I am not claiming that Akala is a better writer than these giants or has more piercing insights, although I think that the book is excellent by any standard. I say it after having adored Claudia Rankine’s Just Us and Citizen after James Baldwin’s genius Fire Next Time and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s rightly praised Between the World and Me. So when I say I loved it as much as my absolute favourite books on racism, I’m not saying this lightly. I am far from being an expert on race (or class or colonialism, for that matter), but I do read on this topic constantly, across different genres. Based on the reviews, I expected it to be good, but not THAT good. It was included in a couple of 2020 round-ups and although I hadn’t heard of him* or the book before, the excellent reviews made me add it to my own list. I picked Akala’s memoir-slash-searing social analysis up almost accidentally.
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