Medium Cool is a weekly series related to popular culture, mostly film, TV, and books, with some music and games thrown in. We hope it’s a welcome break from the anger, hate, and idiocy we see almost daily from the other side in the political sphere.
Arguments welcomed, opinions respected, fools un-suffered. We’re here every Sunday at 7 pm.
Let’s talk about what shaped your views on race and ethnicity. Books, TV, movies? A teacher? A friend? People you met? Travel? A particular experience?
I’m sure there are generational differences in cultural items that influenced us. I almost hesitate to post this because I’m sure that if you’re a person of color, you don’t read a book at the age of 13 or 17 that makes you first think about race, or watch a movie that teaches you about racial injustice when you’re 10.
These are some of my early influences.
Have your views changed? If so, what changed them? Popular culture? Current events? (Is there a difference between popular culture and current events?)
I don’t know that my views have changed, as much as my understanding has changed. Sad to say, Treyvon Martin changed my understanding in a way that could not be un-seen, even though it had been right there in front of me all the time.
How about you guys? Are there cultural changes that contribute to your understanding? There is definitely no lack of current events to influence us.
Note: for those new to Medium Cool, these are not open threads.
Reverse Festivus
sab
James Baldwin’s Another Country.
karen marie
My views on race weren’t set by any book or movie but by observation when I was in kindergarten and first grade in White Plains, NY, where I saw how the one black family in the neighborhood was ostracized.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
From an earlier thread, very pertinent here:
Bingo. I was part of the first 2-years of court-ordered busing in Norfolk VA in the early 70s. Our neighborhood (then) would be considered blue collar white. They shipped 5th and 6th graders downtown on the city buses to Monroe Elementary.
It wasn’t until I was an adult, and then only over time, did I learn about and then realize all the things I saw being bussed. When I tell people it turned out to be probably the best thing that happened to me as a kid, they look at me like I’m nuts…and those reactions are from white people who grew up in a white burb. They still don’t get it and the flood of them who move into city cores to displace those same people I went to elementary school with bring that racial tonedeafness with them.
UncleEbeneezer Again:
One Summer my parents decided to hire a neighborhood child to mow a particularly difficult section of our lawn (a steep hill with the grass mostly in clumps, so a real pain in the ass for a push-mower). I was really too small to do it at the time so they hired this boy named Erasmus who was from Ghana, iirc. While mowing the lawn he got stung by a bee and the sting got swollen really bad. My Mom was skeptical at first and seemed to think he was somehow trying to get out of having to finish the job. Eat the time I thought nothing of it, but looking back I shudder with the realization that my Mom was being RACIST AF in that moment gaslighting a suffering child simply because he was black. But it wasn’t until 30-40 years later that I even understood that. That’s how long this shit can hide from our view/understanding. And even then, if it wasn’t for Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, BLM leading me to start listening and paying more attention it could’ve taken me even longer. That’s how sneaky and internalized all this shit is.
That’s why it’s so hard to unlearn individually and address collectively. And most people will never even bother to try, and will get extremely defensive at even the suggestion that they should.
John
When I was in middle school I always came home and watched “What’s Happening”. Latchkey kid, doncha know.
Then one day my much older brother came home from school early, saw the TV, and said “Why are you watching those black people shows?”
Which left me feeling ashamed for some reason I didn’t understand at the time.
lowtechcyclist
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson gave me a better understanding both of how Jim Crow really was a form of quasi-slavery (to the extent that Black people and families fleeing to the North had to keep their plans concealed until they were on the road) and of the serious obstacles they faced once in Northern states that whites did not encounter.
Props to Ta-Nehisi Coates for recommending it in his blog years ago.
Mr. Prosser
The Autobiography of Malcolm X opened my eyes to black culture and all the injustice around. I read it in 1970 while in the Navy and could see all around the injustices aboard ship, limited ratings for Blacks and lots of dirty work details assigned to non-rated black sailors.
OlFroth
Its a more recent book, but Joshua Rothman’s The Ledger and the Chain had a profound impact on me.
TBone
Mom started us littles out right away with Dr. Suess’s Star Bellied Sneetches.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sneetches_and_Other_Stories
Suzanne
As a grade schooler, I loved Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and its sequels, which told the story of a Black family in Mississippi during Jim Crow. The All-of-a-Kind Family books were about a Jewish family in early-20th-century New York, and I read them all at least a dozen times.
