The Movement for Black Lives catalyzed in the years following the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. He was pursued, shot, and killed by citizen-vigilante George Zimmerman in 2012. It was in 2013 that the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter made its debut on social media via the Twitter platform, when Alicia Garza, a Bay Area organizer, shared the message as a love letter to Black people. Zimmerman had just been acquitted, an outcome that stunned and disappointed many organizers and onlookers. In the coming weeks and months, Garza, along with her comrades Opal Tometi and Patrisse Khan-Cullors, became the leaders of what would be known as the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement or the Movement for Black Lives.

The movement has been mischaracterized as focusing only on police brutality against Black Americans or being “leaderless.” Moreover, BLM’s existence in the mass media has been mired in myth, misunderstanding, and stereotypes regarding its focus, modes of organizing, and the structural concerns toward which it is oriented. Stay Woke’s primary objective is to bring clarity to the motivations and critical events that shaped the actions and mobilizations of the early Movement for Black Lives. Specifically, it highlights the structural racism and systemic processes of anti-Blackness that long predated the movement and underlie its growth during the “first self-identified Black President’s second term in office” (p. 2; emphasis in original).

Stay Woke is much more than a theoretical exercise or analysis. Written as a manual for antiracist activists and thinkers interested in working against the status quo, the book is structured for ease of use and instruction. Each chapter ends with potential questions and debate topics, additional materials for review, and further research to assist readers as they apply the concepts from the book. Rather than writing the text in the impersonal third person, as is customary in much of academic writing, Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith have composed a text written personally, as a jargon-free conversation. This approach and tone render the text accessible and fully applicable to readers invested in embodying the lessons therein.

Structurally, the chapters build directly from one another. The first chapter provides a background to the Movement of Black Lives, with an emphasis on offering tools and resources for those “who benefit from white privilege” (p. 3). Providing brief overviews of structural segregation, racial gaps in income and wealth distribution, policing and surveillance of Black communities, housing and employment inequity, and the implications these factors have for Black health outcomes, Lopez Bunyasi and Watts Smith underscore the precise societal factors that motivated and sustained the BLM movement. The second chapter provides a full index of terms that are used throughout the book, terms that largely circulate in academic and movement communities. These terms are also bolded throughout the book, reminding readers of the terminology that often eludes those outside the Ivory Tower or social movement organizations. The third chapter synthesizes the historical underpinnings of Reconstruction era electoral politics and their long-term shifts into the Black Power Movement of the 1970s, led by Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael).

The fourth, and perhaps most critical, chapter examines the key differences between being “nonracist” and “antiracist.” In doing so, Lopez Bunyasi and Watts Smith, through an investigation of “the scripts that many of us have learned in order to be good, friendly complicit racists” (p. 147), challenge readers to ask themselves whether they uphold white supremacy in their day-to-day lives. Engaging with such work as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s pathbreaking analysis of women’s early contributions to Black civil rights movement work in the post-Reconstruction moment, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (1993); Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s canonical work on color-blindness, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (2003); and Cathy Cramer’s in-depth analysis of white intragroup aggression post-recession, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (2016), this chapter is a comprehensive lesson plan in debunking common misperceptions about the ways that individuals contribute to and reproduce racism. Furthermore, it offers tactics for performing tasks that actively resist white supremacy and racism.

In the fifth chapter, Lopez Bunyasi and Watts Smith hone in on the specific frames, messages, and intentions of the Black Lives Matter movement by focusing on methods of creating social change. For example, this chapter highlights the deep political impacts of discriminatory voter ID laws, state and local budget restrictions that limit the amount of resources provided to underserved communities, gerrymandering and voter mobilization issues, as well as disparities in criminal justice and monetary bail that result in Black defendants being “assigned higher bail amounts, and [being] less likely to be able to post bail than whites” (p. 184). In the sixth chapter, Lopez Bunyasi and Watts Smith outline 21 affirmations meant to “offer instructive encouragement and some final food for thought to help [readers] grow the movement for racial equality” (p. 191). Taken together, these substantive chapters provide a broad and thorough examination of the BLM movement as a matter of praxis. They also provide a map for academics working to understand how they fit within the larger Movement for Black Lives.

Although the text is thorough and intentional about noting the writers’ distance from grassroots social organizing, it is worth acknowledging that the perspective provided in the book is bounded by the experiences of its writers. Using their experiences as academic women of color who are also researchers and educators, Lopez Bunyasi and Watts Smith provide a new perspective of the Movement for Black Lives, one that, although not forged on the ground floor within the movement itself, brings together their deep love for Black people and their commitment to using their expertise to educate others about social change. As Lopez Bunyasi and Watts Smith explain in the book’s opening chapter, they “wrote this book because there are many people who want to help bring about racial equality and have been looking for help to take steps in the right direction” (p. 6). It is within this container of providing help and guidance to those invested in creating a more just world that Stay Woke emerges.

The primary strength of this book is its approach. Most literature written on social movements and collective action is rooted in theoretical claims that are frequently illustrated through cases and examples. These literatures, although they are imperative within the social sciences and critical in stretching our knowledge of the ways movements work, rarely provide a rubric to apply the theoretical concepts and frames identified. Stay Woke provides both theory and practice (or praxis) and so functions both as a tool for education and one for movement mobilization.

Stay Woke should be taken up by academics and educators at every level, especially those whose courses fall under the broad umbrella of race and ethnicity, movements and collective action, social justice, and civic education.