Candis Watts Smith

Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review.

So I read this book a while back when I got it via NetGalley. I honestly just wasn't in the mood to review it though. Not because it wasn't a good primer about systematic racism and why black lives matter. But because I am just sick of justifying my existence to people out there. I don't know how many people have heard about the 1619 Project that the New York Times published. But the number of white men and women who screamed reverse racism and how black people need to get over slavery was just exhausting to see online. We could get over it if our country acknowledged it. We have the historians fighting the good fight out there, but we as a country don't want to hear about the ugly things we have done. We are Americans and therefore we are always on the side of truth and justice, except when we are not. Go read about how we treated the First Nation people in the United States, how many lies we told, how many people we massacred. Go read up about the Chinese Exclusion Acts. Or you know, the fact that we locked up Japanese Americans during World War II.

"Stay Woke" is a really good book that dissects race and the history of racism in the U.S. I have to say as another reviewer said, the things that this book touches upon were not surprising to me. I think though that it definitely will be great reading material for any man or woman out there that wants to read about about racial equality and how and why black lives matters started back in 2013.

This book also has a glossary that I thought was good to include so people can become more knowledgeable about certain terms. I also loved that each of the chapters links to resources if a person reading wants to find out more. The illustrations that comes with the books that get into statistics around hate crimes and money earned for African Americans was eye-opening as well. Hate crimes are going up post Trump being elected in 2016, and I would be interested in seeing the final analysis on that after 2020. I had to do some digging to find some for you all to review since I got this via an electronic ARC though and found these on the book's Amazon page. I can't embed them in my Goodreads review unfortunately, if you want to see them though, check out my Booklikes page, see Obsidian Blue's Stay Woke Review

I thought that Candis Watts Smith and Tehama Lopez Bunyasi did a great job of breaking things down and actually giving readers facts. A lot of things get obscured online due to trolls or just inaccurate reporting. So it was very good to me to just read this book.… (altro)