Book Review: Hope Without Hope

 

Image: The cover of the book is a light blue background with large letters "Hope without Hope." Inside the letters is a photo of Rojava revolutionaries holding up flags on long poles. The flags are yellow and green triangles with a red star in the center. Across the top in yellow is "Matt Broomfield." Across the bottom is "Rojava and Revolutionary Commitment."

I don't think I've ever read anything quite like Matt Broomfield's Hope Without Hope. It often seems like the world falls into polar opposite sides to a spectrum between absolute despair and naive optimism. My pessimism has grown as I've aged and part of me has thought that it's just because I've seen so much suffering and so many things go wrong. I tend to believe I've seen the reality from within communities that others on the left who aren't in them don't understand. I have also been destroyed by the internalization of the shame machine and call out culture, basically directing it towards myself all of the time. However, much of my outlook is just fatigue from being tossed about by the horrors of a dying world. All of this is of course very self-centered. Is my self flagellation and doom scrolling helping the humans and other animals I care so much about? I'm aware of it, but stuck.

It can be easy to feel lost and like there is no point. It can seem rational to take a look at things and decide that putting in effort will only be a waste of energy. On the other side of things, one can look at the world and see many instances where victory has occurred and believe that we can just copy and paste that and we will win. We act on an ignorant form of idealism, falling apart when the messy outcome isn't anything close to what we thought it would be. The author explains how we can acknowledge the bleakness of things without defeat. While Rojava is an anchor for this book, the book is not entirely about Rojava. The people and resistance movements of the AANES are more used as an exercise to explore in practice what it is like to have hope without hope.

Essentially, Broomfield uses his experiences in Rojava as well as other historic events (including war, atrocity, resistance, etc,) philosophy, religion/myth making, analysis of fiction, movement manifestos, and other vehicles to examine how we can both be in touch with the bleak reality of things, while also continuing to move forward. In fact we have to. There is much discussion of truth and factual accuracy and if/when that actually matters. All of this is wrapped up in the ever-present uncertainty of the future. While we may know that things are bad, we really have no idea what is going to work and where. And we have no idea if things that work will continue working or if they'll be obliterated by war tomorrow. I'm honestly finding it difficult to do the topic justice in the realm of a review as I'm still mulling over many of the ideas in my own head. I know that I agree with a lot, I'm not sure whether or not I agree with all of it, and I'm not sure if that matters. The thought exercise that this book has created for me was one that I had not really encountered before. It has challenged me in multiple ways for multiple reasons.

Broomfield is many things, but his journalism chops shine throughout this book and his work as a poet makes the writing all the more enjoyable. He has spent time on the ground and among the people of Rojava and has done his best to see and understand what is going on there as much as an outsider can. He discusses both the tendency of some on the left to idealize Rojava as an anarchist utopia as well as the tendency of authoritarian capitalists to view it as some sort of liberal stronghold. I do think that this book will be a bit easier to take in for someone with at least a little bit of knowledge. I went into it having red articles over time and listening to the women's war podcast. That is to say I don't have a ton of knowledge outside of a little bit of basic foundation. This is part of why I really took my time with this book and read slowly and carefully. Occasionally I would stop by Google to look something up, but a lot of the foundational information is there, at least enough to grasp the thesis.

The more specific discussions about the way things work in the AANES gave me even more respect for these movements. It helped me understand some cultural aspects that help people remain connected and motivated in the struggle. It helped me to understand the absurdity of things like Western media trying to compare Rojava to a small autonomous zone in the US (an actual assignment the author was given by an employer at one point.) What it really drives home is the power of community and the ability of people to create an impressively massive functioning society outside of the brutal authoritarianism it is pitted against.

One practice I have thought a lot about since reading this book is called tekmil. At risk of not doing it justice, I will say that it is essentially an accountability structure where people check in with one another to point out mistakes and how to improve. What I liked about it is that it is truly based and cooperation. You do not apologize in these sessions. They are meant to inform and improve, not to punish. It is also interesting to think of how they have dealt with the massive conflict with ISIS. They essentially have prison villages, but not like what you may imagine with cells and bars. They sacrifice safety in order to create a less controlling atmosphere. It's something I think about a lot with any sort of leftist revolution, especially as I watch my own country descend further and further into an embarrassing (and horrifying) cyberpunk oligarchy. What does a successful revolution do with the masses of people who violently and misogynistically disagree with it if the revolution includes people who are against prisons?

