How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi

After my work book club's first selection for a discussion about diversity, equity, and inclusion was a book by a white man that was not at all about diversity, equity, and inclusion, they gave it another shot. I was honestly – pleasantly – surprised that How to Be an Antiracist was chosen and I'm very curious to see how our discussion goes tomorrow.

I was an African-American/Africana Studies major in college, studying first at Oberlin in 1994-95; then at Syracuse in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1996; and finally at Rutgers, where I earned my degree, in 2003-2004. I mention this to say that I've read a lot of literature on this topic, but also that my reading in this area is at least a little outdated. 

It probably shouldn't have been, but the concept of structural racism was eye-opening to me when I read Black Power as an 19-year-old. I've long believed that structural racism is the central problem in the U.S., and if anything my belief has only gotten firmer in recent years. Relatedly, I also tend to think it's not that useful to label individual people as racists (it's not that I think it's a taboo word, but that I don't think it's very productive). In saying that I believe using the term "racist" isn't productive, it's not that I give credence to the racists and accept that calling someone racist is a step too far, it's that I've generally thought it's not individual people who needed to be fixed; but rather it's the structures that perpetrate and perpetuate racism that need to be repaired.

I will admit: this book changed my thinking. Kendi's ideas aren't a radical departure from the ideas of structural racism, but he deliberately chooses to use different words and – critically – he implicates the people behind those structures for the racist policies they uphold. Kendi's focus on changing policies first and trusting that racist beliefs will fall away later strikes me as absolutely the only answer. And honestly, the idea that change needs to come before everyone is ready for it first isn't exactly new (something in this book put the line, "You keep on saying 'Go slow'" from Nina Simon's "Mississippi Goddam" in my mind), but Kendi's understanding of the role of power – and who has it – was very new to me. He says, "The most effective protests create and environment whereby changing the racist policy becomes in power's self-interest." 

It was in the second half of the chapter called "Black," about halfway through the book, that I really felt I started to understand the definition of racism that Kendi was using. In this chapter, he addresses the idea that Black people can't be racist. This formulation, he suggests, says that Black people have no power; that no Black people have power. But some Black people (and plenty of non-Black people) do have power – some have a small degree of power, and some have a great degree – and choose to use it in ways that perpetuate racism rather than equity. He goes into his reassessment of structural racism at even greater length in the second from the last chapter, "Success," and those two sections really made the book for me.

The other thing that this book does that is new is the way it defines racism and antiracism as, essentially, situational. They are action-related I don't feel the need to expand on this, because it's the thing that's mentioned in basically every review and I recalled it from when I heard Kendi interviewed on Morning Edition when the book was released, but I will say it's a good frame. It puts us on the hook for our actions and our words, but also big chunks of this book are personal anecdotes where Kendi shares his own wrong, sometimes racist, thinking. The reader who is probably occasionally cringing at their own past thinking, actions, and words, may feel a sense of empathy from the author.

There are a couple things I didn't love about this book, but I don't think they're worth dwelling on. I honestly don't think I would have read this if it hadn't been selected for my office book club, so I'm very glad they chose it and put me in the position of feeling like I had to read it.

Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie

I found this copy of Murder on the Orient Express in a little free library. I've always enjoyed reading Agatha Christie, but I wondered whether I should read this one because I already knew who did the murder. I've seen at least two adaptations of it, the one from the Poirot TV series, which I've watched in its entirety, and the Kenneth Branagh movie from 2017. It turned out, while I remembered the main outcome, there was a lot I didn't remember (and judging from the cast list of the Branagh movie, it seems they must have made some alterations to the story). Spoilers follow. 

Murder on the Orient Express is two mystery tropes in one: (1) there's a common trope where you have a group of people in a confined space with no means of escape for the murderer and a murder that must have occurred during a small window of time, meaning that everybody is a suspect.  and (2) there's also a trope – one that I tend to this of this book as the original example, or at least what it is famous for – in which everybody did it. But a key detail – and a third trope – in Murder on the Orient Express that somehow, to my surprise, I didn't remember is that Poirot lets them get away with it. Perhaps this is common in the "everybody did it" genre of murder mysteries, because I think in these stories – as is the case in Murder on the Orient Express – the group of people has come together to exact justice on a bad guy, a baby killer in this instance, whom the formal justice system has let go free. Poirot rarely allows the perpetrator to escape justice. In the TV show, the closing scene of many episodes is the moment the murderer is hanged.* (These hangings always seem violent in the context of the show and I've always assumed this was a comment on capital punishment.) So, the message of this book is that the real perpetrator isn't the 12 murderers in the book, but the murderer they murdered. 

