A very easy read and really helps to understand social justice and everything that comes with social justice.

A very easy read and really helps to understand social justice and everything that comes with social justice.  Read Less

I am a white, able-bodied, raised Christian, American man. And I found Is Everyone Really Equal? enlightening, hopeful, and a j...  Read More

I am a white, able-bodied, raised Christian, American man. And I found Is Everyone Really Equal? enlightening, hopeful, and a joy to read. But if the very idea of social justice education / critical race theory / women's studies makes you angry, this may not be the book for you.Full disclosure: I know Drs. DiAngelo and Sensoy personally. Which is why I was a bit hesitant to post a review - conflict of interest would lead some to dismiss my review, which is understandable. But I felt compelled to post my own thoughts after seeing the impact of the recent downvote brigade. To those wondering why a previously well-reviewed book suddenly received a bunch of 1-star reviews accompanied by brief, vague, sometimes angry comments (absolutely full of crap, If you're a bit of a nutter, this book may be for you, a radical feminist rant against men, etc.), many from folks who don't seem to have any idea what the book actually contains, the answer is simple: r/mensrights. Apparently, someone over on the Men's Rights sub-reddit got hold of one of the illustrations from the book, flipped out, and urged other members of the sub-reddit to downvote the book to oblivion (whether or not they had actually read the book). They now appear to be targeting the authors' personal websites, staff profiles, publishers, etc. If you're not familiar with r/mensrights, you might want to take a look at the wikipedia article on controversial sub-reddits; that will give you an idea of the folks we're talking about.On to the book itself: Is Everyone Really Equal? won the Critics' Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association. It has been adopted as a textbook at universities across the US and Canada. And rightly so: it's engaging, briskly written, full of salient real-world examples and backed by years of scholarly research. It seems that some of the negative reviews didn't notice (or chose to ignore) the 11 pages of references at the end of the book.The book starts at the beginning - What is Critical Social Justice? - and moves on to build a framework for thinking critically about the world as it exists, about the norms which govern our everyday lives, about the institutional constructs that accord more value to some people and less to others. This book gives the reader a vocabulary to discuss and understand these deep topics, and also introduces us to leaders, fighters and thinkers in the field of social justice: Dolores Huerta, Rachel Lloyd, Jay Silverheels, Fred Korematsu, and more. Is Everyone Really Equal? excels at taking an academic topic and making it both understandable and personally relevant to non-academics (like me!) who are nonetheless passionate about social justice.  Read Less