Broomfield also speaks on the way patriarchy and women's liberation work in Rojava. I knew a bit about this from the podcast and things I read, but he goes into it in more complex ways. At the same time he criticizes how identity politics can be used as cheap tokenism for ineffective action. Again, Broomfield is talking about a real world, rather than an imaginary one. At times I felt like his analysis of identity politics would contradict itself anyways I didn't fully understand. However, this book is literally an entire contradiction. That is the central thesis, so maybe that is to be expected. There are many more things about Rojava discussed within the book, but for brevity's sake I just mentioned a couple that stood out to me.

In terms of jargon, this book is divided into different discussions and some of them are more accessibly written while others are a bit more academic than average. I chuckled to myself on occasion, wondering if the author was going to say "neoliberal capitalist hegemony" in every paragraph. That said, I do think it's worth taking the extra time to read this even if you maybe put off by the heavier language. There are times where jargony texts seem to be that way for the sake of it, often hiding the lack of anything substantial behind the language. This book is not doing that. Broomfield is essentially trying to capture endless contradictions and complex topics that require discussion of complicated and specific concepts.

Make no mistake in thinking that this is an exercise in toxic optimism or the power of positive thinking. There is an entire chapter on the falsities in new age ideas (such as Frankl's damaging analysis of life in concentration camps.) The author is clearly critical and rightfully angry about the topics he is writing about. It is a book about straddling the realities of a complex world where we need motivation to keep going even if there is not a concrete and positive victory in sight.

Perhaps my only clear disagreement was the author's points on Westerners avoiding images of horror that those experiencing them must be exposed to every day. The author argues that we should feel bad and not be able to look away. For example, I stopped watching videos of animal cruelty in farming, etc as I realized I was re-traumatizing myself with information I already knew, rather than motivating myself to continue the fight. Rather than helping me keep going, it along with the isolation in a world that mostly does not care even on the left turned me into such an obsessive live wire that I burned out and had to quit everything because my health declined so badly. I've never really been able to psychologically recover from those years.

I remain more open to watching other atrocities in small controlled necessary situations, such as the videos of starving children in Gaza I saw last night. But, we must be careful. There are plenty of studies that show that people double down when faced with conflict (especially men,) desensitize, blame the victim, etc. Human minds will go to great lengths to protect themselves. There is also evidence that exposure to pain and trauma makes people more sensitive and fragile in pathological ways. The answer to atrocity isn't that everyone else should also experience it. It's that no one should.

All of that said, I also understand what he's saying here. Even if you quickly Google the author you see the kind of reporting he's done, the witnessing of violence that he has reported on, and the oppression he himself is faced from various governments including the UK anti-terror squad due to his reporting. I can understand why he and the people living through what he is reporting would scoff at the idea of people not wanting to see what they've endured for mental health reasons. It is a privilege to look away. But the thing about privilege is that privileges are things that everyone should have.

I cannot stop thinking about everything in this book. I feel that it has freed me in a lot of ways. It has reminded me how guilt takes up space, my negativity is not purely rational, my need to control uncertainty will never succeed. It has given new meaning to the "journey not the destination" mantra and has reminded me that even if the end is nigh, we still need to live together today. When there is no hope, it is not necessarily a grounded take to stop hoping. Critical, cynical, absurdist, (and many other adjectives used in the text,) hope not only motivates us to seek more extreme revolution, but to continue on with daily tasks that keep communities going- we need to peel those potatoes.

As many of us know, despair and depression kind of stop everything. Even if we are all careening toward the apocalypse, right now we have to do the best we can. We have to keep going and make our present and future as viable as possible. Many beings of many species including humans will live and die within the period between now and total annihilation if that is indeed what is coming. All of that existence matters.

This is one of my favorite books I've read in a while precisely because it has made me think in ways that I don't recall thinking before. It invites contradiction rather than trying to dispel it. It allows us to be complex, messy creatures who will make countless mistakes, rather than positioning us to the boxes that I and so many others love to place ourselves in. It is a call for action and community rather than to strive toward a guaranteed end point that is a victory. Even if we do only have 11 years left before total climate collapse, a lot can happen in those 11 years.

This was also posted to my goodreads and storygraph.

Book Review: The Omnivore's Deception

Image: the cover of the book is a red background with a large chef's knife pointing diagonally up through the center. In black at the top is "The Omnivore's deception." Below that to the right in white is "what we get wrong about meat, animals, and ourselves." Across the bottom in black is the author's name "John Sanbonmatsu."

