Ackerman’s Community Book Club selection for December is How to Raise an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. This book was selected to help us understand the importance of having conversations about race with children and help them become critical thinkers.
As family systems therapists, we need to work proactively in creating anti-racist spaces in our personal and professional environments and that begins early on, with the young people in our lives. How to Raise an Antiracist is both an instructional guide for parents and caregivers and a reflective memoir in which Professor Kendi helps caregivers have conversations about race with their children.
It’s important for parents to be able to move past our discomfort around the mistakes that we make as parents. To be a parent is to be imperfect, to be a parent is to be human. And so we’re going to make mistakes, but we’re also very sensitive about the mistakes that we make, particularly towards our children, and I felt by providing my own personal story as a parent and the mistakes that I’ve made, as it related to race with my child, I thought it could help other parents to be self-reflective as well. I also thought by sharing my story as a child, it could help teachers to really begin to understand what they’re doing or not doing from the perspective of a student.
— Ibram X. Kendi, on writing How to Raise an Antiracist
Ibram X. Kendi is a National Book Award-winning and a bestselling author of five books for adults and three books for children. Mr. Kendi is a professor in the Humanities at Boston University and the founding director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research, as well as being a contributor writer at The Atlantic.
Book club selection and description written by Silvia B. Espinal, LCSW
About Ackerman’s Community Book Club:
Ackerman’s Community Book Club is a monthly series of reading recommendations curated by our family therapy instructors. We invite you to read one book each month that explores diversity, equity, and inclusion and join us on a pathway to curiosity. The books on our list have been selected with the aim of increasing knowledge, empathy, willingness, and skill to confront xenophobia as therapists, educators, and lifelong learners, in the personal and professional spaces we occupy.