TF79
“Bury my heart at Wounded Knee” was pretty eye-opening for me
UncleEbeneezer
@lowtechcyclist: It’s really tragic though that Coates doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge that the very same dynamic of violent/discriminatory forced exile, across whole stretches of Europe, Middle-East & N. Africa are what made Zionism/Israel so necessary in the first place. The fact that he rightfully treats the Great Migration as central to understanding Race in America, but completely leaves centuries of the same treatment of Jews out of his moral calculus when he talks/writes about Israel/Palestine is super-disappointing.
That said, I’m reading Warmth of Other Suns now and yes, it is excellent.
UncleEbeneezer
Stamped From The Beginning– Ibram X. Kendi
Mothers of Massive Resistance– Elizabeth Gillespie McRae
Out Of The House of Bondage by Thavolia Glymph
The Case For Reparations/We Were Eight Years In Power– Ta-Nehisi Coates
1619 Project– Nikole Hannah-Jones
Countless Xitter threads by Michael Harriott
Hundreds of hours of The Black Guy Who Tips podcast
HBO’s mini-series Exterminate All The Brutes
Suzanne
@sab: Also Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time.
lowtechcyclist
@UncleEbeneezer:
Agreed.
eemom
Can I ask why so many here do not capitalize Black? That has been the rule for years now, observed even in shitholes like the NYT, and for good reason.
And no, white does not get capitalized.
eemom
@Suzanne:
I loved those books as a kid, and I’m a lot older than you. Very glad to hear they are still being read.
WaterGirl
@eemom: I had no idea.
Honus
When I was in high school late 60s early 70s my brother brought home books from college. I read Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown. Also Junkie by William Burroughs. Before that I had been reading Mark Twain, which believe or not comes from a similar perspective.
Steve LaBonne
Many great suggestions but I want to add Wilkerson’s Caste, which I found really eye-opening and which gave me new perspective on the (to me, previously) puzzling persistence of anti-Blackness.
Eric S.
To pick media to stay on topic I have to say Coates Between Me and the World and The Warmth of Other Suns. I need to return to and finish the latter.
Outside of media it’s been a lifelong journey.
I followed Gov George Ryan’s battle against the death penalty in IL.
I observed how a friend took a job as a police officer in a predominantly Black suburb and just become more and more openly racist.
For the past decade I’ve managed a team supporting LIHEAP at a utility and seen the reactions and assumptions of too many colleagues.
And so many more small and large instances.
Princess
I’veprobably told this story before but I thought about it today when Prof Bigfoot pointed out the (in my view) fact that white people don’t realize his whiteness affects us; that we’re swimming in whiteness. I was at a Sears on the south side of Chicago near Xmas. It had a didplay of little Santa dolls, elves, Mrs Claus etc. They were all Black, because that was the clientele this store served. Blew me away. I suddenly realized how I unthinkingly swam in a white world that 99% of the time catered to people who looked like me. Never forgot it.
Starfish (she/her)
The things that influence my perception of race are a little bit all over the place.
The Untold Story Of America’s Southern Chinese is an excellent 8 minute documentary on the history of the Chinese Americans who live in the Mississippi delta.
“Cutting School: The Segrenomics of American Education” by Noliwe Rooks had me really thinking about gifted education. She framed gifted education as an attempt to run two different schools under the same roof with certain kids getting better educational access.
“The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America by Lawrence T. Brown” discusses the hypersegregation of Baltimore in the aftermath of the death of Freddie Gray. The life expectancy variations across Baltimore are huge. The lead poisoning in east and west Baltimore is much greater than the lead poisoning in the white L. All the kids in that area get tested for lead at birth and at age two.
“Parable of the Sower” by Octavia Butler feels weirdly relevant all the time even though it is 30 years old.
“The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race” by Neda Maghbouleh is strange and academic, but it is about Iranian student’s perception of their own race and how 9/11 changed it.
Someone who I know told me about how her nephew was killed by police in the early 1980s when he was a college student. That loss really stressed out his parents, and she said that it really harmed the life expectancy of that entire branch of the family. And I could not stop thinking about that when Erica Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner died.
These folks who never set out to be activists are elevated as activists around the most traumatic moment of their lives. It’s heartbreaking.
