, or like most people, watched season 1 then read the manga it is one of the greatest series of the 2010s. The "Goldy Pond arc" of volumes 7-11 was the highlight of the series to me (and why I was so disgusted with season 2 of the anime totally cutting it out). While I do think I have read better manga since I began this series (that I have not yet covered on Goodreads), this is the second series where I covered most of it on Goodreads after Demon Slayer which I finished last year and one of the best manga I have covered so far.


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My Goodreads Review of One Christmas Eve by Langston Hughes

 Haven't read a Christmas story or any LAngston Hughes in a while, so "two birds with one stone." This story reminds me a lot of At Christmas Time by Anton Chekhov.

One Christmas Eve by Langston Hughes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This reminds me of a story my grandmother told me of growing up poor in rural Virginia. While the rest of the United States was in the come-up of the post-WWII economic boom, her community was as poor as they ever been. The youngest of 10, her mom would tell her and her siblings that Santa Claus tried to get there gifts in the house, but accidentally left the. In the fields and hillsides around the house and they had to search for them there. Of course there were no gifts, but they would look in vain anyway.

While we don’t have an explicit location, by context clues the short story here takes place in small-town central Maryland. The only major city named is Baltimore where they could actually afford to build a movie theater for Black people, this town that the story is set in only has a whites-only movie theater. A severely over-worked & underpaid mother is trying to by something for her son to have for Christmas despite being cruelly-underpaid by her white employer whose home she worked in on Christmas Eve! It is her young-son who has an unfortunate run-in with a Santa at a whites-only movie theater lobby that learns the harder lessons of Christmas in the Jim Crow Great Depression era.

This was a short, but bitter story. Nothing big-traumatic happens, but we do get a little loss of innocence here. One does wonder if Hughes meant for this to be a cynical comedy or serious which I can’t tell, but this story does give me a little to think about.

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My Goodreads Review of Marvel's Voices: Indigenous Voices #1

 With all the sorrow of this month, I still haven't forgotten to take some time to honor our Indigenous family this month and I have an excuse to read American comic books again—something I hadn't done in a long time. 

Marvel's Voices: Indigenous Voices #1 by Rebecca Roanhorse
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I haven’t read an American comic book since 2021, so I know I was going to be a little rusty on reviewing one now. I am so use to manga now that several times while reading this I had to stop myself from reading the speech bubbles and text box from right to left. The fact is, I still have fairly substantial back-catalog of western comic books that I need to read and given this is November, good reason to read this short-anthology celebrating Marvel Comics’ Indigenous heroes. This is not the first time reading a comic anthology about Indigenous people as I previously read and reviewed This Place: 150 Years Retold an excellent historical narrative anthology on the history of Indigenous people in Canada. Like in that book, the illustrations vary in quality, but the stories are a good introduction/sample. I really wish there was more here to read, but better than nothing.

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My Goodreads review of Copacetic by Yusef Komunyakaa

 This is my proper into to this poet and more of a check on my to due list as much as anything. Hopefully I get in the mood to read more of his work some day.

Copacetic by Yusef Komunyakaa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Tangled in the bell ropes
of each new day,
scribbling on the bottom line
of someone else’s dream,
loitering
in public courtyards
telling statues where to fall.” - from “Soliloquy: Man Talking to a Mirror”

Yusef Komunyakaa is a poet who I knew by reputation before I ever read him. I finally read his work when I read him as part of the anthology Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry and was impressed by what I read. Trying to find something to read by him was difficult, but I chose this book as it was just long-enough to serve as an introduction to him and was early-enough in his career before his more notable works on music and war (he was a Vietnam War veteran). The book was written as a homage to his Jazz heroes, and reflections on his early life in Louisiana and as a soldier abroad (though he never makes a direct reference to his time at war here).

I liked this volume generally. I didn’t have any poems I hate, but there where at least half the poems I really liked. I think the second part of the book is stronger than the first, but I think this is a good volume of early-1980s poetry. Eventually I will likely read more by him one day.

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My Review of The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Been awhile since I read something and been so angry—in a good way—at what was being written about. I felt so enraged about the crimes talked about in this book, but I think it is good to feel righteous anger at this. Well here is my Goodreads review/thoughts on this book.

  The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

All our work dealt with the kind of small particulars of being human that literature generally deals with. But when you live as we have, among a people whose humanity is ever in doubt, even the small and particular—especially the small and particular—becomes political.


What is the duty a writer holds to their audience, themselves, the process? James Baldwin wrote a book of essays trying to answer that in Nobody Knows My Name in 1961 while working on his novel Another Country and as his direct involvement in the Civil Rights Movement was deepening. Now in 2024 we have Ta-Nehisi Coates writing the same sort of book about being a writer and this being a mea culpa about a section of his landmark essay The Case for Reparations in which he listed West Germany paying reparations to the State of Israel which he received immediate blowback for. Coates travels to Senegal, South Carolina, and Israel/Palestine and writes what he sees and feels and it is a harrowing and deeply soul-searching travelogue. This book is 230+ pages, but it felt like it could've been 500 with the emotional weight it put on me. I am still taking in the information in the book, but I really was moved by this book and want to process it.

Senegal

No one has the right to erase my culture, because a community without a culture is a people without human beings" - Léopold Sédar Senghor

Étoile de Dakar - Titeur

Back in 2020-21, I lost quite a few of my family members while the COVID-19 pandemic was ongoing—chief among them my paternal grandmother. I hadn't seen her in person in years and she had been the one who kept so many stories of our family history. It dawned on me that with her gone I would be losing a lot of those stories so I decided to do some amateur genealogy and family history research to preserve the names and stories the best I could. When an African-American takes a consumer DNA test, what they are shown, among other things, is that they share ancestry not with one specific African ethnic group or tribe, but with multiple—sometimes over a dozen. One may share a plurality of ancestry with one ethnic group, but that still is not a lot. This makes claiming ancestry with one group based on biology a bit hallow given that you are related to a lot of different groups. Then you have to remember that most of your known history and culture only concretely begins in North America in 1619. Alex Haley has a lot to answer for. Still, it has always been for that reason that African-Americans have historically taken the lead when it comes to Pan-Africanism and countless figures from Alexander Crummell to W.E.B. Du Bois to Marcus Garvey (West Indian, but still important to African-American history) and so on have dreamed of a strong independent Africa and possibly a place to return to. Liberia and Sierra Leone were founded from such aspirations.

In 2022-23(?) (we are not told of when he went to Senegal, but it was before he went to the Middle East) Ta-Nehisi Coates makes his inaugural journey to Africa—specifically the Republic of Senegal and he spends his time there wrestling with the fact that he was physically in Africa, but it was not the mythical paradise his Black Panther father had told him about growing up nor was it the raging uncivilized hell-hole that white Americans have always told everyone it was. One feature of this book is that while he is telling us about his real-time experiences, he is also giving us background information and lessons on how and why he is experiencing things or what he is writing against. In this case it is hundreds of years of anti-Black racism distorting the history of Africa to justify slavery and colonialism. He is doing this while trying to reconcile if he and the Senegalese people he spends time with can truly close the gap with each other across cultures and histories. He is hopeful, but a bit uncertain. Ironically, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie expressed similar feelings in Americanah on interacting not just with African-Americans, but with other Africans in the novel. Blood ties can only bind people so much and one has to ask what else makes peoples, peoples. He comes to an understanding with himself about these things—what slavery and apartheid has done to him & colonialism and neo-colonialism has done to people in Senegal—and realizes that there has to be a little caution to being so hasty to want an imagined utopia so hastily....but we'll come back to that. There is hope here, as an Americanah, that a real connection in the African diaspora can be made on tangible ground, regardless of reality or myth. This Senegal section was the one that connected to me on the most personal record even if I don't have quite the naivete about Pan-Africanism that Coates has.

