National best seller due to being a comprehensive description of anti-black racism in Ontario (with occasional mentions that the rest of Canada is there, too), published in 2020. I'd say the author's timing is good, but I'm pretty sure he could have put it out in any year in the past hundred and fifty or so and it still would have been timely. At least with it coming out now, people are reading it, or at least buying it.

Cole, a reporter and activist from the prairies but based in Toronto, describes a year in the life of anti-racist activism, from January 2017 to January 2018, with each month focusing on an issue like carding, police brutality, police in schools, pride parades, immigration discrimination, missing and murdered women, etc. The chapters are centred an incident that either happened or hit the press in a given month, describing the specifics of what occurred, and then going through the greater history of institutional racism in Canada that led up to it.

I liked that a lot of the book's time was spend on community and organisational efforts to combat racism, from municipal up to federal levels, talking about what worked and what didn't. The work is often maddeningly slow and difficult, but not always doomed. Cole takes time to celebrate the successes as well as mourn the loss. I wouldn't describe it as angry, but it's certainly a book whose author is tired of this bull shit, which I appreciated.

Probably slightly more than anti-racism 101, as Cole expects his readers to be more or less on board with what structural racism is, and agree that it's a thing.

Author reads the book, and has great expression and emotion.