In Black and White

I have just finished reading Alexandra Wilson’s In Black and White – a powerful and challenging read, making, for me at least, a highly worthwhile contribution to the need to recognise the reality of racism.

Faced with that reality, she decided to do something about it, and has trained, and now practises as a barrister. The book is aptly sub-titled a young barrister’s story of race and class in a broken justice system. The stories she tells of clients who have so valued someone like her representing them as against the times when she has been assumed by the ‘system’ to be in court as an offender make some powerful points.

In a sense, I wish I didn’t believe her, because the picture that emerges is of an unfair society that has huge dollops of racism. Sadly, that is absolutely the truth. We so need folk like Alexandra Wilson to do the kind of thing she is doing, but also to tell the story.

I can’t say I enjoyed it, because you shouldn’t enjoy a book like that, but it was well worth reading, and I have no hesitation in recommending it.