South Carolina

Marvin Gaye - Save the Children

"If...we are going to use history for our pleasure and amusement, for inflating our national ego, and giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment, then we must give up the idea of history either as a science or as an art using the results of science, and admit frankly that we are using a version of historic fact in order to influence and educate the new generation along the way we wish." - W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Propaganda of History" Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

I remember the 2020 era of Black squares and everyone promising to do better with "The Blacks." What a time! Before the year was even out, the reaction had begun and the first wave of book banning laws were being drafted. Whether it was called "woke" or "CRT" or now "DEI". It was basically a ban on teaching about whoever you didn't like whether it be Black people or LGBT people. One of these places that passed book banning laws was the state of South Carolina a state that had implemented a particularly brutal form of slavery, had one of the most violent reactions to Reconstruction, and fought racial integration particularly hard. The state house in Colombia celebrates all kinds of the worst people in human history and in Chapin, South Carolina the Lexington-Rchland 5 School Board and high school teacher Mary Wood were entering a showdown over Between the World and Me. Coates' book along with works like The Complete Maus, The Bluest Eye, and The Diary of a Young Girl are favorite targets of the right-wing school censors. That particular school board is prone to extreme right-wing parents. This chapter really has Coates reflect on his own time as a student, as well as the history of South Carolina and a deeper meditation of who writes the histories and who decides what histories are read. TNC goes to the school board meeting with Mary Wood that ultimately decided her fate: that we she would be allowed to keep teaching BTW&M. A battle won, but a temporary victory as the forces of white supremacy don't stop working just because they suffer a loss. We would do well to remember that.

Israel/Palastine

"But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests. This is what is becoming clear (I must say that it was always clear to me). The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of “divide and rule” and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years. - James Baldwin "Open Letter To The Born Again" (September 29, 1979)

Marcel Khalife - My Mother

So here we are to the heart of the book. I tried to explain what parts 1 & 2 of this book were about because it is here in part 3 that the sum of both narratives reaches a dark conclusion. If part one ("On Pharohs") was about one of the most hated and wretched people of the world trying to connect to each other in a supposed homeland of paradise, but question if there can be such a thing as a utopian homeland; If part 2 ("Bearing the Flaming Cross") is about the fight to control the history, narrative, and basic information of this wretched people constantly; part 3 is a cautionary tale about another very despised people who manage to establish a homeland and promote their own narrative about it...at a terrible price. They make their land and their narrative according to the designs and whim of the very people who had spent thousands of years persecuting them. A freedom achieved not though good faith, but through the use of colonialism and apartheid against another group of people.

I'd known about this conflict between Israel and the Palestinians all my life, but it was witnessing the brutality against the Palestinians between 2009-2012 that made things clear to me on this issue. While for me it seemed clear, for others it as taken a lot longer to see and with genocide as the trigger. But this section is where Coates brings all of his journalistic efforts to bare as he goes through a very intimate look at how antisemitism and Zionism found a common goal with each other and the Holocaust became the perfect pretext to accomplish a two-fold goal:

1. Get the majority of Jewish people out of the West (something the Holocaust had two-thirds accomplished) and 2. Set-up a colonial state in the Middle East to keep the Arabs in-check. The natives (in this case the Palestinians) would be the only real losers so nobody would care.

Accomplishing this would see the United States as the main model (along with Apartheid South Africa after 1967). The genocide of Indigenous people in North America and the régime of racial segregation laws that spread throughout the United States of America and targeted only non-white people and effectively turned a quarter of the United States into an undemocratic totalitarian state. Imagine if Jim Crow-era South Carolina or Mississippi was transported to the Levant and funded by the United States and allies. The catalogue of atrocities, by which I mean not just the physical violence, but the violence of the state itself against through its laws and customs against all it deems outsiders or minorities that is so galling to comprehend. I currently live just across the highway from the former plantation that my family was enslaved on. I have talked with grandparents and a great-grandparent on their experiences living under the Jim Crow régime. I even found an old newspaper advertisement for the auctioning of one of my 3x great-grandparent and his siblings. It truly hits one to see such a legacy being alive and well today to be used against another people funded with my tax dollars (I had an antebellum-era newly-freed 4th great-grandfather who was taxed $5 a year for being a "free person of color" in Virginia. That money was used to fund the continued enslavement of his brother and family). It's made all the more tragic that the people doing it would by conventional-wisdom be the last folks to do this.

