I honestly thought I'd be further along with my to-do list at four months into this pandemic. I should have read more, exercised more, organized more, been further along in German and/or Spanish, painted the front door, etc. Instead I have been caught up in current cultural moments - the impending election, COVID-19 run amuck, bizarre political climate, Black Lives Matter - and gardening.
I thought about backdating this post to early June, but decided I'm just too old to feel the need to fib my way through anything here. It's July 20th. There, I admit it. I read two books in June, just procrastinated about reviewing them and July 3rd good intentions turned into a better-get-on-it task two and a half weeks later. The bar is low for July people.
Before cracking a book from my downloaded queue I added
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates as it was on several IG/FB/blog antiracist reading lists. It is read by the author - who has a wonderful speaking voice - and I was grateful for the correct pronuunciation of his first name -- Ta-na-ha-she. This is an open letter to his son chronicling his own experience as a Black man growing up on the streets of Baltimore and attending Howard University, as well as hopes for the future - and not sappy dreams, but practical realities, warnings. I'm still processing - this is heavy and there's a lot to unpack for a middle class White woman. It's completely other for me - knowing that this is someone else's reality, so foreign to me yet so much of our collective Amercian experience, is very sobering. Ta-Nehisi is a beautiful writer. Two of my favorite excerpts:
I came to see the streets and the schools as arms of the same beast. One enjoyed the offical power of the state, while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and violence were the weaponry of both. Fail in the streets and the crews would catch you sllipping and take your body. Fail in the schools and you would be suspended and sent back to those same streets where they would take your body. And I began to see these two arms in relation. Those who fail in the schools justify their destruction in the streets, the society could say he should have stayed in school and then wash its hands of him. It does not matter that the intentions of individual educators were noble. Forget about intentions. What any institution or its agents intend for you is secondary. Our world is physical. Learn to play defense, ignore the head and keep your eyes on the body. Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of Black people being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans would do all they can to preserve the dream. No one directly procalimed that schools were designed to sancitfy failure and destruction. But a great number of eductators spoke of personal responsibility in a country authored and sustained by criminal irresponsibility. The point of this language of intention and personal responsibility is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. Good intention is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that insures the dream.
One must be without error out here [sic] But you are human and you will make mistakes. You will misjudge. You will yell. You will drink too much. You will hang out with people who shouldn't. Not all of us can always be Jackie Robinson, not even Jackie Robinson was always Jackie Robinson. But the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countryman and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body's destruction must always begin with his or her error. Real or imagined. [sic] A society almost necessarily begins every success story with a chapter that most advtanges itself and in America these preciptating chapters are almost always rendered as a singular action of exceptional individuals. It only takes one person to make a change you are often told. This is also a myth. Perhaps one person can make a change, but not the kind of change that would raise your body to equality with your countryman. The fact of history is that Black people have not, probably no people have ever, liberated themselves strictly through their own efforts. In every great change in the lives of African Americans we see the hand of events that were beyond our individual control. Events that were not unalloyed goods. You cannot disconnect our emancipation in the northern colonies from the blood spilled in the Revolutionary War any more than you can disconnect our emancipation from slavery in the south from the [sic] houses in the Civil War. Any more than you disconnect our emancipation from Jim Crow from the genocides of the second World War. History is not solely in our hands and still you are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory, but because it assures you an honorable and sane life.
I'm committed to reading a book by a Black author or about Black / People of Color experiences at least every other month. I recently joined my sister-in-law's book club and we are reading
How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram Kendi for August.
Speaking of book club, the June book was
Daisy Jones and the Six which I read last summer. We gave it a 7 out of 11 which is on par with my B-. For this reason alone I am hesitant to choose a Reese Witherspoon book club choice in the future.
The Kept Woman by Karin Slaughter is a gritty crime novel in the author's Will Trent series. I read a Slaughter book two years ago, but don't recall if Trent was a character. A cop with a dicey past, a fancy nightclub under construction, a couple of famous basketball players, a rape charge, a dead cop and a crime scene with a lot of blood. It was a good distraction but not good enough for me to want to read more in the series.
Queue:
