Carly’s Comments (group member since Aug 16, 2017)

Carly’s comments from the Here to Learn Book Club: Education on Race in America group.

The value in this book, I think. lies mainly in its historical significance and that of its author. In my edition from 1989, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. gives a fantastic introduction, explaining this in regard to the main character:

"If such vanity suggests an ego afflicted by self-division, he is the first flawed character in Afro-American fiction, the first instance where a character's fate is determined not by environmental forces such as racism but by the choices that he makes. Whereas the subjects of black autobiographies heretofore sought to reveal themselves as inherently noble, sensitive and sympathetic characters, the ex-coloured man emerges from the very beginning of his own narration as a person made unattractive by his own hubris."

Amazing! I have to say I didn't find this story particularly compelling (I was definitely annoyed by the hubris, as well as what I viewed as a bit of - pandering? self-preservation? - in how he tended to give equal weight to racist and anti-racist arguments), but I think it's important to have read it in its crucial historical context.

Did anything else strike you as you read this?

As a reminder, this will be my last post in this group as moderator. If you are interested in taking over moderation of the group, please email me at info@carlya2z.com and we can certainly chat.

Take care, everyone, and happy reading!

Hi everyone,

In August 2017, in the wake of the white supremacist rally and attack in Charlottesville, I started Here to Learn to encourage myself and others to become versed in the history and current issues surrounding racism in America. It was and still is my firm belief that knowledge is our individual and collective power, empathy, light and necessary driver for change.

Since then, we've read over 20 books from authors of many backgrounds and perspectives, and hopefully many of you have taken away some insight you didn't have before. That's all I wanted for this group - to be part of the mechanism that powers individuals to go forth and grow, for a greater good.

I'm moving into a new chapter in my life, and I will no longer be able to moderate this book club. It is my sincere hope, though, that if someone is interested in leading the 40 people in this group to a greater awareness and more lively discussions than I could, that he/she/they allow me to pass the torch. Our current book, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, will be my last to post about, and I'll be taking my leave on March 1, 2021.

This group is now a cache of knowledge, and I think it has value in simply that. But if someone wants to build this cache even further, taking on board the core principles of diverse perspectives and civil participation, I would be happy to have a chat. Feel free to message me here or email info@carlya2z.com.

I hope you all have enjoyed and found this resource useful, and I hope we can all go out into the world, in our various ways, and make it better than we found it.

With hope and gratitude,

Carly

The reason I love The Fire Next Time so much is that, as a white person in America, this book showed me myself. And from that, I was able to understand how I exist in this peculiar American racial dynamic and exactly what work I would need to undertake - crucially, internally - to help change anything. A lot of books about race make me feel like I'm looking on race issues from the outside, or that I'm unwittingly trapped in some socio-historical, surface-level binary because I'm white, and there's nothing else to the story.

But James Baldwin understood something that, thank God, he articulated, because I've never heard anyone else with such a deep and total grasp of the heart of racial issues. Since I first read this book in 2016, I have thought about his words almost constantly and have had so many ideas and experience that have spun out from them. The album I made as an independent musician even opens with Baldwin's words, and I surreptitiously placed this book in the background of my music video as a little 'thank you'.

Perhaps one of the most important core messages I gleaned from The Fire Next Time - and this is my interpretation; feel free to give me yours in the replies - is that white people's role in race issues is not about hate. That word is thrown around so often now, as if there is simply an evil core to a whole swath of humans, with no rhyme or reason to it besides the dry fact of history, that drives the engine of racism. But Baldwin grants white people the benefit of a soul, a human existence like everyone else, which - let's face it - is much more realistic, and actually gives us something to WORK with here. If we believe that people are simply hate-filled, there's not much we can do about that. It's a supreme othering, a tempting and convenient explanation that allows us to say, "Welp, they're hopeless. Nothing I can do. They just have hate in their hearts. And thank God I'm not like THAT."

But if we believe, as Baldwin did, that the problem is a very different one, fundamentally a human one on every level, for everyone, we can connect with something we can act on. Baldwin says of white Americans:

"Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum - that is, any reality - so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality - for this touchstone can only be oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is unaware of it (is unaware of so much!), are historical and public attitudes. They do not relate to the present any more than they relate to the person. Therefore, whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves."

Damn. Damn damn damn. Have you ever heard the core problem of racism articulated as joylessness? As not an ignorance of education or intellect, but an ignorance of oneself? As the inability to renew ourselves at the fountain of our own lives? To me, this is the crux. This is the word and the life and everything else.

America is defined by delusion. When Europeans first got to it, they called it the New World. But literally the opposite was true. There were people already living there. It was a very old world. But that had no bearing on colonizers. For them it seemed new - and they really, really needed it to be new because they really, really needed to escape some shit back home and become 'new' people - so that's now "reality". This gets extrapolated through American history and we begin to lose sight of what reality actually is. We have lied to ourselves so much that we no longer recognize the truth, and we can no longer be guided by it. We made up the concept of race to justify our slaveholding, and now "race" is our unquestioned reality. We told ourselves that material wealth in itself will make us happier and more successful than anything else can - literally looking upon the unhappiness it causes and calling it happiness - so now we can't even tell what happiness actually is.