I had always suspected this as my knowledge of world history expanded, but being a victim does not preclude you from being a victimizer. Kendrick Lamar said, "Hurt people, hurt people." Alas, he was more right than he knew. Coates realized that even the victims of the Holocaust could endorse apartheid and ultimately genocide. It is a tragedy that Coates lays out in magisterial detail from the moment he begins this section at Yed Vashem (the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem) to the ending with Palestinian-Americans in Chicago. This is as much a long-form journalistic narrative and history as it is an example of writing to haunt...speaking of which.

To Sum It Up

The book's stated goal was to show young writers how to write to haunt the reader as Rakim the MC haunted him as a listener. Like Between the World and Me, this book is written as an epistolary non-fiction essay. For all his atheism, Ta-Nehisi Coates is seemingly trying to make the case for being the successor to Saint Paul as far as the use of letter-writing to tell his stories. I am not a big fan of this format, but I still appreciated what he wrote here and I was definitely haunted by it.

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My Goodreads Review of Diana's Tree by Alejandra Pizarnik

Finally got this one out of the way after procrastinating on it for eternity. Diana's Tree by Alejandra Pizarnik
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"I have made the leap from myself to the dawn.
I have placed my body alongside the light
and sung of the sadness of the born." - Poem 1

"only thirst
silence
no encounter

beware of me, my love
beware of the silent woman in the desert
of the traveler with an emptied glass
and of her shadow's shadow" - Poem 3

Ever since reading her poem "The Awakening" (in Spanish: El Desperatar) in The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: An Anthology, I had been curious to read more poetry by Alejandra Pizarnik (who was part of the odd, troubling trend of suicidal white women poets of the early to middle of the 20th century) and was recommended this volume. I like that this is a very straight-forward, but still high quality collection of brief poems (the best to read, but hardest to write). These poems are from relatively early in her equally- short career as her more famous work was still 3 years ahead of her. Given that I am reading this totally in-translation (without the original Spanish version) I have to trust that the translator Yvette Siegert did the best she could to keep the original meaning of the poem as one inevitably loses the wordplay that the poet had intended when translating. I don't know if I'll read more by Pizarnik, but I loved the alchemy which she uses in the lyrics of this collection.

"beyond the reach of every forbidden region
lies a mirror for our sorrowful transparency." - Poem 37

"This repentant song, standing guard behind my poems:

it belies me, it has silenced me." - Poem 38

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Goodreads Review of The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison

 My first book review in over a year is bound to be rough and this thing feels rough. Got to start from somewhere, I guess. 

Happy New Year.

The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Been a minute since I have done any type of real serious reading, but here I am.

This year is the last year of the United Nations International Decade of People of African Descent. For the last 10 years that I have been on here I have been saving a bookshelf of books by or about people of African descent here on Goodreads if you wish to check it out: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...

This book was on my radar from the time it came out, but I needed it in a reasonable price-range before I decided to read it given it's length. It is the second-to-last book published during Toni Morrison's lifetime and it is an edited publishing of her 2016 Charles Eliot Norton lectures. As the title suggests, she uses the idea of the other or othering and how in the U.S. context slavery and it's afterlife helped to create "the other" as we have it in America today.

"One purpose of scientific racism is to identify an outsider in order to define one’s self. Another possibility is to maintain (even enjoy) one’s own difference without contempt for the categorized difference of the Othered. Literature is especially and obviously revelatory in exposing / contemplating the definition of self whether it condemns or supports the means by which it is acquired. How does one become a racist, a sexist? Since no one is born a racist and there is no fetal predisposition to sexism, one learns Othering not by lecture or instruction but by example."

She spends the book using various examples from literature like Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, to show how whites "other" black people, but she also uses people like Harriet Jacobs, Camara Laye, and most noticeably herself to show how Black writers push back against the attempts to dehumanize them. This book also reminded me that I need to read Paradise ASAP.

