#IMWAYR: Everything I Learned About Racism I Learned in School!

Hi everyone! Sorry for not posting last week—I was away on a lovely week-long vacation to the beach, which was really emotionally healing. I feel like in getting to enjoy myself and avoid all the usual pressures of life, I got to feel more confident as a human being and get in touch with some of my deeper thoughts—so now I'm feeling more like myself upon my return.

Unlike my big trip last year (see here and here), I did far less reading. Instead, I:

• Visited an art museum
• Rode on a boat
• Went to the mall
• Swam in the ocean
• Sat in a hot tub
• Hung out with my family
• Virtually talked with my friends
• Took around 250 photos (not including the art at the museum)

So not much time for reading! But I did knock out one nonfiction book that I probably wouldn't have found time for, were it not for traveling. I'm really excited to tell you all about it, so let's do it!

Everything I Learned About Racism I Learned in School

Written by Tiffany Jewell and other contributors

Young adult · 2024

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· · · The publisher says: · · ·

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of This Book Is Anti-Racist and The Antiracist Kid, Tiffany Jewell, this YA nonfiction book, highlighting inequities Black and Brown students face from preschool through college, is the most important, empowering read this year.

From preschool to higher education and everything in between, Everything I Learned About Racism I Learned in School focuses on the experiences Black and Brown students face as a direct result of the racism built into schools across the United States.

The overarching nonfiction narrative follows author Tiffany Jewell from early elementary school through her time at college, unpacking the history of systemic racism in the American educational system along the way. Throughout the book, other writers of the global majority share a wide variety of personal narratives and stories based on their own school experiences.

Contributors include New York Times bestseller Joanna Ho; award winners Minh Lê, Randy Ribay, and Torrey Maldonado; authors James Bird and Rebekah Borucki; author-educators Amelia A. Sherwood, Roberto Germán, Liz Kleinrock, Gary R. Gray Jr., Lorena Germán, Patrick Harris II, shea wesley martin, David Ryan Barcega Castro-Harris, Ozy Aloziem, Gayatri Sethi, and Dulce-Marie Flecha; and even a couple of teen writers!

Everything I Learned About Racism I Learned in School provides young folks with the context to think critically about and chart their own course through their current schooling—and any future schooling they may pursue.

· · · · · ·

For full clarity, in this review, all quotes from the book are in italics.

A few months back, when I attended the North Texas Teen Book Festival, I was lucky to hear from author Tiffany Jewell at a panel, and then stop by her table in the signing line (and get my copy of this book signed!). I hadn't heard of this book until that day, but I knew I wanted to read more books about racism, and this seemed like an excellent place to start. And y'all, it was—this book is phenomenal.

Everything I Learned About Racism I Learned in School is divided into a variety of different chapters, most written by Jewell herself. Jewell's chapters are part memoir or personal narrative, as she chronicles her experiences in school from elementary school up through college, and how racism affected those experiences in countless ways. And Jewell's chapters are part primer on antiracism, as she shares statistics, research, and ideas by other scholars so that readers of all ages can better understand systemic racism and discrimination.

Then, interspersed with Jewell's chapters, we get one or two chapters apiece from 19 contributors, sharing their own personal experiences with schooling and racism. These chapters ensure that so many different human experiences, not just Jewell's own, are represented in the book. We hear from beloved children's authors (Torrey Maldonado, Joanna Ho, Minh Lê, Randy Ribay, and more), scholars and academics, and teenagers affected by racism in schools today.

The book moves fast, coming in at just 224 pages with large text, and the accessible writing style of Jewell and her contributors ensures that anyone can benefit from this book. I can imagine kids as young as middle school seeing their own experiences reflected here, and learning about things that need to change in this world. And then on the other end, I think this is an essential read for educators, who need to understand exactly how racism is perpetuated in schools, in part due to adults' behavior, and in part due to poorly designed systems and practices that still haven't changed.

I want to highlight a few chapters of Jewell's that are simply amazing, and left me with so much to think about:

• "What I Learned About Tracking" – I'm starting to feel like intelligence is a made-up idea. I think all of us are capable of thinking deeply and understanding deeply, so who cares how fast we do it, or how much random crap is stored in our brain? And this chapter really emphasized this idea for me. Jewell walks us through the school days of three students who have been placed on different tracks in school. Supposedly, these tracks enable individualized learning, but really, it seems like they set the "gifted" students on a path to success, and leave the rest struggling and marked as "less than." And the administrators choose which students are most likely to benefit from the higher-level tracks—it is likely that students are assigned to tracks (and potential futures) on the basis of on implicit bias and stereotypes. I'm wondering what could happen if we saw every student as gifted, if we saw every student as deserving of high-quality education that could help them reach their fullest potential.
• "What I Learned During My Sophomore Year" – Jewell writes about having spent time in high school in a club that fundraised for international causes (e.g., hospitals, sanitation). She writes, "I felt like our club was making a difference. (And maybe we were.) I didn't recognize that my own community could have used that funding to ease the costs of school lunches, school supplies, and winter gear." And then she writes, "We never went deeper or tried to understand the decades and centuries of institutional misuse and abuse of power that led to kids needing to hawk notecards at craft fairs to raise money for necessities of life." Let that sink in for a sec.
• "What I Learned About Suicide" – I appreciated this chapter for drawing connections between racism, schools, and the alarming numbers of youth suicide and suicidal ideation in our world today. By pulling in the context of mental health, this chapter makes clear that we as a society are not effectively taking care of our young people.
• "What I Learned About Military Recruitment" – Writing about how the military recruited her and other students of color while they were just in high school, while their White classmates were largely left alone, Jewell writes, "I learned that the military and the government and the education system—which (I thought) was supposed to be watching out for my best interests—colluded in hopes of getting kids like me (poor and Black/Brown and academically motivated) to head out into the world and defend the United States even though the country was rarely willing to defend me and people like me."
• "What I Learned About Malcolm X and Thelma & Louise" – Jewell writes about a truly appalling (and absurd) situation in which, at the end of a college class, the professor let students vote to watch the movie Thelma & Louise instead of reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X. As Jewell puts it, "...my professor allowed a movie about two fictitious White women to be a substitute for a book about a very real Black man and his experiences in our country."
• "The Culture of White Domination in Schools" – This is my favorite chapter in the whole book, because here, Jewell shows us how the design of American schooling—which we often take for granted—inherently creates power imbalances and supports racism. And in showing us this fact, Jewell asks us to imagine a system of schooling centered around students' needs rather than old habits and adults' wishes. She asks us to imagine a system of schooling where grades do not dictate self-worth, adults do not direct students using power and fear, natural human emotions are allowed in the classroom, and all stories are valued even if they are not written down in an old novel or a textbook. It's a radical and necessary vision, and this is the chapter I especially hope every educator seeing this will read.