I want to learn more about model minorities. Recently, I stumbled upon the concept of the “bamboo ceiling,” and I am still thinking about that too.
wonkie
I read the Autobiography of Malcom X, Manchild in the Promised Land, and some other books of that kind while in high school. It didn’t change my views so much as give me views where previously I’d had none. I lived in a small college town in central Iowa and literally had never met or even seen a Black person. There were a few in town–the football players. Anyway, it was around 1968 or so and I was becoming politically aware on many levels. Reading was a way of meeting people outside of my experience and learning what their experiences were.
eemom
@WaterGirl:
Here’s some background.
Steve LaBonne
@eemom: I follow the same practice- “white” is a phony “identity” created for the purpose of domination; “Black” is a real ethnicity that was perforce created on New World soil when the identities enslaved Africans were born with were brutally erased by the enslavers.
wonkie
Oh I read Black Like Me while in upper elementary school and was profoundly shocked. My Sunday school read Roosevelt Grady, which I also found shocking. So I did have views prior to Malcom X. I thought Black people and Jim Crow was a South thing that had nothing to do with northern states and really nothing to do with me. I forgot about this because this post starts with Malcom X who I also read.
SiubhanDuinne
@Suzanne:
Those were wonderful books! I loved them as a youngster and, like you, read them multiple times.
I really enjoy re-reading childhood favourites now and then (it’s akin to eating comfort food), and in anticipation of an All-of-a-Kind craving I ordered the full set for my Kindle app not too long ago. Looking forward to a nice, nostalgic binge. (That’s what they invented winter for, right?) It’s been many decades since I last read them, so I’m eager to see if they hold up.
Steve LaBonne
@Starfish (she/her): Butler was a genius. Her writer’s block followed by premature death deprived us of marvelous things that we can only imagine.
Suzanne
@SiubhanDuinne: In one of the All-of-a-Kind Family books, an Italian character is described as “swarthy”. I remember it was the first time I encountered that term.
I loved reading about the five daughters. But when Lena the Greena got polio (referred to as “infantile paralysis”), I remember actively crying.
I often wonder….. do young boys read books about girls’ lives?
frosty
I don’t recall any books I read on race from my youth. I recently read Warmth of Other Suns though. We hear a lot about the Great Migration from Mississippi to Chicago; at least I, along with every other blues aficianado, knows about it. Wilkerson added two more stories: Florida to New York, and Louisiana to Southern California.
All the stories discussed the danger, which I hadn’t known about. Don’t tell anyone you’re leaving is a major one. This one struck home to me: If you’re driving to California, you don’t stop. There aren’t any motels that will rent you a room.
Miki
@Honus: I’d forgotten about Manchild. Really important book.
WaterGirl
@eemom: That’s really interesting, thank you.
So not wrong if not capitalized, but capitalization preferred.
This jumped out at me:
It’s interesting to me to note that I instinctively capitalize the word “native” when I say Native vote in my Four Directions fundraising posts. It never occurred to me that Black should be capitalized, but it looks perfectly normal in wonkie’s comment at #26.
Good to know, thanks.
Josie
The first book I remember reading was Black Like Me. Then later the Autobiography of Malcolm X and one of James Baldwin’s books. My understanding of the depth of the problem of white privilege, however, has developed from reading truths written on this here blog. Without reading BJ over the years, I would not have come to a better understanding of race in America.
UncleEbeneezer
@Steve LaBonne: We live in Altadena, which was Butler’s home. There was a great Black-owned bookstore named Octavia’s Shelf that sadly just closed down.
Trivia Man
In chronological order –
The Snowy Day
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
Huckleberry Finn
Autobiography of Malcom X
Lots of things about the Black Panthers
Black AF History
These are the most memorable. The Snowy Day deserves a shout out. No idea how i wound up with a copy. Every bit of my upbringing was mormon as could be and white as fuck. I remember the outcries and the story vividly from about age 3 or 4 (i was an early reader). But it wasnt until i looked at it 10-15 years later that i realized the child was black. Nobody mentioned it and i was too busy thinking Lucky Kid! I’ve never seen snow! Sometimes i wonder if that non-issue helped me. It wasn’t A STATEMENT, it was just a kid in a story. I just assumed he was like me.
KatKapCC
Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America by Melissa Harris-Perry was incredibly eye-opening and helpful for me as a white woman, to gain a better understanding of how even though the experiences of white and Black women are similar in some ways, they are also very very different, and the things that Black women face in our society that I never will, thanks to my skin color.
The Devil’s Highway: A True Story by Luis Alberto Urrea is an investigative look at one particular incident that speaks volumes about the wider story it’s part of. Synopsis:
The first two that come to mind for me, and both had quite an impact.
Reni
I grew up in a mostly Irish/Italian Catholic neighborhood. My first exposure in the 1960s was my father, who was a general family lawyer, coming home with a clock that a black client gave him as payment. I remember thinking that was odd and why didn’t he get money. ( I was about 8 at the time.) He explained a lot of his clients (mostly in Queens NYC) didn’t have a lot of money so he doesn’t always charge them much and this particular woman didn’t want to accept ‘charity’ so she gave him a clock. (Which I have now in my home.) Then when my father died in 1966 I also recall answering the phone and hearing a lot of black/hispanic people very upset he died. Some came to his wake/funeral and my mother treated them with such grace and gave the old ‘evil eye’ to those who complained they were there. We lived on Long Island and it wasn’t easy for them to travel to the Island. My father treated everyone equally and it’s the greatest sorrow of my life he died so young at 45. His family were die-hard Democrats very active back then in the Queens County Democrat Party.
Trivia Man
In high school, Black Like Me made a deep and lasting impression on me.
Specifically, how the people he met discussed and strategized what to do. Stay under the radar of YT, avoid giving offense, reassure each other of their shared humanity. It was a community, his dark skin as instant inclusion though he was obviously a stranger.
dnfree
@eemom: I have been through the whole capitalize/don’t capitalize Black completely twice now. In the 70s there was a move to capitalize Black but not white. Then some capitalized both. Then it became more prevalent to capitalize neither again. Now we’re back to capitalize Black but not white.
i can understand capitalizing Black when referring to a population, and not capitalizing when referring simply to the color (like a black dress). But then for consistency and clarity it seems to me that White should also be capitalized when referring to the White population and not when referring to a white dress. Capitalizing Black people but not white people doesn’t make sense to me.
But I no longer care one way or the other. It’s not the important aspect of the discussion. People can do what they want.
wolf parade
Kindred really brought out the personal and relational terror of the slave experience, the total lack of autonomy and constant threat of violence or sale.
Heart of Darkness showed me the true depravity of the slavers and merchants that kept the system running and rge way that evil found its way to their very core until it was their humanity stripped away.
KatKapCC
@UncleEbeneezer: The answer to the “why” of that is painfully obvious, more so because he will never ever admit it. It’s an unfortunate thing that someone who is quite intelligent can become willfully stupid when they have bigotry they refuse to acknowledge.
scav
Oddly enough, and I can’t really say they shaped my views but served as a pretty early red flag warning that it really existed and could be accepted by some as normal, was running across older unrevised editions of the Bobbsey Twins in the library of our really small school. Utterly useless as to grasping the complexity of what was going on currently, but somehow served as a good early slap in the face that the world as observed on Zoom, Sesame Street, the Elec Co and Mr Rogers wasn’t anywhere near the whole picture. Better still in that it wasn’t trying to lecture me, this was just basic evidence that people once thought this kid-appropriate.
Suzanne
@Trivia Man: OMG I was going to mention The Snowy Day. Didn’t exactly “shape my views on race”, but it’s simply wonderful. Great for kids to see stories of all kinds of children sharing experiences.
There’s a great picture book series (and now a Netflix show) that is around for kids now called “The Imagineers”. Each book is about a kid (and the last one is about their teacher) and their dreams. One of them in particular I found very moving. It’s called Aaron Slater, Illustrator, and it’s about a Black boy who has dyslexia, and he struggles with reading….. but learns to express himself through art. An interesting note about the typography: the book is typeset in Dyslexie, which is a typeface designed to provide faster letter recognition to people with dyslexia. There’s also a note from the actual illustrator, who notes that he has dyslexia. The character is named after Aaron Douglas, a prominent artist of the Harlem Renaissance. All of the books are utterly charming and a great gift for any littles in your life.
dnfree
@Trivia Man: That’s what I came here to say. When I got to college I read books like “The Fire Next Time” and “Another Country”. But reading “Black Like Me”, by a white man who disguised himself as black, was a point of entry for a white young person.
KatKapCC
@dnfree: From the AP style guide:
UncleEbeneezer
The New Jim Crow– Michelle Alexander
Cult of Glory– The Bold & Brutal History of the Texas Rangers- Doug J. Swanson
Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles– Eric Avila
Mothers of Conservatism– Michelle Nickerson
This Happened In Pasadena– David Hurlburt
MomSense
Seeing how my grandmother was treated certainly made an impression.
Reading Rev. Thandeka’s book Learning To Be White: Money, Race and God in America and then by chance getting to spend some time with her when we were at the same place at the same time was incredible. She and my dad are friends and colleagues so it was really special.
Chetan Murthy
I grew up in a racist place, around racists, and so of course, wanting to fit in, I was racist too. And racist against my own kind (of course) since we were brown, and I wanted to be white. Decades later, I found Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog at The Atlantic, and slowly, he woke me. I remember to this day one particularly moving post he wrote about Eliza Icewalker (archive link here: web.archive.org/web/20121018172242/https://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2012/10/the-hyperlin… ) that stands out among all the others.
To this day I say that TNC woke me, and I think that the word “woke” is a good word. I was asleep in my racism until reading his works. Sure it wasn’t the virulent racism of some, and I was always a Dem voter, and I always subscribed to anti-racism and all. But inside? No, I was still a racist. He woke me. And eventually in the fullness of time, I learned to not be racist toward my own kind either.
Trivia Man
@Princess: I adopted 2 Black boys and we worked hard to find things like a Black Santa or picture books with diversity. Really opened my eyes. They also appreciated that we took them places where I was in the minority. They have told me it helped.
dnfree
@eemom: Note the last paragraph of the CJR article about capitalizing Black and not white: “Editors Note: This piece has been updated for clarity. An earlier version included an explanation that was off-base. We appreciate the feedback, have revised the language, and will continue to discuss this subject internally.”
That’s my thought. It’s easy to get deep into semantics and ethics, and it can derail substantive discussions. It would be interesting to know what the “off-base” explanation was.
As a side note, at one point in college I lived with Black roommates, and one had a birth certificate (from the 1940s, in Chicago) that showed her race as Black (capitalized). She had previously been appalled that it didn’t say Negro like the birth certificates of her friends, but suddenly the term was becoming popular and she now joked that the doctor had been ahead of his time.
Matt McIrvin
@dnfree: My usage isn’t very consistent, but here’s the way I see it: White Americans generally have a more specific ethnic heritage that they can celebrate. They’re Polish or Italian or Irish or Scottish/English/German/Norwegian like me.
This isn’t the case for the majority of Black Americans, because their specific ethnic heritage in Africa was erased, taken away from them. So “Black” functions in the role of an ethnicity for them. Hence the capitalization.
Someone calling “White” their ethnicity, rather than Greek or Dutch or whatever, is usually up to no good. So “white” is a different kind of marker.
Marc
Not all Black/black people agree on whether to capitalize. It’s one thing for a publication to have editorial rules, another thing entirely to try to police the usage of others. There is no one Black culture or ethnicity. There is instead a rather diverse set of overlapping cultures and distinct ethnicities, with the one thing in common that some white people will use the n-word to refer to us. Strangely, we don’t all think alike and we don’t necessarily agree on everything.
UncleEbeneezer
@KatKapCC: Considering his Dad used to assign students to read
The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, a book arguing falsely, that Jews were disproportionate financiers of the slave trade, my guess is that Coates grew up hearing Zionism Is Racism, Colonialism, Genocide, Apartheid etc. from a very early age. His Dad ran in exactly the kind Pan-African studies circles that the Soviets targeted for their decades of Anti-Israel propaganda.
schrodingers_cat
Whose race and ethnicity are we talking about here?
Trivia Man
@eemom: Excellent read, i have passed it to my friends.
KatKapCC
@schrodingers_cat: Seems to me she means it very broadly. Any and all racial and ethnic groups outside of one’s own.
raven
Alas Babylon
Tehanu
Not books, but two experiences. When I was in the 5th grade, we moved from California to Birmingham, Alabama — this was 1957. On the first day of school, I went up to some kids on the playground to introduce myself. They looked at me and one said, “So you’re one of them Yankee n-lovers.” I was a somewhat sheltered little white girl and I was so taken aback, I didn’t know what to say; my mother would have washed my mouth out with soap if I’d ever said anything like that. And I don’t remember what I did say … but I’ve never forgotten what I thought, which was, “If that makes me different from you, then I’m a Yankee n-lover and proud of it.” (We only lived there a year, thank goodness, but it’s the reason I tell people to this day that General Sherman is my hero.)
