Pacific Grove anti-racism activist turns his experience into his first book.

Dirrick Williams has spent years having tough conversations about race. Now he's put his energy into a book.

Williams, who grew up in Pacific Grove, is best known around town as a community leader and for the anti-racism class he created called Euro-Centric Cultural Reflectionism, or ECCR. The course came out of a frustration he felt watching the energy of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests start to fade.

In response, he built a 14-week program where small groups meet over Zoom and dig into their own feelings about race, including guilt, shame, anger and fear. From there, the class works its way through how racism actually functions in our society, and then into Black history and culture.

Williams knows this stuff personally. In 2018, a couple attacked him outside Monterey Lanes in Monterey, called him a racial slur, and broke his jaw in three places. 

The book is called Don't Be Just Another Brick in the Wall: A Conversational Journey with Truth and Self-Becoming, and it's not quite like anything else out there.

It starts with a small, everyday moment: a tired dad, coffee in hand, calls out to his daughter as she heads off to her first day at a new school:  "Don't be just another brick in the wall!" A bystander overhears it and can't shake the phrase. So he goes looking for an actual brick wall to talk to. And the wall talks back.

Over 17 chapters, the narrator and the wall go back and forth about identity, fear and what it really means to know yourself. The wall asks hard questions and doesn't let the narrator off the hook easily. It pushes him to look at where his beliefs came from, why he acts the way he does, and what parts of himself were shaped by other people's expectations rather than his own choices. 

What makes the book work is that it doesn't feel preachy. Williams doesn't hand you a to-do list. Instead, you get to listen in on a conversation and kind of have it yourself at the same time. The wall has a dry sense of humor, which keeps things from getting too heavy, but the questions it asks are real ones.

Williams said the book grew out of the same curiosity that drives his teaching: What does it actually take to change? Not just show up to a training and nod along, but really shift something inside yourself? His answer, both in the classroom and on the page, is that it starts with slowing down and being honest about who you are and how you got that way.

Don't Be Just Another Brick in the Wall is available now. To learn more about Williams and his work, visit blaac.org.