STRENGTH OF SOUL by Naomi Raquel Enright proposes tangible strategies and ideas on how to challenge systemic racism through naming and resisting the ideology of racial difference and of white supremacy at its root. Enright explores racism and the language that upholds this ideology through personal narratives that includes an examination of her family’s experience. Throughout this volume, Enright shares reflections of her identity growing up as a bilingual, multiethnic individual, and as the mother of a son presumed to be white. She also advances ideas of how to confront societal notions of an inherent difference between the lived experiences of white people and everyone else, which results in the widely-held belief that there is an inevitable “us” and “them.” In this regard, Enright suggests that embracing one’s total identity can allow people to challenge systemic racism as well as the language and ideology that created it and upholds it. In these poignant and deeply personal stories, Enright allows readers to reconsider a society on a genuine path towards justice, healing and true transformation. STRENGTH OF SOUL is for anyone who is willing to rethink the status quo and is interested in creating systemic change vis-à-vis institutionalized and internalized racism. Cover art: Sebastián Whittaker. Cover design: Adam Whittaker.
Here's What People Are Saying
“In STRENGTH OF SOUL, Naomi Raquel Enright, a bilingual, Ecuadorian and Jewish American woman, shares her journey through American society as it constantly seeks to confine her and her immediate family members to starkly different racial categories. We feel safe with Enright. Her argument builds gradually until its conclusion hits us with devastating power. A beautiful book.” ~David Tipson, Executive Director, New York Appleseed
“In this deeply personal reflection and call-to-action, Naomi Raquel Enright ambitiously flips the script on the way we’ve categorized Americans for generations. Drawing upon her multiethnic family’s lived experiences, the ‘strength of soul’ her parents instilled in her, as well as her work as an educator and activist, Enright is uniquely positioned to challenge all of us to reject the longstanding racial framework that continues to reinforce racism and white supremacy. What a gift Enright has given us with STRENGTH OF SOUL.” ~Catherine Wigginton Greene, Director of the feature documentary, I’m Not Racist… Am I? (2014)
“Thank you, Naomi Raquel Enright for your gifts of windows and mirrors in STRENGTH OF SOUL. I saw what it is and means to be a blended family in a culture dominated by the supremacist consciousness of a single way of being in the world; that single way of being compounded by the construct of race. I found myself in the memoir as a person color who also navigates the United States, having to constantly resist imposed and assumed identities. I hear the writer’s voice: resist.” ~Donald Burroughs, Educator and National SEED Project Staff
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.