I went into John Sanbonmatsu's new book The Omnivore's Deception: What We Get Wrong About, Meat, Animals, and Ourselves a little nervous. I had seen Sanbonmatsu talk and enjoyed it, but had only read one essay in the past. It was so jargony and academic that I feared that this book might be, too. Luckily, it is readable, though heavy in subject matter as is to be expected. Sanbonmatsu is passionate about these topics, the experiences and worth of animals including humans, and in conveying important information. I have some concerns with how he went about it at times which I will discuss, but overall found this book to be an important addition to the collective liberation canon. I will note that I no longer read or watch most graphic cruelty descriptions or footage (I have witnessed enough for many lifetimes.) There is not a torturous amount in this book, but I did skip paragraphs here and there that I thus cannot comment on as they are the only things I did not read.

Before reading this book, I knew quite a bit of the long dark shadow of Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. Many people who have ever been involved in the monumental task of trying to get people to have respect for farmed animals know of the damage that Pollan's feel good copout of a book caused. It gave people who thought they might care about other animals and climate change a way to think that they could change next to nothing and somehow end up helping animals and the planet by harming and killing them the nice way. On top of the widespread negative cultural effects it had, it's also full of absolute bullsh*t. It has been a long time since then, and a book confronting all of this has been long overdue. 

It has been so long that I didn't realize just what I was getting into. Even in hindsight, I did not recall quite how diabolical Pollan's words were, how absolutely cruel his assessments. I did not know that his book is infuriatingly still considered mandatory reading for some courses as some sort of guideline for how to (use liberal capitalism to cause immense suffering and climate destruction for taste.) The cultural lore around Pollan's book made it stick even in my 19 year vegan mind as less horrifying than it was. Sanbonmatsu delves deep into the depths of the text, highlighting just how dangerous the "humane" slaughter movement has been. He shows quite clearly how neoliberal "welfarist" consumerism reduces other animals to the status of products, just like other forms of exploitation towards them. In a way, it becomes more frightening than the callous cruelty in undercover footage that may have gotten some people to pay attention to what happens to other animals before their body parts are packaged. It has taught these people that that cruelty is not cruelty at all. In fact, you should feel good about it. Messages like Pollan's went as far as to pretend people were doing animals a favor by sending them to slaughterhouses. I could go on and on, as you may guess this lit a fire inside me a bit, but I want to focus on this book rather than just one of its many subjects.

Sanbonmatsu uses Pollan's book as an anchor for a far larger scope and discussion of our relationships to harm of other animals. I appreciate that he was clear and direct in his language, calling a spade a spade, rather than allowing industry terms to proliferate. He does well to show how offensive and ridiculous many "humane" slaughter proponents are, using their own words and materials to do so. He shows how the drive for localvoreism caused hippie granola types to embrace the far right and move away from leftist consideration for both humans and other animals (if they were ever on the left, some hippies never were.) He discusses the "femivore" trend wherein women take up harming animals in the many ways men have more traditionally done so (hunting, slaughter, etc) and treat this turn towards patriarchy- complete with their own versions of machismo- as a form of womens liberation. 

Sanbonmatsu discusses connections with various oppressions such as the abuse of slaughterhouse workers forced to do the most dangerous and traumatic tasks of killing animals for those who shield their eyes. He does a decent take down of utilitarianist ableism of philosophers like Peter Singer, which he discovered after initially being inspired by Singer's ethical arguments for other (nondisabled) animals. This was also something I was aware of and had read about before, but somehow, perhaps by grace of the universe, I had not heard of Singer's "Should the Baby Die?" until this. It's even more appalling than I had realized. I am grateful that I could not locate more than citations of posts tearing down the piece during a quick search, so hopefully it will die and no one else will have to read it. Sanbonmatsu also discusses ecofascism and the words of Holocaust survivors explaining their thoughts about the mistreatment of other animals. This was unfortunately one of the few times his mention of the Holocaust felt appropriate. The leads to my criticisms.

I am not someone who thinks one should never discuss intertwined oppression between humans and other animals. I believe all of these things are complex and interconnected in many ways. Many writers and organizers have done far better jobs than I can in a small space here, so I added a few recommendations at the end of this review. It took me a long time to flesh out the ways to discuss collective liberation that is inclusive of nonhuman animals that did not misrepresent or cheapen the struggles of any of the groups involved. It is not easy and I still make mistakes. I do think that Sanbonmatsu makes some mistakes in this book in this regard.