I know this review is getting long, but I also want to share some quotes from the contributors to this book, because they too have wise words to offer:

• Discussing their relationship as a kid with performing music, especially jazz, shea wesley martin writes, "But my love of music, of being heard in my rawest form, pushed me all of the way to graduation." This struck me—I think being heard in our rawest form is maybe every human's deepest want, myself included.
• Ozy Aloziem writes, "I am more than the ways in which I have or will continue to suffer. How I show up during the mess is my testimony. I can feel the ways in which I heal around the hurt and the softness that emerges as a result of that. I choose to lean into that softness, into that grace."
• Ozy Aloziem (again!) writes, "...I'm learning to be relentless. I'm trying to go back to feeling things with every atom in my body, loving so deeply it hurts. I'm tired of looking at the totality of my life, I want to get stuck in the details of it all again. So here's to that."
• Y'all, I'm sad Ozy Aloziem is not an author, because I would read everything she writes.
• Writing to her younger self, Gayatri Sethi writes, "You will grow up to be a hypereducated person with multiple degrees from world-renowned institutions. You will be viewed as the quintessential girl child from the Global South whom the world declared needed schooling for saving. It will be a widely held belief rooted in saviorism that your life chances and success depend largely on you being schooled. You will believe them. You will be enamored of all the alluring promises of futures possible for you through schooling."

This book is freaking amazing. My only concern with the whole book is with the chapter, "What I Learned About Students' Rights." In this chapter, Tiffany Jewell establishes rights for young people that—I agree—every young person deserves. But I'm not sure every young person is actually receiving them, and I worry her framing of them as rights implies that schools will always provide them. For example, Jewell writes, "You have the right to privacy and no one (including school and district administrators, faculty, and staff) should 'out' you to your family, classmates, anyone. ... You have the right to keep your transgender status private. Your school cannot disclose this information without your consent. You are protected by the federal privacy law." Per this article, schools do out LGBTQ+ youth to their parents without the consent of those youth, and I worry the phrasing in this chapter implies students are safe when they may not be.

That concern aside, I cannot recommend Everything I Learned About Racism I Learned in School enough. I think every human being can relate to school being a source of trauma, at least to some degree, and Jewell and her contributors challenge notions of what a school should be, envisioning a place where true learning, critical thinking, and safety can happen. This book provides catharsis for the past experiences of so many human beings, and it provides a roadmap of questions and answers for our future as a society. We would do well to listen.

Bookish thoughts:

A couple months back, I highlighted several indie bookstores I got to visit that were all delightful in their own unique ways! That whole experience helped me set a new goal of going to an indie bookstore every time I visit a new place. I'm not sure I can always keep to that goal, but on my trip last week, I did! So allow me to introduce you to a delightful little store...

Black Cat Books

Corpus Christi, Texas

Facebook · Google Maps

This is a very small indie bookstore, about the size of Hyperbole Bookstore from my last bookstore post, but unlike that store, it's entirely a used bookstore! Which was delightful for me—I bought a kids' book I had owned eons ago but never read, and I also saw a copy of Replay by Sharon Creech that was the original hardcover for school distribution!

Critically, Black Cat Books is cat-themed, as you can see from the very front entrance:

Besides that delightful pun, there is plenty of cat-themed signage throughout the store:

While most of the store is organized by category, there is a lovely display table at the very front with some highlights:

The owner of the store told me that she bought the store in October, and this article says that was when the previous owner needed someone to take over, so he wouldn't have to close the store after just opening it in 2022. I'm really glad she bought it and kept it alive—it's a delightful little store to visit, and if you're ever in the area, I suggest you check it out!

The Kidlit Lovers' Meetup!

Last thing—the second Kidlit Lovers' Meetup is THIS Wednesday, July 24, 2024 from 4-5 PM Pacific / 5-6 PM Mountain / 6-7 PM Central / 7-8 PM Eastern!

If you read kidlit (or kidlit blogs like this one), please join us—the more the merrier! You'll have the chance to meet other bloggers and readers (such as myself) and discuss books, reading, blogging, and more! We'll have several discussion questions to keep the conversation going, and they are different from the meetup in June if you'd like to attend again! My goal is to make this a low-stress, enjoyable event for everyone.

Click here to RSVP for the meetup, or click here to learn more about the meetups in general. Feel free to email me at completelyfullbookshelf [at] gmail [dot] com with any questions.

I really hope to see you there!

That's all for now—have a delightful week, and I hope to see you at the meetup on Wednesday! ✨✨