I watch a lot of murder mysteries and I'm always fascinated by the ones where the murderers are allowed to get away with it. I think probably this happens more in the stories centered around gentlemen detectives rather than police. Father Brown, for instance, lets an alarming number of people get away with murder – after they've made their peace with God, of course. But Poirot, as a former policeman, seems to usually share the bias of the police that murderers should be formally punished. So perhaps Murder on the Orient Express is a bit of an outlier in this way. 

In any case, I'm pleased to report that this was an enjoyable read – even already knowing who did it. 

The Spirit of Science Fiction, by Roberto Bolaño

I am just back from a short visit to Seattle. As usual, I brought with me more reading material than I could possibly get through in the four full days I was there. Also as usual, I visited a local bookstore and came home with more books than I started out with. I just brought two books with me, which is honestly not bad given my track record, but both books were rather long. I had already started one of the books and I doubted I would actually finish it while away, but I brought the second in case I wanted to read a different kind of book. After finishing the first section of the book I had underway I did, in fact, want to read a different kind of book. But by that time I had already visited Third Place Books and added five additional books to my collection, so I hardly needed the back up book I brought with me. Among the books I picked was The Spirit of Science Fiction, of which there was a stack of remaindered hardcovers on the bargain books tables. It was one of the few Bolaño books I didn't already own. 

After Bolaño's death, I remember being surprised at the seemingly bottomless supply of his works that had not yet been published in English. I'm not positive, but I believe that I learned about Bolaño in the same moment I learned about his early death, in a review of one of his books on NPR. (Googling leads me to believe it was probably this story about The Savage Detectives; I have a weirdly specific memory of driving on the BQE or possibly the Whitestone Expressway when I heard the story.) Then I remember clearly when 2666 came out and I was under the impression that he had just the two books. I got around to reading The Savage Detectives in 2009 and read 2666 a couple years later, and then at some point — I have no idea where in the timeline of all this exactly, though it must have been after I had read at least one of his books — my dad gave me a whole stack of Bolaño books, mostly those published by New Directions. After reading the big two, I read some of the smaller books here and there. I didn't pay too much attention as the posthumous works came out. But when I saw or heard reports that there was a new Bolaño book, I would marvel and rejoice that he'd left so much behind, that there was so much still untranslated. 

I may be mistaken, but I seem to remember hearing that The Spirit of Science Fiction is the last of his books to be published, suggesting they have finally reached the bottom of the volumes he left behind, though perhaps it is just the latest to be published. (Is it even that? I actually don't know for sure.) I had somehow assumed it was something he wrote late in his life, though on reflection given the timing of the publication of 2666 vis-à-vis his death, there's probably not much at all that came later in his life than that. In any case, I was surprised as I was reading The Spirit of Science Fiction to come across characters who were familiar to me from The Savage Detectives. When I looked into it and found it was written well before The Savage Detectives and published posthumously both in Spanish and English, things made much more sense. I enjoyed The Spirit of Science Fiction well enough, but it has nothing on the later works, including Bolaño's other short fiction. As someone with completist tendencies, this wouldn't have changed my decision to buy it or read it, though perhaps I would have chosen a different option from among the books I picked up in Seattle to read at just this moment. But I did manage to start and finish it over the course of my short vacation, so there's that. I read an entire book and a good chunk of another on a four-day trip, which definitely counts as rare for me. 

The Appointment, by Herta Müller

The Appointment wasn't in the original stack of six books that I pulled out to read during Women in Translation Month, but after getting through the first five, I started the last book I had intended to read and found it just wasn't what I wanted to read in that moment. So I went back to the shelves (conveniently, I had slightly pulled out all the books by women in translation that I had not read) and looked for another option. I'd been meaning to read Herta Müller for a while; she was the writer I'd selected to read for Romania for my world books project.

I found The Appointment slow going at times, but I really liked it. The narrator is a young woman who has been summoned to an appointment for questioning by the secret police. In the present of the book, we don't know how many times the narrator has been summoned before, but we know it has happened several times. The book spans the slow, frequently disrupted tram ride she takes from her apartment to the government building where she will be interrogated. As she rides the tram, her observations of the passengers around her are interspersed with her memories: from childhood, her first marriage, her relationship with her current lover, Paul, her friend Lilli, who was killed trying to flee their home country, and memories of previous interrogations with the secret police – always with the same creepy captain. The story that unfolds is beautiful and grim.