He frequently discusses (US chattel) slavery, Naziism and the (Shoah) Holocaust, and makes some other statements that made me cringe a bit. My issue is not that humans and other animals should never be discussed together. In fact, I and people of many marginalized groups discuss how we are intertwined in solidarity with other animals facing oppression. My problem is when people make direct comparisons that are not apt. For instance, discussion of the atrocities of animal agribusiness alongside genocide, with semi direct comparisons, cheapens and erases BOTH struggles. We are not trying to wipe out farmed animals (I know genocide is far more than that but for brevity's sake...) It's the opposite, they make up most of the birds and mammals on the entire planet because of what we have done to them. That is completely different from genocide. I suppose hunters and ranchers' attempts to wipe out predator species could have some connection, but still has its own horrors. Both are horrifying in unique ways. 

All of these forces do involve the animalization/objectification/pest-ification of others (discussed in better detail in other books at the end) that can be a unifying factor, but that was not the author's focus. We can discuss how the roots of oppression, hierarchy, capitalism, fascism, and so on are the connecting threads between these things without making these sort of comparisons. I do not think Sanbonmatsu actually means to be making 1:1 pairings. But, the way things are written, it reads like he does. I think he needed a bit more practice and feedback regarding the minefield that these discussions occupy before spending so much of the book doing so.

My other issue is the pop psychology sections of the book wherein Sanbonmatsu compares our relationships to other animals with psychopathy and sociopathy. These sections show that he is a philosophy professor, not a psychology one. Much of the info is inaccurate in the same ways journalists writing about science and health can be. Much of it is irrelevant. It is much more apt to discuss industrialized humans in relation to other animals from a sociological/group dynamics perspective. People are not showing traits of individual sociopathy any more than anyone else (as we all have traits of most mental illness in lesser amounts.) People behave these ways because it's what everyone is doing, it's cultural, normative, and accepted, etc. That fits far better into the central thesis regarding Pollan strengthening these dynamics with horrific results. I would also be remiss if I did not mention that Sanbonmatsu discusses his outdoor cats without realization of both the threat this caused to them and how that impacts other animal populations in the area, particularly birds and rodents. A short anecdote, so this is my short response.

Part of why these flaws really get to me is that I believe that they could stop some people from finishing the book. Many people don't finish most books that they start as it is. Sanbonmatsu's book absolutely shines in the end. This is where we get into his academic field of philosophy. The discussions of  personhood and consciousness are by far some of the best I have ever read. These are topics that have been written about and discussed for centuries so that is saying a lot. I put so many flags in that section that I eventually marked the entire chapters. I hope that anyone who may find themselves put off by some of the flaws with this book will simply skip over those parts rather than put the book down entirely. There are some really important thoughts in here that I hope reach a wider audience.

This was also posted to my goodreads and storygraph.

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*Note: initially thought Sanbonmatsu was joining VINE book club this month, so I put this off. But, it is actually going to be at the end of August. I will update after that if anything seems important to add.
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Books that explore collective liberation including other than human animals (I am sure I am forgetting some):

Beasts of Burden and Disabled Ecologies by Sunaura Taylor

Oxen at the Intersection and Birds Eye Views by pattrice jones

Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era Sarat Colling

How to Unite the Left on Animals John Tallent

Feminism in the Wild Ambika Kamath and Malina Packer

Transfarmation Leah Garces

Animaladies: Gender, Animals, and Madness

Aphroism  by Aph and Syl Ko

Racism as Zoological Witchcraft Aph Ko

Meet the Neighbors Brandon Keim

Fear of the Animal Planet  by Jason Hribal

Tongue-Tied: Breaking the Language Barrier to Animal Liberation  by Hanh Nguyen

Veganism in an Oppressive World  Vegan of Color Community

When Animals Speak  and Animal Languages by Eve Meijer

Neither Man nor Beast  and  The Sexual Politics of Meat  by Carol Adams

Terrorists or Freedom Fighters?: Reflections on the Liberation of Animals  Ed. Best and Nocella

Sistah Vegan and Brotha Vegan

Fat Gay Vegan  Sean O'Callaghan

There are a bunch more on  my to-read list , but I did not list them since I have not read them yet or just forgot to. Many of them came highly recommended, particularly works by Lori Gruen and Claire Jean Kim. 