It's interesting, then, that people seem surprised how far we've been able to take this delusion. Conspiracy theories abound now, fake news is rampant, we exist in illogical political extremes, lies are told directly to our faces by those in power with no consequences. But when have we ever had a "touchstone for reality"? Baldwin knew in 1963 that we'd lost that. It was only a matter of time before we became so detached that we didn't even recognize reality when it's place directly in front of us, when we lived in a world with no "reality" whatsoever.

There so many other important, eerily prescient parts of this book. I'm just going to note the ones here that have proved most meaningful for me. After all, I can't say it as well as Baldwin can. Which of these, or others, struck you the most? What are you taking away from this reading?

"There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be 'accepted' by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this - which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never - the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed."

"Whether in private debate or in public, any attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim movement came about, and how it has achieved such force, was met with a blankness that revealed the little connection that the [white] liberals' attitudes have with their perceptions or their lives, or even their knowledge - revealed, in fact, that they could deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man."

"People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility."

"In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American goodwill can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems. These have been dealt with, when they have been dealt with at all, out of necessity - and in political terms, anyway, necessity means concessions made in order to stay on top."

"Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have."

"White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want. And this assumption - which, for example, makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negroes accept and adopt white standards - is revealed in all kinds of striking ways, from Bobby Kennedy's assurance that a Negro can become President in forty years to the unfortunate tone of warm congratulation with which so many liberals address their Negro equals. It is the Negro, or course, who is presumed to have become equal - an achievement that not only proves the comforting fact that perseverance has no color but also overwhelmingly corroborates the white man's sense of his own value."

"Therefore, a vast amount of the energy that goes into what we call the Negro problem is produced by the white man's profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white, not to be seen as he is, and at the same time a vast amount of that white anguish is rooted in the white man's equally profound need to be seen as he is, to be released from the tyranny of his mirror. All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word 'love' here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth."

"But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand."

There's just no one like Toni Morrison.

Something she says through one of Song of Solomon's characters, Susan Byrd, strikes me as a through-line in much of Morrison's work, something that sums up some of the main reasons why her work is so important:

"Those must have been some times, back then. Some bad times. It's a wonder anybody knows who anybody is." (324)

In her essay The Site of Memory, Morrison talks about reading slave narratives and the realization that there's so much information we have lost; crucially, we rarely have access to the interior lives of the enslaved. Morrison's work then, does the absolutely necessary work of excavating those lives:

"On the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply. What makes it fiction is the nature of the imaginative act: my reliance on the image - on the remains - in
addition to recollection, to yield up a kind of a truth."

And it certainly does feel like a kind of truth. Morrison quotes Zora Neale Hurston:

"Like the dead-seeming cold rocks, I have memories within that came out
of the material that went to make me."

Whew. So basically what we have in Song of Solomon, to my mind, is an excavation, firmly rooted in "fidelity to the milieu... in which my ancestors actually lived", and presentation to all who would listen of the interior lives, and the generational interior lives, of the enslaved. Which of course are beautifully complex, like this story. Full of mythology and the kind of hope that bends reality and stories - lots of stories.

And of course, by doing this, she rings the bells in the interior lives of us all. This connects us, whatever our race or nationality, to those enslaved people and helps us understand. Perhaps helps us be a little more human. For me, it's like she throws open a curtain we all assumed, and some of us hoped, was sealed shut by history. It strikes at something visceral and real. I love how Morrison summed it up in a video I watched:

"This story is about a young man learning to fly."

What are your thoughts? Feel free to discuss in this thread.

Morrison's essay The Site of Memory is available here: https://blogs.umass.edu/brusert/files....

This book looks at the concept of race in the context of genetics and its supposed correlations with intelligence, athletic ability, creativity, etc.

I found the title of this book misleading, as it doesn't actually address how to argue with racists - it's kind of an unabashed publicity stunt of a title - but it does offer some insight into what current science tells us, or doesn't tell us, about race.

Essentially, this entire text can be summed up with the following: "Geneticists don't really know a lot about genes yet. But genes probably don't correlate to folk definitions of race. It's probably mostly about culture."

It's a lot of "maybes" and "probablys" and "we have absolutely no ideas", which doesn't inspire a huge amount of confidence, and for me doesn't make for a compelling read. What we can glean from the data Rutherford lays out, though, is that it seems to point pretty well to the idea that race is by and large a sociological and cultural phenomenon, particularly the way we currently define - or don't precisely define - it. There's a lot of "correlation without causation" and a lot of (well deserved) grumbling about pseudoscience and misguided lay interpretation.

Basically, Rutherford says, we have simply not been able to make a case that observed differences in races have a biological or genetic basis, and that doesn't seem to be in the cards - at least in any significant way - in the future. He doesn't get into the socio-cultural aspect much at all, but we've read tons of resources in this group in which this kind of data proves much more compelling, buttressing Rutherford's point.

