Layla Saad

Me and White Supremacy started as a free Instagram challenge in 2018: twenty-eight days of prompts asking white readers to examine their own behaviour in writing rather than to discuss the subject in the abstract. Around ninety thousand people downloaded the workbook that came out of it, and Sourcebooks published the expanded version in 2020, where it reached the bestseller lists during that summer's protests. Layla Saad is British-born of East African and Middle Eastern parentage and has lived in Qatar. The method is the argument: no reading list, no history lecture, a daily question and a demand that the reader write the answer down. Critics of the book say a personal inventory is not the same as changing anything institutional, which Saad has never disputed; her case is that the inventory has to come first. She followed it with the podcast Good Ancestor and a book of that name.