Speaking of Race: How to Have Antiracist Conversations That Bring Us Together (Paperback)

Speaking of Race: How to Have Antiracist Conversations That Bring Us Together By Patricia Roberts-Miller Cover Image

Speaking of Race: How to Have Antiracist Conversations That Bring Us Together (Paperback)

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“Readers of all levels and backgrounds will appreciate the clarity with which Roberts-Miller approaches a topic so often driven by powerful emotion.”—Choice


It’s easy to say that racism is wrong. But it’s surprisingly hard to agree on what it is. Does a tired stereotype in your favorite movie make it racist? Does watching it anyway mean you’re racist? Even among like-minded friends, such discussions can quickly escalate to hurt feelings all around—and when they do, we lose valuable opportunities to fight racism.



Patricia Roberts-Miller is a scholar of rhetoric—the art of understanding misunderstandings. In Speaking of Race, she explains why the subject is a “third rail” and how we can do better: We can acknowledge that, in a racist society, racism is not the sole provenance of “bad people.” We can focus on the harm it causes rather than the intent of offenders. And, when someone illuminates our own racist blind spots, we can take it not as a criticism, but as a kindness—and an opportunity to learn and to become less racist ourselves.
Patricia Roberts-Miller, PhD, is professor emeritus of rhetoric and writing, and the former director of the University Writing Center at University of Texas at Austin. She has been teaching the subject of demagoguery since 2002, and is the author of Demagoguery and DemocracySpeaking of RaceVoices in the Wilderness, Deliberate Conflict, Fanatical Schemes, and Rhetoric and Demagoguery. She lives in Texas.

Product Details ISBN: 9781615197323
ISBN-10: 161519732X
Publisher: The Experiment
Publication Date: January 12th, 2021
Pages: 144
Language: English
Packed with helpful examples and analogies, this lucid account takes a meaningful step toward ‘reducing racism in our world.’
— Publishers Weekly