Book Review: Feminism in the Wild

 

Image: The cover of the book is divided in half with white below and above a landscape of  three lionesses and two cubs on a hill with a cloudy sky behind them. Across the top is the quote "Anyone who's curious about animal behavior should read this book." -Ed Yong, author of An Immense World and I Contain Multitudes. In large white letters across the center is "feminism." In black below that is "in the wild". In smaller blue letters is "how human biases shape our understanding of animal behavior." Below that in black is Ambika Kamath and Melina Packer.

Feminism in the Wild is the type of science book I feel like I've been waiting for for a long time. I often run into science texts that don't take bias and social justice or cultural influences into account at all. On the other hand, I'll sometimes find books that do tackle those things and try to connect them with science that don't do very well in grasping the science side. There have been some books that have bridged this gap, but Ambika Kamath and Melina Packer's book one of the best ones in my opinion.

As I expected, one of the authors' focus is on how humans' interpretation of research resumes is highly informed by bias, patriarchal norms, cisgender heterosexual dominance, and other cultural limitations. For instance, the existence homosexuality in many species has been known for a very long time, but scientists jumped through hoops to find other reasons why the animals were acting the way they were. Some scientists still try to deny that homosexual behavior exists in other animals despite it being extensively documented and tons of species. The idea of sex as a simplistic binary is another realm in which scientific results have been ignored to fit into dominant narratives. 

At the same time the authors are clear that they want to avoid placing any sort of strict binarist explanations on to the worlds of other animals. This means neither projecting a patriarchal capitalist hellscape sort of evolutionary hierarchy on to them, nor treating them as if they live in some feminist utopia full of magical fairy creatures. I am an avid birder and in viewing thousands (millions?) of birds from hundreds of species, I can say that there is great variance both within and across species in terms of culture, communication, behavior, sexuality, and so on. I have seen touching affection and cooperation as well as aggression almost too hard to watch. Much like many encounters I've had with humans.

Kamath and Packer also focus on positional knowledge and the importance of cooperation throughout the natural world. Despite some scientists' claims that nature is a world full of competition and conflict, the authors, like many who have come before them, demonstrate that cooperation is often far more common and is not the aberration it's often made it to be. Individualist self-interest is not what is driving everything, even if colonialist scientists did their best to try to fit their findings into that narrative.

Another standout section is where they talk about evolution. One of my biggest pet peeves of something like 90% of science books I read that discuss evolution is that they treat every trait as if it is advantageous. They jump through thousands of hoops trying to find a reason that every single thing another animal does is due to evolutionary fitness and reproduction. Kamath and Packer rightly criticize the optimalist way of viewing things. They acknowledge the reality that evolution is a bunch of random shit happening and proliferating over millions of years. There are advantageous traits that end up being passed on through reproduction and attraction, sure, but latched on to those are plenty of other things that range from nonsensical to weakening to a hell of a good time regardless of the cost. There are always going to be things that all species have and do that are not in line with reproduction and survival of the fittest at every second of their complex lives. 

The authors also take the evolutionary discussion a step further, seeing it through a queer and feminist lens. I had not thought about it exactly that way before, but it makes a lot of sense. Some of the biggest objections to lgbtq and feminist causes from social darwinists is that they aren't in line with perceived hierarchy, evolution, or other animal behavior (all of which they are also usually wrong about.) But, they don't have to be because that's not how animals work. We are all in amalgamation of many things and some of those are indeed very linked to survival. There are also endless non-adaptive explanations. Reducing our lives and that of other animals to a simple race for procreation and survival is frankly very silly. It's not true and it's the opposite of how we know evolution to act.

The only criticisms I have of this book are that they regularly use the term "differently abled" instead of disabled (or people/animals with disabilities which would have been ok.) I have no idea why they did this given how clear and expansive their knowledge of anti-oppression frameworks is as "differently ables" has been fairly well discussed as an insulting. It was created by a person without any disabilities and treats disability as a dirty word instead of a basic reality. The other problem I had was a section where they discuss domestic chickens in very archaic language that was completely out of place in the book- including how they discuss domestic and lab animals in general. Claiming a genetic researcher "solved" the welfare problem (of forcing tons of birds into a cage the size of a shoe box to live out their miserable horrific lives- as is the case of most farmed birds) by selectively breeding for less reactivity to crowded atrocious conditions was insulting. This was brief, and felt like it came from an entirely different book. It was later followed by extensive discussion about the lives and experiences of animals in more considerate and accurate terms, so I'm not sure what happened there. 