"I became interested in the portrayal of blacks by culture rather than skin color: when color alone was their bête noire, when it was incidental, and when it was unknowable, or deliberately withheld. The latter offered me an interesting opportunity to ignore the fetish of color as well as a certain freedom accompanied by some very careful writing. In some novels I theatricalized the point by not only refusing to rest on racial signs but also alerting the reader to my strategy."

This book is like a career-bookend to Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination and a lot of what she brings up here will be familiar to those who have read that book or The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations. I confess, with this being the first book that I had to sit and think on in some time, I had a time trying to say something here that was different from the other non-fiction books of her that I have read, but the fact is that this book is transcript of a lecture she gave so it was no surprise that there would be little surprise here if you are familiar with her non-fiction writing. I will say that if you only know Toni Morrison from her novels, this is the perfect place to start for seeing what her thought-process is in condensed form.

I wish I could feel like this review was up-to-snuff with how I usually do, but this is what I have in the tank at the moment.

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Chihayafuru vol 1 by Yuki Suetsugu - manga review

Back into the Goodreads thing. We'll see how long this goes...if things pick back-up for me this blog itself may move to a better place. I've been waiting to do this review for two years so I am glad to have it off my chest. Chihayafuru, Vol. 1 by Yuki Suetsugu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

[I originally wrote this part of the review in July before the last chapter had been published]
Since the announcement that this manga was coming to an end this August, I felt it was time for me to read it and watch the anime adaptation. Now I am not big into sports anime/manga and while I'd heard of this title for years, I had no interest in ever reading it...until 2020. In one day, the author of this manga gave me all the reason to want to read and watch this that I needed. I am going to review the first three volumes of this manga, watch the anime and read remaining volumes of this series, but I want to use the beginning of this review to talk about something else: my appreciation of the author as a black anime/manga fan.

In the aftermath of killing of George Floyd with myriad of people speaking out, I came across someone who I had never heard of make the case for black folks despite it not having no benefit to her. That person was Yuki Suetsugu, the author of this long-running manga about a traditional Japanese card game dominated by women. On June 4, 2020, Suetsugu sent out a series of tweets speaking out against racism and for Black Lives Matter and as I read these tweets it made me think about things. In my time growing-up in, growing apart from, and coming back into anime (and later stating to read manga). It is not surprising that people of African descent & dark-skinned people in-general are not the most well received in the media formats. That has a lot to do of course with how black folks are viewed in Asia generally compared to whites and it is reciprocated throughout the media in the continent which includes Japan. Japanese creators-now-have been a lot better about this than when I was young, but it still has far to go. The mecha genre and Shinichirō Watanabe are the outliers on this as non-stereotypical black representation has always been normal with that genre since Mobile Suit Gundam and that creator's anime Cowboy Bebop. Outside of those were example it is more usual to know manga and anime creators' racist views and neo-Nazi leanings. The long-held controversy over the fascist views of the creator of Attack on Titan is the most well-known example from recent times but given how Japan's failure to deal with its fascist, imperialist past is no different than the USA's, it is not surprising. What IS surprising is seeing an anime/manga creator who does not make mecha or is big into African-American culture (as far as we know about Suetsugu) actually speak out against anti-black racism. It is a small gesture, but one that I appreciate given how rare such a gesture from anyone in that industry is (and hey, you get to have my money).

[This portion of the review was written after the series had ended]
I suppose now I should actually talk about this first volume of the manga. The story is based around a girl living in Tokyo names Chihaya Ayase who is trying to find a purpose for herself and be out of the shadow of her older sister, an up-and-coming Japanese supermodel. When a boy from rural Japan named Arata transfers to her school she learns that despite his appearances he is very skilled in and participates in competitive Karuta: a traditional Japanese card game. They clash with, and then become friends with another boy named Taichi who is also a competitive Karuta player, and they join together to form Team Chihayafuru. They come together at a community center that teaches Karuta and they start practicing and decide to enter a Karuta competition.