Ultimately, if you're interested in science, this might be a good primer for you, and his points are good ones. I found the book unfortunately very dull and a bit too over-my-head, as I'm not very scientifically-minded. I'd recommend instead watching the three-part Race: The Power of Illusion series mentioned in my last post, which makes many of Rutherford's points in a much clearer and more intriguing way.

What did you think? Am I on my own here? Feel free to discuss!

Hi everyone.

I hope you're all getting along okay with our current book How to Argue with a Racist. There's a three-part video series I think goes along with this content very well, and it has helped me immensely in understanding the idea of science in race, particularly the concept that race isn't biologically real.

It's a documentary series from California Newsreel called Race: The Power of an Illusion. You can rent it on Vimeo (links below). It features tons of prominent figures talking about foundational race concepts and is edited together really well and clearly. I watched the whole thing twice back-to-back!

I hope you enjoy it, and feel free to reply to this post with any reactions or feedback.

Documentary page on California Newsreel site: http://newsreel.org/video/race-the-po...

Watch the trailer and rent on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/race

I'm gonna be honest here.

With the state of America after the murder of George Floyd, with the pandemic ravaging our certainty and security and entire sense of reality, with major life decisions in my and many people's midsts, I had a hard time focusing on this book at times.

It's inarguably an important book, an insightful book, a well-written book. And those of us whose perspectives as white people have been utterly shifted through this know that we need books like this. I just want to tell you it's okay if you weren't able to finish it this time. Sit, breathe, process, and come back to it.

The journey to and with anti-racism is long. We're receiving a lot of input right now, and neurologically we can only process so much at one time. Biologically the adrenaline coursing through us at the swelling of protests and public outcry must recede into a kind of exhaustion. The good news of course is that this resource, and all resources in this internet age, will be there when you're ready. You are allowed to, and in fact you must, take the long view and respect when your body tells you to stop, as well as when it tells you to go.

If you feel you can get into this now, let's go.

First of all, as an artist, I really appreciated this book. It's fascinating to me to see an artist's creative development over time, and this book presents Ta-Nehisi Coates' essays for The Atlantic in chronological order over eight years. I took lots of notes, increasingly so as the book progressed and his points became sharper, deeper and more nuanced. I also thought the work got a bit more needlessly dense, but judging by how much time it takes to scroll through all my notes, it didn't detract much from my learning.

For me, the overall theme of Coates' work is the centrality of race in American life. Coates sometimes catches flak for his intransigence on these subjects and his unwillingness to allow white people much comfort in his delivery. But he's not wrong. His struggle seems to be trying to get people to see that the thought of race as "marginal and provincial is in itself parcel to white supremacy, premised on the notion that the foundational crimes of this country are mostly irrelevant to its existence (114)."

The man must be exhausted trying to get this point across because, to me, that is the central tenet of the anti-racist struggle that could, if it were realized, serve as the nail in the coffin of white supremacy: the understanding that everything in our American lives is party to and predicated on race, and that nothing will be solved until we address it. It is quite simply delusional to believe that our healthcare, our houses, our schools, our prisons, our policies, our geographies, our jobs, and our relationships to ourselves and our families can exist as they do without racism having been employed to make it so. Coates makes this point in brutal, elegant, purposeful fashion.

I was really satisfied to note so many connections between Coates' text and those we've read already in this group. It gives me hope that all our learnings are becoming some sort of cohesive whole and that, over time, with more resources under our belts, we'll be better able to make these connections ourselves and better prepared for the ant-racist struggle. Some examples are his multiple references to William Julius Wilson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose ideas we read about in the book Ghetto, his elucidation of the causes and effects of incarceration in the black community echoing Michelle Alexander's in The New Jim Crow, and this line, which makes me think of Toure's conception of a modern "post-blackness":

"But increasingly, as we move into the mainstream, black folks are taking a third road - being ourselves (54)."

Coates also waxes lyrical about James Baldwin, my favorite author of all time, whose books we will read in future.

There are so many eloquent turns of phrase and insightful quotables I could pull out here, but one passage in particular struck me. Fittingly, it happens when Coates discusses his love for Baldwin and dives into the kind of intimate excavation of white people's lives that characterizes much of Baldwin's nonfiction:

"The need for purpose and community, for mission, is human. It's embedded in our politics, which are not simply fights over health coverage, tax credits, and farm subsidies but parcel to the search for meaning... The popular notion that America is so exceptional in its virtue that even its invasions are alchemized into liberations lends meaning to the political lives of its citizens. Through war, hatred, violence, communities draw fences and define themselves... White supremacy is a crime and a lie, but it's also a machine that generates meaning (214-5)."

I mean... yep. And meaning is fundamental to our lives. To ask people to give up racist ideas is to ask them to shed their very identities and values and some of the only threads that keep them tied to themselves. With this in mind, how do we ask people to become anti-racists? How do we navigate this delicate, extremely personal matter?

One more note here: if you are looking for an exploration of how race affected Barack Obama's presidency and what came after, look no further than the essays in this book, particularly Fear of a Black President and My President Was Black.

I want to end on words that pertain particularly well to us in this group. Hopefully they can remind us of what we are trying to achieve here and help us on our journey forward:

"Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate... we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion - and that is perhaps what scares us (200-1)."

What do you think? How are you feeling right now? Do you have any insights you've gained during this time that you want to share, related to this book or not?

I hope you all stay well and humble for the long road ahead.

Hello everyone,

Well, here we are: in a time both shocking and familiar, fueled into words and action amid the stress of this pandemic and the chaos caused, because another black human being has been murdered in front of us.

I know I don't need to remind you, but this is why we do this work. This is why we are all here, trying to learn. This is why we find time to sit down, be humble, and educate ourselves. I hope you feel the anger and the helplessness and the despair alongside enough optimism to keep going. Even when the world looks like it does now and racial issues seem intractable, remember what James Baldwin said, "The impossible is the least that one can demand."

Our education needs to be coupled with action. This is a moment to share what we've learned, when it's appropriate, and to donate, protest, talk, listen, write and make art. Please also know that your fellow Here to Learn members want racial justice just like you do, so please use this resource to connect and support each other. Let's help one another demand the impossible.

I hope everyone is enjoying We Were Eight Years in Power. It is proving very timely for me, and I look forward to discussing it. Please join in on the issues raised, even if you haven't been able to read it all the way through by the deadline.

Thank you for being here and for contributing to this group. Let's keep learning.

I have to be honest that I found this book to be self-important, out of touch, and terribly written. There were so many random occurrences, details, and literary devices and so little emotion and substance. There was no flow to the ideas and I lost count of the times when I looked up from a paragraph and just said, "What is she talking about now??"

I took this as the author's inability to distance herself enough from her subject to articulate fully on it (as well as an editor's folly). To me, it seemed as if she was thinking only of herself and her experiences without asking herself what the point was for the reader. Personally, I didn't see the point.

There were certainly valid and interesting insights peppered throughout the book. Many, though, were out of context and/or never drawn out enough for the reader to get the full picture. For instance, on page 208 she notes in herself "a tendency to cherish my neuroses as a sign of my specialness". This is a very timely and complex idea, but where does she take it? Nowhere.

But I suppose we should examine what Jefferson says here about race, particularly from her interesting vantage point of being "bourgeois black". I think her perspective can be instructive as a sort of counterpoint to an image of blackness in popular culture that is singular and definitive while being unrepresentative of many black people's lives.

On page 164, Jefferson notes, "strategic privilege and flagrantly displayed prosperity let you forget." She affirms that she was insulated from many of racism's historical barriers and realities, but notes the complexity of never being fully protected: "A Negro girl could never be purely innocent", etc. She does detail, albeit erratically, the psychological complexities of being "in two worlds at once". I wish she would have drawn this out more.

I also see shades of other books we've read when Jefferson says things like, on page 173, "Teach your psyche to adapt its solo life to a group obbligato". That's very Shelby Steele, don't you think? It's interesting how privilege, as she mentions, can make some swing more in this direction in order to fit in with other black people or the other in order to fit in with white people. Of course there is little room in the societal imagination to conceive of "that sanctioned forbidden space between white vulnerability and black invincibility". This highlights the difficult choices many people of color must make in America on how to live as an individual. It's a choice most white people never have to think about in the same way.

What did you think of the book? Do you have a totally different take? Did you get something else out of it? Let us know!

As a staunch believer in the power of the individual, I really like the main theory Toure posits here, and it rings true from my (non-black) point of view. We are in an age now where "blackness" is not as clear-cut as it once was, not so directly and compactly organized around overt, de jure oppression, and therefore is not easily definable internally or externally. I see this theory and this book as part of a larger discussion on the making of identity in our modern age.

There are some very important and perhaps unanswerable questions here, and I'm melding two quotes from pages 41 and 42 here: "We have to get past this notion that Black culture is separate and apart from America... that only Black people can understand it and white people have no relationship to it... much of the world feels Black culture is available to them. So what impact does that have on Black culture and its producers? How does that transform Black culture and, with it, Black identity?"

For me, the center of all this is the age-old imperative to define oneself with nicely delineated boundaries that fit an accepted social construct. It's a Sisyphean task, quite impossible, but perhaps even more so because of America's insistence on being perfect and successful and setting one narrow goal and working as hard as you can toward it, forever. So many of us in this American landscape feel, for perhaps a rich variety of reasons, the need to define ourselves quite narrowly, and perhaps because a rather narrow view of Blackness was one of the only definitions allowed for a time, that definition felt necessary and good and communal. But now that we have so many possible definitions, how does one go about choosing one? Does that threaten the notion of 'communal'? I don't envy anyone having to traverse the complexity of identity in our modern age, when we are aware of so much, but especially those having to do so on the short end of such a stiff yet malleable construct as race, and STILL in the face of racism. I think Toure does an excellent job of laying out these complexities.

Even so, I balk at his continual invoking of Fortune 500 CEOs and presidents as the peak of success in whichever definition of blackness one may choose, especially at the end of the book as he's preparing to leave the reader with perhaps his defining idea; he has just wrapped up a discussion of how black people should access power from within instead of 'throwing rocks' and essentially infiltrate white power structures to succeed, and his last sentence is: "You can fight the power, but I want us to be the power."

But what does power, in the American sense, really do? Are powerful people in America happy? Are they satisfied? Are they more fully human? If he's talking about personal empowerment, great, but I'm not sure he is because he so often references the ultimate goal of positions of power and influence. In any case, the pressure in this country of being "successful" and "fulfilling your potential" at all costs is so great, even if it did work for most people, I'm just not sure it's the savior that Toure and many others would imply.

I'm interested to hear your thoughts about this book. The idea of post-blackness is certainly a fascinating one and a necessary one to wrestle with. Do you agree with Toure? If not, why? Is there anything that struck you that you'd never thought of before?

I think this book tears at racism in a way we haven't yet seen in our readings. Yes, like the rest, it does it through content, but unlike the others (and more like James Baldwin, my favorite author, whom we'll surely read soon), what Lorde achieves here is a connection with the reader that is of such authenticity and unrelenting honesty as to be a sort of visceral, uncomfortable, gloriously intimate act. In doing this, she is saying, "We are one" in a way that supersedes any race, gender or other line of division. She is so honest about herself that her book is effectively about us.

I believe that no amount of telling and teaching people about race will change anything without addressing the fundamental perception of difference so many of us hold. It is vital that we learn about, for instance, people of color, not only in the context of being people of color, but of being people, full stop. Interestingly, because of Lorde's intersectionality and her eloquent way of expressing it, she also forces us to address the social divisions in our sexualities - to confront homosexuality (for those of us who identify as heterosexual) and, to a lesser extent, polyamory (for those of us who identify as monogamous) as functions of the same human experience we inhabit. She does it by being so open about herself, addressing taboo thoughts, fears, shames that we find we also hold. We connect with her and she pulls that thread of connection a little farther than what we might be comfortable with.

I wish the book would have come a bit more full-circle in a literary sense, tying up some of the loose ends, but I found that certainly wasn't my biggest concern reading this. I read all the way to the end because I constantly wanted to see what else Audre had to teach me. Books by such intersectional individuals are still rare, at least in the mainstream, which I think makes them even more important for us to spend time with.

As a side note, I think I've found one of my favorite lines in literature in Zami:

"Some of us died inside the gaps between the mirrors and those turned-away eyes."

Beautiful and profound, like so much of the rest of this book.

Excellent feedback Linda, thank you. And I'm so glad you learned new things from this book.

I agree - the way Kendi describes how the burden of racism falls so intensely on the "unexceptional" black person totally changed the way I think as well. There is a judgment of black people generally that either you are a credit or a discredit to your race, but it always assumes race - in the place of humanity. You cannot simply be a human, which... what else is there, you know? Racism gets at the root of people this way, ensuring black people are not allowed, societally speaking, to escape from being "a black person" with all its connotations. It strikes me that that's how the wheel of racism keeps turning after so many centuries.

Linda wrote: "Great stuff Carly - I’m behind on my reading but your remarks inspire me to catch up! I don’t think I learned this in The New Jim Crow but I was surprised to learn that the welfare queen that Ronal..."

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts Linda!

About a quarter of the way through this book, as I was making notes which basically consisted of every line in the book, I realized I was going to have to read it again as soon as I finished, that I would never properly process it in one go. So I stopped taking notes and let myself absorb the whole of Kendi's message, the framework for antiracist thinking that he offers up. Now that I've closed the book, I look forward to going back in so I can allow his insight to truly affect my perspective. This is one of those books that, I think, if you dare open up to the idea that you might be racist, has the power to change your life.

Kendi takes so many of the basic ideas that pervade American society in regard to race: biology, behavior, culture, class, etc. And he challenges the assumptions around these ideas one by one. It's brutal. Everything that's hidden comes to light. There's nowhere to hide any racist assumption you might hold. And that's why I loved this book and why I feel like I need to read it again - to let Kendi clearly identify and attack my deeply held racist assumptions so they have a chance at being killed off for good.

For instance, Kendi's words about so-called black crime. This is a subject I've always had problems with, and I haven't been able to find a satisfying perspective until this book. Our first book, The New Jim Crow, got really close by showing that white people and black people commit many crimes at similar rates but are incarcerated at greatly disparate rates and by clearly showing how the prison system keeps black people disenfranchised and disempowered. But still, in my home community in New Orleans at the time, I saw what I thought was a clear link between crime and black skin. I was around a lot of crime that seemed to be mostly committed by black people, and it bothered me. Was this proof that black people are more prone to crime? If so, what does that mean for my desire to be antiracist, for the idea of antiracism as a whole?

Kendi's words are thus: "We, the young Black super-predators, were apparently being raised with an unprecedented inclination toward violence - in a nation that presumably did not raise White slaveholders, lynchers, mass incarcerators, police officers, corporate officials, venture capitalists, financiers, drunk drivers, and war hawks to be violent."

Damn. How much white crime was around me that I somehow failed to recognize? I knew a guy who used to steal from the cash register at my work. White. I knew tons of people who smoked weed and did other drugs. White. The drunk guy who plowed his truck into 28 people at a Mardi gras parade? White. Crime was everywhere in America in every race, but I wasn't paying attention. I also wonder how many other crimes I had only assumed were committed by black people. How many times had a black person come to my mind when I actually did not know the race of the perpetrator? And how many of the crimes committed by white people are simply hidden because they might be white collar? And how many deaths result from these, including from the majority white government officials who make racist policies?

This brings up another of Kendi's assertions - that violent crime is a function of poverty instead of race. New Orleans has a lot of poverty, and because of the massive amount of gentrification since Hurricane Katrina (of which I was a part), both the city's poverty and crime are witnessed now by a lot of white people like me. There was poverty around where I lived, so there was crime. And when you're used to thinking of black people as criminals, it's much easier to conceive of it as purely racial and exclude this evidence to the contrary. Also I should mention that when I lived there, New Orleans was about 60% African American, 30% white, and 10% "other". So even without poverty, if there was crime in the city, and it looked like black people were committing most of them, well, statistically that's simply proportional and would not necessarily signify anything else.

Kendi's central premise is also a really useful tool of perspective. He claims, as Ta-nehisi Coates does, that the word "racist" has been misused and dramatically twisted to be basically the worst insult you can lob at someone, when really it is simply a descriptive term. People, he claims, can be racist one minute and antiracist the next. And that goes for all people - black, white or any other race. This is certainly an effective way to offload the crippling shame that many of us, especially white people, feel around race. That one awfully misguided thing I said years ago doesn't have define my entire identity; I can take into account the antiracist things I've said, too, and continually strive to make those my norm. I think that shame is the source of a lot of inaction and negative reaction in our society (although I do think a bit of shame can help correct behavior as well), and thinking of racism and antiracism in this way evens the playing field so to speak because we all have both capacities within us.

A few other things in this book rang so true for me that I physically shouted "YES!" at the pages. One such idea is this: "What if economic, political, or cultural self-interest drives racist policymakers, not hateful immorality, not ignorance?" I deeply believe this to be true on the most basic level, as I've witnessed a lot of racism from people who I wouldn't describe necessarily as ignorant or hateful - including myself! But they are self-interested, like all of us to some extent or other. And if we don't admit this, we risk misdiagnosing so much of our society's ailments and the way it works generally, which means we will never be able to treat the ailments properly. We will never be able to heal.

I'm really looking forward to exploring this book further. There's so much more to talk about. What stood out to you? What basic assumptions have you questioned while reading this book? Have Kendi's words changed the way you think about race in any way?

I'll be sure to post with other thoughts after reading number two!

Hi all,

Just wanted to pass along a stellar podcast I just finished called Seeing White from Scene on Radio. I found it on Spotify; you can also listen on wherever podcasts are found, including on their website: https://www.sceneonradio.org/seeing-w....

Because it's awesome, it also comes with a study guide! You can find it here: http://www.sceneonradio.org/seeing-wh....

Seeing White focuses on whiteness - a simple premise, but is it really? John Biewen flips the lens in our view of race to white people, looking into why we might actually behave how we do, and along the way revealing some facts and insights I'd never heard or thought about.

And it addresses something I've been thinking about a lot lately: white silence. A willful forgetting, an inability to engage with the facts of racism. Why might we do that? What is its effect?

I would highly recommend this podcast. It's a relatively short 14 episodes and an invaluable learning tool. Feel free to post your thoughts on it in the comments!

Looking at the reviews for this book, it seems I might be in the minority, but I found it a really instructive and a compelling read overall.

I learned about Jewish ghettos in Europe, about restrictive covenants, about the Harlem Children's Zone, and about dominant racial themes in sociology that I never realized so strongly influenced our public policy and national thought. I was intrigued by the massive confluence of "vicious cycles" that operate in American ghettos and the vastly different ways people think about and try to address them. I think it's important that the author addresses the duality of a ghetto being a place where flourishing and oppression can happen simultaneously (not necessarily at the same level, but at the same time).

I think one of the book's most important assertions is the following:

"Day after day, my students and I saw what it meant to treat the Jewish communities before the Holocaust as worthy of their own memory, a memory separate from the Holocaust... One of the most important realizations we had in the museum was that Jewish life in Poland prior to the Holocaust has been largely forgotten, overwhelmed as it was by the memory of the Holocaust itself. The Nazis thus blotted out not only the lives of millions of people, but also the history of the culture of a particular people."

Which of course is what ghettos (and our rhetoric about ghettos, our policies regarding ghettos) can do - blot out the individual lives of the people who live there. I've heard that one of Duneier's other books called Sidewalk delivers many stories of these lives, and I look forward to reading that one soon.

This is one of those books I wanted to be a fan of, but wasn't. I don't think it reads well or brings up much new information beyond what most Americans already know about the word: it is versatile, it has been deemed "okay" to use by some people and not by others, there are many different opinions about its use.

I wanted a more nuanced look at it, not just a litany of examples. I suppose maybe I was looking for an artist's lens rather than a scholar's, so maybe that means others of you go something out of it where I didn't.

Did anything about this book particularly stand out to you, besides the shocking title?

I suppose one of the interesting conversations here is the legality of the word, of its use in court cases and how that will stand the test of time. I suppose for me, policing free speech is a cut-and-dried case: the word itself can't be directly legislated against, as to make words illegal goes against the very identity of the nation and most likely only leads in one Orwellian direction. But I agree with Kennedy regarding it's inclusion in evidence of, say, hate crimes cases, that its status as the nuclear bomb of all words in America matters in our society and therefore in our legal system.

The word itself, though, can never be cut-and-dried. I think we'll be grappling with the kinds of cases Kennedy talks about for a long time.

What do you think?

As we learn and grow through our study of race in America, we need context. We read from many different perspectives from many different eras, and it might sometimes be difficult to piece everything together into a chronological and cohesive narrative.

There is a series of lectures on YouTube that I have found helpful in firming up some of this context; it is a Yale course from 2010 on post-Emancipation African American history that has been filmed and is now publicly available. While the professor can necessarily only touch on limited elements of this history, he does cover figures about and from whom we've been reading and situates them in a historical setting that is ultimately necessary for true understanding.

You can find the lecture series here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp6mj....

The aim of this club, ultimately, is to change our hearts as we change our minds through education on race. The end goal is to get at the core of each of us so that our reading may mobilize into sound action that addresses real issues in meaningful, constructive ways, ultimately changing the world we live in.

I think this book speaks particularly to this aim because it addresses the issue of racial identity for each of us. It gives us a framework to understand ourselves and not just the issues at hand. After all, people can read about racial issues all day and still be racist, or still be working from a misguided place in their own heart, which manifests itself negatively in the world no matter what their stated goal. It is not enough to understand racism; we must understand how racism exists and is propagated from within ourselves.

Dr. Tatum allows us to understand ourselves better in the context of our racist society through this book, which is important also because only individuals who understand themselves and consequently love themselves are able to make sustained positive change in the world. This book is, I think, especially important for white people to read and internalize, as I address later in this discussion.

As for the question posed in the book's title, Tatum essentially answers it in the following way:

"In adolescence, as race becomes personally salient for black youth, finding the answers to questions such as, 'What does it mean to be a young black person? How should I act? What should I do?' is particularly important... It is the peer group, the kids in the cafeteria, who hold the answers to these questions... We need to understand that in racially mixed settings, racial grouping is a developmental process in response to an environmental stressor, racism. Joining with one's peers for support in the face of stress is a positive coping strategy. What is problematic is that the young people are operating with a very limited definition of what it means to be black, based largely on cultural stereotypes."

So we can see here how a search for identity manifests in certain behaviors in our society. Unfortunately many white people perceive many of these behaviors as threats and the cycle of racism is fueled. As Tatum insists, racial grouping is a positive coping strategy, but it has been seen as at best curious and at worst threatening by those in the dominant society, which reveals, to my mind, that much of the problem lies with those dominant - read white - people. Humans will never stop searching for their identities, and racial grouping is an outcrop in essence forced by our society. So what do we as white people need to change about our white-dominated society to allow positive identity development for people of color, for ourselves and for everyone?

Tatum also speaks about the misguided and unfair ways the American education system and most classrooms within it are set up for many children of color to fail, or at least to be marginalized and have their critical sense of self-worth reduced:

"Too often I hear from young African American students the embarrassment they have felt in school when the topic of slavery is discussed, ironically one of the few ways that the black experience is included in the school curriculum."

Might this be where much of our misunderstanding about race lies? When you were in school, were you adequately informed about the contributions of people of color to American society and that of the world? Did you learn about Black Wall Street or the foundation black musicians laid for all modern music?

I do remember learning about George Washington Carver finding hundreds of uses for the peanut, but because it was only one person of color being presented (that I recall), I think I inevitably viewed him as the "exception".

Tatum also mentions the inability of teachers to understand, cope with and address race issues in their classrooms. Most white teachers do not understand racial identity development, and children (and society) suffer as a consequence. Quoting Herbert Kohl, Tatum asserts:

"To agree to learn from a stranger who does not respect your integrity causes a major loss of self. The only alternative is to not learn and reject their world."

Is there any wonder, then, at the germ of the current state of racial conflict in America?

I want to leave with the quote from this book that made the most impact on me and which I think is critical for all white people in America to hear:

"... The role of the ally is not to help victims of racism, but to speak up against systems of oppression and to challenge other whites to do the same."

This is critically important for us to understand in our age of white savior-ism, and especially important for us to recognize when we are being driven by our guilt as opposed to a genuine desire for racial, which is to say moral, change in our nation.

I interpret this quote as saying that contrary to what most whites, even well-meaning ones, believe, people of color are well able to help themselves. And it's not a matter of white people "bringing people of color up" to where we are. This is a racist and patronizing view that implies that where we are is a better place to live, and I would argue, as does Tatum, that we are just as wounded as everyone else and have propagated this racist and morally confused society. We don't need to "help" people become just as confused and despairing as we are. We need to get clear with ourselves about this and then help remove the barriers that people of color face in America that keep many from being able to fully realize the just and upwardly mobile existence that is theirs to achieve.

So. I think one of the main challenges for those of us who are white going forward is to "develop a positive white identity based in reality, not on assumed superiority" and to keep this in mind through all of our reading. Because this is how we can affect real change in the world.

Are you up to the challenge?

Well, that was an adventure.

For many of us, certainly for me, this book was more than a little shocking. We have read one book in this group by a conservative-leaning black author (White Guilt by Shelby Steele), but never one like this.

What I want to say outright is that I think it is important for us to have read it. So many progressives suffice to say that anyone who holds conservative values is stupid or racist and that's why they think the way they think, vote the way they do, are the way they are, without bothering to investigate any legitimate reasons for that perspective. Because the liberal calling card is supposedly open-mindedness, and we think of ourselves that way, we are often blind to when we are being close-minded. And this only further deepens the political divide and pushes conservatives even further to the right, because they are tired of being so judged.

So we need to try to understand the legitimate reasons why many people think differently than we do, and reading books like this is an excellent way to do that. Unless you understand all sides of the problem you wish to address, unless you can accurately define it, there is no way for you to solve it.

So onto the book. It certainly did enlighten me as to the way a particular cohort of my fellow Americans think. My biggest issue, though, is that it is so dripping with judgment, it's practically soaking. Rush does not give us the same decency and regard as liberals that we are giving him by opting to read his words and consider them. Which unfortunately greatly reduces his credibility and makes the whole of the book difficult to take seriously.

And even if I could have ignored that, my resolve would have dissolved with his insinuation on pages 5-6 that Obama should at one point have been investigated for murder.

The essential gist after this seems to be that all liberals, at least the elected ones, are in on one big plot to destroy America and have been for a long time. What irks me about this is it assumes that A) all liberals are continually meeting Illuminati-style is some secret underground bunker so we can all get on the same page about how best to organize our inherent evil and B) that this one entire group is somehow lesser than the group he belongs to. Diminishing the humanity of a person or group of people is a classic device used to deflect responsibility, a way not to deal adequately with the issues at hand, even for all his talk of same.

I also take issue with Rush's grievous misunderstanding of art, including music, and its role in society (page 26, for example). While I do become frustrated with many lyrics in rap songs myself, as well as the lyrics in other types of music, I have to consider why, since all art is expression, these particular things are being expressed at this particular moment.

Setting aside the fallacy of Rush's blanket description of all rap as "garbage", which indicates to me that there's quite a lot of rap he has never bothered to listen to, Rush interestingly references Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ" here. Many conservatives' immediate reaction to this piece when it was first displayed was of horror and offence, and all consideration for any point of view other than that the artist hated Christians collapsed. But could Serrano, by immersing an icon of Jesus on the cross in a container of his own urine, have been lamenting that Jesus' original message is perhaps being distorted by certain modern individuals such as himself?

Yes, but viewpoints like this were rarely considered then. So could it be that these commercial rappers Rush decries are actually encapsulating something else we need to face as a society? Could they be showing us what it looks like when the kind of power America has always valued - power over women, the power to make gobs of money, physical and violent power - is simply brought out into the open, unashamedly? Could they simply be showing a mirror to us, what we've all come to, together?

The fact is, these particular rappers HAVE taken the responsibility Rush talks about; they've just taken it literally instead of infusing it with a conveniently justifying and obscuring morality. They've done exactly what America has always insisted of its citizens: to make a success of oneself, to uphold national values, to pursue life, liberty and happiness. So while we may legitimately ask what their words and actions say about them, the answer to that question lies in figuring out what they say about us.

Having said all this, I actually do believe that Rush's so-called "negrophilia" exists in America. I think that just as conservatism can veer off on a dangerous, extreme course, so can liberalism, especially if we fail to examine it with openness, commitment and patience. I am not convinced that it exists in exactly the way Rush has described, but I do think that good intentions can be manipulated and stirred to a point to which the original aim is unrecognizable.

For instance, there is a heightened awareness in our current news and social media of violence and racial aggression against black people. These things need to be revealed and discussed. But we have to remember that it is also now very easy for politicians to manipulate those heightened sensitivities and use race as a platform for personal gain. White people in general can now use an ill-defined support of African Americans to "seem good" regardless of if their words and actions actually foster a more human-centered society or if they actually are attempting to understand the situation apart from tropes. We know now that we can post online every time an abhorrent racially-charged crime happens and be given the unearned praise of allyship (at least by other white people), which actually, I believe, makes it harder for race issues in America to be truthfully addressed in a way that benefits individuals of color in the short and long terms.

I also agree with Rush that personal responsibility is paramount in each of our lives, and that the profundity of it is less acknowledged the more we face issues like race and gender in an abstractly progressive way. But I also believe in mitigating factors and that a balance is required for humanity that neither pure conservatism nor pure liberalism can address.

What do you think? Is America in fact an institutionally racist nation or not? Have black activists, as Rush negatively asserts, done anything of concrete consequence for the black population in America? Is racially-based legislation, such as affirmative action, a step in the right direction or a platform for unfair advantage? What did you think of the book overall?

I would love to discuss this with anyone who's read the book, especially if you disagree with me!