This leads me to what is one of the most refreshing parts about this book. At the end of the book they actually confront the issue with researching other animals who do not consent to our intervention. They do not conveniently avoid the oppressive and consent violating nature that is the laboratory animal research industry. They do not avoid discussing research of animals outside of captivity and how we need to consider their consent as well. They dwell in the contradiction that is both reporting results of nonconsensual research and having a discussion about if that research should occur. It is written respectfully and carefully, I am sure as not to scare away their colleagues who have been taught their entire education to immediately reject such concerns. The authors acknowledge that there may be times that we need to forgo knowing something in order to respect the animals we are studying. They acknowledge the truth that we can and should find new methods of study.

This is a brave and refreshing take for science writers as even some of the more considerate science texts, which acknowledged the cruelty in some experiments or who highlight the individual desires and experiences of other animals, will not go as far as to say maybe these experiments shouldn't happen in the first place. There is an ignorant knee-jerk reaction to any criticism by many animal researchers and their kin who claim that there is no other way to do things (or worse, simply demean their subjects as objects or unworthy- like us enough to extrapolate data from, but not like us enough that they suffer and deserve consideration.) Yet, many human research endeavors are now seen as atrocities and we have found new ways to study our own species. There have also been miniscule changes in laws around the use of a (minority) of animals wherein certain methods are not longer permitted. There are plenty of brilliant minds in these fields with the ingenuity and creativity needed to find new ways of knowing. I appreciate that Kamath and Packer acknowledge the archaic nature of a lot of this research and encourage science to move forward.

I want to note that, since I focused on the general arguments of the book rather than the specifics, there are a lot of data in the text. The authors give evidence from many studies of many species to support their points. This is not a detached theoretical exercise. This was a refreshing book to read and I hope the authors continue to write in ways that are able to convey scientific realities and how they intertwine with our and others' lived experience.

This was also posted to my goodreads and storygraph.

Book Review: What's Real About Race

Image: The cover of the book is a black background with a multicolored striped double helix illustration going down the center. In large white letters across the top is Rina Bliss, Below that, "What's real about race," and below that, "untangling science, genetics, and society."

I picked up Rina Bliss' What's Real About Race because I have frequently found myself very confused about what race actually is, when it makes sense to call attention to it being made up as a means to control and oppress, when there are real measurable differences in health supposedly genetics based on race, and when race is a culturally existing phenomenon deeply affecting the lives of everyone in different ways. I really enjoyed this book because it does what many authors struggle to do- offers a summary of science, social justice, history, and other elements written in a way that many people outside academia are able to understand.

Bliss is a researcher in sociology and genetic science and seeks to dispel myths around the use of racial categories as distinct genetic groups while also confronting the reality that race is very much at a systemic and personal level. This shows in the ways she navigates across different modalities while conveying information to the reader that weaves them together.

I consider myself fairly well read at this point on ideas about race as a social construct. I am less familiar with how race exists in the genetic realm and it appears that I am not alone in that. Even social justice focused doctors and scientists seem to be consistently confused or knowingly convey inaccurate information in the ways they summarize their findings. The reasons for these mistakes made by scientists and medical professionals have such a wide range that it is odd how they often come to the same place of treating racial categories as clearly delineated, homogenous groups with simplistic origins and similar genomes. For some, it is straight up racism and eugenics. For others, it is habitual use of outdated and disproven classification systems that are sometimes required by certain journals and platforms. For corporations, like geneology DNA labs, it's a capitalist venture, becoming ever more destructive as these companies grow. For others still, it is to seek liberation and appropriate care and attention for oppressed and marginalized racial groups. 

What Bliss shows is that even the most social justice minded scientist, including BIPOC ones, can suffer from implicit bias or from improperly categorizing the spectrum of humanity into distinct genetic categories that do not exist. She also offers solutions to these modalities and approaches, directed both towards scientists and medical professionals as well as the reader. She expresses the importance of being able to interpret the way journalists also fall into these traps when reporting on research or demographic disparities in media. 

Bliss' ability to navigate all of these elements is a strength that makes this book live up to the title. Is Race real? Yes and no. Here and there. Relevant in many situations and irrelevant in others. All of this packed into a small volume that is readable for the masses makes this a really strong book that is not quite like other things I have read.

This was also posted to my goodreads and storygraph.