I'm as white as the driven snow so I can never understand what brown, black, and other people of colour experience. But books like this one can give an insight into that experience and I applaud Tess McWatt for writing it.

Tessa grew up in Toronto in a family that had emigrated from Guyana (formerly called British Guiana) to Canada. McWatt has a varied ethnic background (Scottish, African, Chinese, Portuguese, Indian, Arawak) but because of her dark skin and negroid features she is often classified as black. And that has led to her being subjected to racial epithets and discrimination. She says "To strangers and even friends, I am images of violence and oppression." Just imagine how that changes interactions. It seems that McWatt has come to terms with her body and her colour but will the rest of us ever do so?

This was an audiobook listen which was read by the author. That made it very powerful. ( )

this is really well written; the structure she creates (science and anatomy) beautifully illustrates both the point she's making and also the investigation she makes into the idea of race and the idea of herself and her make up. i am impressed by this, and by her. this is excellent; there's a lot to think about here.

"But the body is a site of memory. If race is made by erecting borders, my body is a crossing, a hybrid many times over. My black and white and brown and yellow and red body is stateless, is chaos. Her body is stolen territory. I am the result of movement of bodies on ships. As captains, as cargo, as indentured servants, as people full of hope for a chance of survival."

"There is violence in making a border. There is pain in being behind a wall."

"We assign values to some people's lives over others; we believe in narratives of progress that leave many behind."

"While slavery was abolished, the structure that produced it still flourishes."

"The black radicalism of the 1950's that promised to free these writers and artists through collective radical action was supplanted in the US by the civil rights movement that strove for integration - an integration that has never truly arrived, and has never dismantled the structural inequality of the plantation."

"At the heart of racism is the border. And yet migration is part of what makes us human. From the movement of homo erectus out of Africa across Eurasia almost two million years ago through industrialization, war, famine, partition, and to the current unfathomable refugee crisis around the world, we move therefore we are. And borders create the 'us' and 'them' that is the seed of war."

"Skin as a marker of race is a false border, merely an illusion of a border between us and the outside world, between us and other bodies."

"...racial blackness was only possible because of the white state of mind that feared it most."

"'The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.' -- Audre Lorde"

"Reversing economic oppression exposes one of the origins of racism: a basic assertion that there is not enough to go around, resulting in the belief that some must have less than others. Why does race exist? To do the accounting for who will have more and who will have less."

"'You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world, and you have to do it all the time.' -- Angela Davis" ( )