Make change How to fight injustice, dismantle systemic oppression, and own our future

Review by Booklist Review

Journalist, activist, podcaster, and social media influencer King, declared by Time magazine to be one of the 25 most important people in the world online, presents a mix of memoir and motivational treatise. His philosophy can sound simple: "It's about living intentionally, guided by hopes and goals and decisions, instead of allowing the actions of other people and corporations to drag you along every day." But King goes into instructive detail when recounting his use of social media to support families seeking justice after police killings, and how he used Twitter and Facebook to raise money for kids' organizations. After working extensively in the Black Lives Matters movement, King worked with a group called Real Justice, "which was focused on helping to elect compassionate, accessible, reform-minded district attorneys throughout the country," and which resulted in big wins. Like many online activists, King has been the subject of public scrutiny and criticism, but he also has some powerful supporters, including Bernie Sanders, who contributed the book's foreword, and a large, appreciative following.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Prominent commentator and activist King is a magnet for many seeking a way forward to a more equitable America.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

King, a journalist and Black Lives Matter activist, debuts with an impassioned guide to becoming an "effective change agent" in a time of "deep systematic widespread suffering and oppression." Drawing on the work of 19th-century German historian Leopold von Ranke, King contends that human history "alternate back and forth between improvement and regression," and describes the current political moment--including Donald Trump's election and the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va.--as a reaction to America's first black president. To bring an end to this period of social decline, King writes, activists must identify the "one single problem" they're most motivated to solve; he traces his own involvement in the Black Lives Matter movement to his biracial background and the abuse he endured at the hands of white classmates in Versailles, Ky. In the book's most effective sections, King offers directives ("whatever your gift is, bring it to the table"; "find your offline, real-life community, plug in, and get to work") illustrated by his own experiences as an organizer. Readers familiar with King from his prolific social media presence will appreciate the book's autobiographical details, while those new to his work may wish for a tighter focus on the nuts and bolts of organizing for change. Nevertheless, this fervent exhortation succeeds in making the case that the time for progressives to act is now. (Apr.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

A blend of memoir and manifesto by Black Lives Matter leader King. Born in 1979, the author was already a well-known activist, using social media for progressive causes, when a friend and Morehouse College classmate sent him a note advising him of a YouTube post showing the infamous 2014 "I can't breathe" killing of Eric Garner by New York police. "The case and the injustice of the murder…consumed me from that day forward," he writes. "I took it personally." He dug deep to discover that the NYPD had banned the chokehold that killed Garner two decades earlier and discovered that police across the country "have shot and killed an average of three people a day," most of whom never made the national news cycle, especially if they were members of ethnic minorities. Things are worse than ever, King writes, in a book that shares the spirit of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. The institutions that ostensibly protect all citizens are crumbling, gradually overcome by a creeping fascism that has risen slowly and stealthily over decades. What's to be done? "Making change isn't theoretical," writes the author. "You have to get out there and fight for it. You have to be in the game, in the campaign, in the war." Of course, that fight will involve losing some battles, as King's mentor Bernie Sanders, who provides the foreword, has experienced, and it's likely to be met by objections on the part of well-meaning people: "Nobody believes in me," "I'll start later," "I'm afraid of failure." There's no time for all that, and King advises instead getting out and becoming involved in grassroots movements: "Don't be pushy to the point of weirdness, but exchange information, and let them know that you are hoping to volunteer alongside them and could start immediately." That encouragement is welcome, and in any event, writes King, those who oppose democratic change are busy on their end: "They are not passive defenders of the status quo but deliberate, forceful advocates of it." A vigorous complement to other primers in political activism and social justice. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---

It was a beautiful, cloudless Friday morning in July of 2014. I could smell the ocean and hear the soothing sounds of its waves crashing as I took the first step out of my beat-up Hyundai and slammed the door shut. It was about 7 a.m., and Santa Monica was quiet. Rush-hour traffic in Los Angeles could be maddening, so I had left home super early that morning to beat the snarled highways and make my way to the offices of Global Green, an international environmental organization where I served as the director of communications. I was tempted, as I often was, to walk the extra block to the Pacific Coast Highway and stare out at the blue water that stretched as far as my eyes could see. Something about the ocean centers me. Seeing it never got old, but I was behind on several tasks at work, and the mounting pressure of deadlines overruled my inclination to be contemplative that morning, so I made my way inside. The job was a major change of pace for me after years of spearheading my own philanthropic projects. I had become known in charity circles for my use of social media and email listservs to build awareness and raise funds for causes, but doing it for an organization like Global Green was a new challenge, bringing me into a more corporate setting. As I climbed the steps to our cushy second-floor office, I had no expectation that this would be the day that would change the entire course of my life. Everything about it felt just like the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that. Routine. But as I reflect back on that day, and over my forty years on earth, I now see my life as split in two, existing one particular way before that Friday and in an altogether different way after it. For nearly a decade, Global Green had partnered with Vanity Fair to host its annual Oscars gala. The entire budget for the organization hinged on the success of the event. That morning, I organized our donor database, mundane but necessary work that consisted of cutting and pasting and entering data for hundreds of donors. As the hours crept along that morning and my colleagues filed in, I received a push notification on my phone from a former classmate of mine from Morehouse, where I had attended college fifteen years earlier. It was a Facebook message. "Shaun," my friend wrote. "Somebody posted something horrible on YouTube, man. The police are harassing this middle-aged brother on the street corner in New York and the dude is just begging them to leave him alone. He tells them over and over that he didn't do anything. The man wasn't armed. He wasn't violent. None of that. And all of a sudden, this plainclothes cop comes up behind him, and starts choking the shit out of him, like UFC rear naked choke-style. The cop chokes the man while the brother was still standing up ​-- ​then wrestles him to the ground and continues choking him. And Shaun ​-- ​you can hear the man yell out over and over and over again, 'I can't breathe ​-- ​I can't breathe.' He says it a dozen times. And the guy dies right there on the sidewalk, man." When I read those words, my stomach dropped. My first thought was that I couldn't click on that link in the Global Green office. Don't get me wrong: the people there were nice. But nobody ever talked about civil rights or police brutality or racial justice. I just didn't know if I was ready to explain to them what my friend told me I would be seeing. And I'm ashamed to admit this, but a small part of me thought that he must've left out a key detail somewhere along the way. What he described for me was cold-blooded murder in broad daylight, with witnesses, caught on film. I wondered whether my friend had left out an essential chunk of the story. He hadn't. Such videos have spread across the world in the years since, but before that day in July, a viral video of someone being killed by police simply did not exist, and so the reality of it was confounding. I waited until my lunch break to watch the video, turning the volume down on my computer before clicking the link. What I saw was shocking. It was just as my friend had described, but worse . . . much worse. Excerpted from Make Change: How to Fight Injustice, Dismantle Systemic Oppression, and Own Our Future by Houghton Mifflin Houghton Mifflin Harcourt All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

---