This is not the first Josei manga I have read, but it may be the best-looking one easily. The is a very solid coming-of-age story and it was a good read. The idea of a traditional Japanese card game that uses poetry is quite different than even what most Japanese think about. Under this review I will post some videos of competitive Karuta and how it is played. All-in-all, I'll probably mostly be following this series thought it's anime adaptation, but I still have some manga volumes that I will read and review first.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMh-V... Okay, so the guy is a bit extra in the beginning of the video and he has an accent, but he does a good job explaining exactly how to play the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X0JG... This is an English-subtitled commentary of a standard competitive Karuta match. IT gives you as broad an overview as you could hope for by actual people who have been top-ranked in the official tournaments held in Japan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_30EF... This is a full competition Karuta match, in Japanese.

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My Goodreads Review of Eye Level by Jenny Xie

After this long hiatous of mine where I've been staggering alone in the wilderness, I'm making my way back to civilization. This review is just to get me back on the road. I really wish I was in a better frame-of-mind to analyze these poems, but that I was able to write any thing at all on it is a miracle. I'm honestly ambivalent on the book, but I can't quite pick-up why. I also use the word "interesting" a lot in this review: my apologies up-front.



Eye Level: Poems by Jenny Xie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"I've grown lean from eating only the past." - Line 9 of "Corfu"


I was supposed to have read this book in–at most–two weeks and then review it, but I ran out of inertia emotionally and spiritually and after almost 2.5 moths away I have finally finished it. This is an interesting book. It is the personal recollections of the author on her life and travels and of the writer. While it did not leave me speechless, it has a lot of good lines in it. I can't remember how I discovered this book, but I had been curious about reading it for awhile. Though I suppose the book is relevant given the news of the past year, it is an interesting travel diary/meditation all its own.

"Look at how I perform for you

Look at how you perform for me

An eye for an eye
is how you and I
take on forms in the mind" - stanza 13 of "Visual Orders"

I am always impressed at how poets are able to use words to create the scene in your mind's eye. The "mind's eye" is what this book is quite literally about and the poet makes references to the title throughout the book. Xie is looking back somberly on her life on the road and is put between nostalgia and melancholia (literally has a poem with that name). She thinks of her time as an immigrant in New York City's Chinatown and her travels throughout Southeast Asia great detail.

I hope I can convey that this is an interesting book to read for someone who likes to read poetry of different people's experiences. I know I am not doing a great job at describing the book because I am still a little bit rusty with my reviewing skills after 2 months. This was an interesting look at a life that could not be more different than my own. And did I mention it has a lot of good quotes.

As a bonus here is Jenny Xie's music poetry video for her poem "Chinatown Diptych": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2vUq...

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My Goodreads Review of The Promised Neverland, volume 17

The Promised Neverland, Vol. 17 by Kaiu Shirai
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the last English-translation manga volume of The Promised Neverland for the year. This has been such an exciting book to read this year and it is crazy to think it will all be over in 2021. Of course, the Japanese-language version has already ended and season two of the anime is expected to premiere early 2021. In any case, this title has been one of the most interesting and intriguing comic books I've ever read and I can't wait to give my overall thoughts of the franchise when I read the last volume next spring/summer.

This volume has the beginning of the final battle. The parties to that conflict though may not be who we think, though. Emma and Norman have completely different agendas that will see the final conflict play out very messily and sorrowfully.

Posuka Demizu art work is almost better than the story, the dynamism on every page is just incredible and in an action-packed volume like this is used to great effect.

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My Goodreads Review of How To Be An Antiracist by Ibrahim X. Kendi

I am always weary of reading library books of non-fiction. It is tricky with ebooks, but because I was already trying to get through an even longer ebook I was going through this book at a very fast pace so I have not been able to give my whole soul over to this book but I have gave it at least half my mind. Consider this more a first impression more than a full review.

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi


"An antiracist idea is any idea that suggests the racial groups are equals in all their apparent differences—that there is nothing right or wrong with any racial group. Antiracist ideas argue that racist policies are the cause of racial inequities."

"The most threatening racist movement is not the alt right’s unlikely drive for a White ethnostate but the regular American’s drive for a 'race-neutral' one. The construct of race neutrality actually feeds White nationalist victimhood by positing the notion that any policy protecting or advancing non-White Americans toward equity is “reverse discrimination.” That is how racist power can call affirmative action policies that succeed in reducing racial inequities “race conscious” and standardized tests that produce racial inequities 'race neutral.'"


I was mildly-interested in this book even before BLM II kicked off this summer of 2020, but my interest in this book was definitely peaked a little. When I recently discovered my library got a digital copy of it I checked it out. This book is a semi-memoir, semi-essay/manual/history. It is modeled in the mold of books like We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates or more aptly Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil by W.E.B. Du Bois. Ibram X. Kendi uses his life to explain the concept in all it's dynamics of antiracism. As well as showing his journey from being a racist to an antiracist he documents this journey in W.E.B. Du Bois. It is an interesting book in seeing his personal stories, but the hype I had heard over the policy is one of those things where I am being told things simply which I had already learned the long way. Had I read this book between 2008-2012, it would've been my bible, my handbook. Unfortunately, I read it in 2020 after discovering a lot of these concepts that are antiracism on my own. If you don't want to spend so many years reading like me, this book is the cheat-sheet.

I agree with pretty-much 90%-95% of what Kendi articulates in this book. Most of it is pretty didactic straight-forward telling you how to be antiracist. I do get annoyed at that very common new-intelligentsia habit of trying to rename certain academic terms ad hoc. I was not totally convinced at his arguments concerning institutional racism, but he makes an interesting argument when he says: "Policymakers and policies make societies and institutions, not the other way around. The United States is a racist nation because its policymakers and policies have been racist from the beginning." Beyond that he tries to give antiracist advice on every conceivable issue and he leaves almost no stone unturned. It is fascinating and I was impressed at how relatively simple he makes it (I wish he could have made it more simple, but this is the best you'll get out of these Gen Xer academics). Towards the end he gives his antiracism credo:

It happens for me in successive steps, these steps to be an antiracist.
I stop using the “I’m not a racist” or “I can’t be racist” defense of denial.
I admit the definition of racist (someone who is supporting racist policies or expressing racist ideas).
I confess the racist policies I support and racist ideas I express.
I accept their source (my upbringing inside a nation making us racist).
I acknowledge the definition of antiracist (someone who is supporting antiracist policies or expressing antiracist ideas).
I struggle for antiracist power and policy in my spaces. (Seizing a policymaking position. Joining an antiracist organization or protest. Publicly donating my time or privately donating my funds to antiracist policymakers, organizations, and protests fixated on changing power and policy.)
I struggle to remain at the antiracist intersections where racism is mixed with other bigotries. (Eliminating racial distinctions in biology and behavior. Equalizing racial distinctions in ethnicities, bodies, cultures, colors, classes, spaces, genders, and sexualities.)
I struggle to think with antiracist ideas. (Seeing racist policy in racial inequity. Leveling group differences. Not being fooled into generalizing individual negativity. Not being fooled by misleading statistics or theories that blame people for racial inequity.)

I had not expected this book becoming available to me as fast as it did so I have rushed through it and have not had time to really sit more with it to give a deeper analysis here. I read this as a library borrow on my Kindle, but because it temporary I have not made my notes and highlights from it public. If I buy the book then I'll give a more thorough breakdown of this book. I can't tell other people how essential this book will be to their development, but it was not as essential to me as I thought it would be. It is a fundamentally idealistic book which may put more realist/pessimistic-leaning people off. In the end, what it teaches is fundamental.

"I represent only myself. If the judges draw conclusions about millions of Black people based on how I act, then they, not I, not Black people, have a problem. They are responsible for their racist ideas; I am not. I am responsible for my racist ideas; they are not. To be antiracist is to let me be me, be myself, be my imperfect self." – Amen Brother Kendi, amen.

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