The Skin We're In by Desmond Cole

BOOK 56 OF 2021

RATING: 4.5/5

What a powerful book and reminder about how Canada isn't as perfect as a country as we make it out to be sometimes. It's easy to look at what's happening in the USA, the police brutality, blatant acts of racism, and assume that we're so much better. We are wrong.

Desmond Cole's debut takes place over the course of the year. We start in January 2017, and end in January 2018, and each month Cole takes us through various different struggles of racism in Canada. Police brutality, police in schools, immigration, border crossings, and Idle No More, to name a few. Desmond Cole was a familiar name to me: I knew him as a journalist who wrote for the Toronto Star and eventually severed his ties with the publication after they warned him his activism was creating problems for the newspaper (despite the fact that his columns were some of the most read).

I'm ashamed that I wasn't aware of many of these stories. I learned more about racism (specifically, anti-Black racism) in Canada reading this book than I ever learned in school. If you are white, and you are Canadian, you must read this book.