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Learning about the horrific acts of violence (murder, to call it by name) committed against Emmett Till and Oscar Grant (amongst others) again added an extra layer of context that I didn’t know- this book does that well in that it encourages the reader to jump straight to a search engine to look up the cases mentioned by Starr. And then there’s what *could* (and,in the book’s case, does) come after that. As a society, the vast majority of us may be sympathetic and genuinely appalled by headline featured stories of police brutality towards the black community, such as in the case of George Floyd, but I would argue that a lot of people will never truly ‘get it’ in terms of understanding the primal fear (ingrained in Starr and her recital of ‘how to behave’) of being a black person pulled over by a white police officer.

I have taught black students who have exhaustively tried to make their white peers understand that racism exists everywhere- to little real, tangible impact, in truth. It is something that I have sought to educate myself on for years and this book does serve to show how deeply entrenched the issues still are.

The book, for me, was a real learning process- what I thought I knew about racism in society is just the top of a deeply-toxic iceberg as it turns out.

I read this on the recommendation of a friend following a discussion that we were having about how to make the curriculum in our, predominantly white British, school more diverse.