"Taking It Personally needs a warning label: DANGER, it should announce, IDEAS UNDER INTENSE PRESSURE. OPEN AT YOUR OWN RISK. Berlak and Moyenda guide us into the depths of racism, peeling away layer after layer, revealing the pervasive American devil in all its complexity. If you start the journey, you may want to turn back, you may want to look away, you will certainly want them to lighten up. But stay to the end and you will never be the same. This is a brave, embracing book—honest and unrestrained, filled with pain and grief, but never despair. In the end it is about transformation and redemption and the possibility of a more just and joyful world. Take the risk."
—William Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education, University of Illinois at Chicago, and author of A Kind and Just Parent