Dealing with Your Implicit Racism : For black people and anti-racism activists

by Sefunmi Oladumiye

Sefunmi Oladumiye’s struggle with racism began at the age of 12.

That was when she found out she was black.

That was when she decided that she did not want to be black because she finally understood why some people were mistreating her.

The desire to not be black led her down a road of racist beliefs about black people and discrimination towards Blacks.

In DEALING WITH YOUR IMPLICIT RACISM, she chronicles her racist thought process and what eventually led her to reject the notion of black inferiority and to start to view Blacks in a non-racist light. She also explains where racism comes from and how it enters people, affecting their thoughts, beliefs, and actions.

Oladumiye makes the case that most black people and non-black anti-racism activists are also struggling with implicit racist beliefs about black people. DEALING WITH YOUR IMPLICIT RACISM outlines the techniques she used (and still uses) to combat her racist thinking and the successes she experienced in her fight.

76 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 15, 2017

Reviews

[Yufeng · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great discussion on implicit racism. I greatly admire the courage and introspection of the author. She makes many great points and offers practical solutions that are derived through personal experience. Her experience not only brings great hope in fighting implicit racism on an individual level, but also brings forward the importance of personal and psychological development in tackling this racial problem. There are many levels and facades of racism; I think the author is able to capture some nuance in this intricate topic and offers great insights.

Implicit racism is certainly not a rare issue and can bring significant negative effects on both individual and social levels. It deserves more attention, and I really hope to see more discussions like this, as well as more efforts on its investigation from sociologists and (natural) scientists.

[Rui Jun · Rating 4 out of 5]

Duidelijk geschreven en herkenbaar. Alleen schrijft ze over 'Blacks' en 'Whites' wat ik denigrerend vind, ik zou eerder 'Black people' en 'White people' schrijven.

Aanrader. ✨

[Seun · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dealing with Your Implicit Racism is quite an interesting book, not for the very least on how it treats the issue of Racism, but for how it treats the issue of Discrimination.

The author's experiences with racism against Blacks are touchy but not uncommon. It is the universal psychological assault on Black people which has been around for many decades, with a malignant history of the Mayflower transit to the Americas.

The book seems to posture as a text meant for the American Blacks that delve into genealogical issues that assault racially as the author points out about Blacks on Black racism. But the introductory notes to the book was quick to rescue that impression. It is a book written for victims of racism, (social media) activists passionate about ending it and the distant sympathizer who may (or may not) recognize its institutionalized affirmations but don't understand its intricacies and dynamics. Racism is one of the many things that make up discrimination. Racism is discrimination. Discrimination isn't racism, it is much bigger than that. The author starts off as trying to talk about discrimination but makes it a racial issue and towards the end of the book, brought in all methods of discrimination and present them as methods of racism.

In the text, the author identifies three basic sources of racist ideas and beliefs: Culture, Society, and the Media. The blame on the media, and social stigmas against Blacks also apply to different ethnic groups and religious groups. Since the beginning of the 21st century, more than half of the human population have either been convinced to fear Muslims/Islam, or are on their way to being convinced, with credit going to the global War on Terror and how the media keeps on hammering on the term "Islamic Terrorism".

So bringing up issues of discrimination as it applies to the profiling of an ethnic, religious and even gender group shouldn't be all used to tackle the issue of racism (as this book did) cause not all of them apply to racism on exclusive grounds.

The book thrives on obvious strengths. It is a short book but a good one which is mostly inspired by the author's personal experiences and self-reflections. It tries very well to showcase the various aspects of racism and also to prove that racism subsists despite its rallying denial to this day. The author provided standard and still, very practical solutions to combat racism. In identifying ways to deal with racism, the author advocates techniques that straddle around speaking well of black people, getting knowledge, cultural exposures and the like. The sentences are quite simple and its easy-to-read format would make the book accessible to people of all ages, with the teachings easy to imbibe.

However, on a flip side, as pointed out, the book so much hijacked racism and used it extremely, perhaps extensively and loosely, to capture other range of discrimination. The roundhouse collection of everything about discrimination and applying them to rather more “contrived” issue like race is an overreach. This book, somewhat, isn't going to be a universal knowledge tool on how to handle racism. One won’t be appalled if the book is notoriously stretched and argued as being racist toward Whites, although it would be quite a leap but it's plausible. The book started off with hyped loads of promises which might have been mildly inconsequential to the hype, as nothing new was really presented for those who are vast readers aside the peculiar dimension to the racist narratives.

N.B: I received an early review copy from the author in return for an honest review. This has not in any way influenced my review.