YA Author's Video on Racism Goes Viral

In the weeks following the police killing of George Floyd, anti-racist protests have vaulted a number of Black leaders, artists, intellectuals, and authors to the foreground of American consciousness. Among them is YA author and former bookseller Kimberly Jones, whose seven-minute video “How Can We Win” has gained national media attention, been viewed three million times, and was given the final word of John Oliver’s episode dedicated to police violence on his show Last Week Tonight.

“How Can We Win” opens with Jones dismantling the debate within Black communities regarding the value of different types of protests and riots as a distraction. “As long as we’re focused on what they’re doing, we’re not focusing on why they’re doing it,” she says.

But Jones reserves much of the video for a searing critique of the white supremacist “up from your bootstraps” take on the American Dream, which she says ignores how Black poverty in America is inextricably linked to the fact that the nation’s economics were built on slavery. Equating it to a rigged game of Monopoly, Jones likens it to making Black people “have to play on behalf of the person you’re playing against. You have to play and make money and make wealth for them, and then you have to turn it over to them.”

“You can’t win,” Jones says. “The game is fixed.”