The other experience was much later. I went to UCLA and after that I’ve always lived on the West Side of L.A., which is affluent and mostly white. The only Latino people I ever saw were housekeepers and parking valets and gardeners. But then I got a job in the San Gabriel Valley, which extends from east of downtown L.A. about 30 or 40 miles, and discovered that there is an enormous Latino middle class; suddenly I was working with Latin American-descended accountants and engineers and managers, and they were great — and they were Americans who saw the same movies and drove the same kinds of cars and cheered for the same teams I did. I’d always thought in a kind of intellectual way that of course everybody was equal and that I wasn’t prejudiced … but it was still an eye-opener for me to realize how ignorant I was of the city I lived in and how limited my surroundings had been.
Trivia Man
@Suzanne: I did. Even though i was myself a paper boy i much preferred Ramona’s point if view over Henry. Little Women, Momma’s Bank Account, Junie B Jones, and many more.
The boys were always mean and broke rules.
Trivia Man
@frosty: Better get the Green Book! (Edit for my faulty memory)
KatKapCC
@UncleEbeneezer: Sigh. Amazing that people see no dissonance in pinning massive situations on one of the tiniest demographic groups. If only we were really as powerful as the people who vehemently despise us believe.
Thrasius
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and Anne Frank’s Diary, I read the latter in 5th or 6th grade and the former in high school. Those two books probably had the biggest impact on me. Heart of Darkness in high school was up there too. Everything that followed was just an evolution.
Suzanne
@Trivia Man: I’m glad to hear that. I have had this discussion with Mr. Suzanne…. we are the same age and share so many of the same cultural references. But things like All-of-a-Kind Family completely passed him by.
Moving forward in time a bit….. Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret is primarily known for being Judy Blume’s book about periods. But there’s a subplot in the book about how one of her parents is Jewish and one is Christian, and that causes her some tension. She gets pressure from her grandparents to prioritize one identity over the other. It’s dealt with, IMO, very well for young people.
schrodingers_cat
Deleted.
Suzanne
Also….. no one has mentioned Beloved yet.
Marc
@Trivia Man: I never traveled south before the 70s, but I do remember the copy of The Negro Motorist Green Book my grandfather kept on his shelf next to The Farmer’s Almanac and the past year or so of National Geographic.
UncleEbeneezer
@KatKapCC: I blame it all on your space lasers!! /sarcasm
TBone
Another tough choose, because there are so many…
Snow Falling On Cedars is an amazing eye opener.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Falling_on_Cedars
Also the works of Barbara Kingsolver.
Chetan Murthy
@UncleEbeneezer: Weeeeellll, there -is- documentary footage of those Jewish space lasers after all: youtube.com/watch?v=sz7JGCj4Q5k
TBone
@Suzanne: I was gonna but figured someone else would have already!
Ben Cisco
A childhood split between my native Queens NY and VERY rural Alabama.
KatKapCC
@UncleEbeneezer: Don’t forget how we engineered the Covid virus to affect everyone except us. Brilliant gambit, that.
UncleEbeneezer
America For Americans by Erika Lee is about immigration/xenophobia in America, so obviously race is absolutely central to everything: Anti-German sentiment, No Irish Need Apply, Chinese Exclusion Act, Operation Wetb*ck (mass deportation of Mexicans), Japanese Interment, Post 9/11-Islamophobia, Obama’s Birth Certificate, Covid etc.
Trivia Man
In another form of media, from the 1968 Olympics still affects me deeply.
Tommy Smith, john Carlos, and support from Australian Silver medalist Peter Norman. The more I learn, the more important that moment seems to me. They willingly gave so much to make a statement that echoes today.
UncleEbeneezer
@KatKapCC: Wait, I thought the Chinese created Covid. Your machinations know no bounds!
TBone
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for the lessons of poverty.
KatKapCC
@UncleEbeneezer: Ooh, that one has been on my list for a while. Thanks for the reminder, gonna see if my library has it!
KatKapCC
@UncleEbeneezer: You know how Jews eat Chinese food on Christmas? Those were actually our planning sessions.
Gloria DryGarden
I grew up in all white suburbs of big cities, pretty segregated. There have been several influences in my journey of waking up to racism.
It started here: In reevaluation cocounseling leaders told the white people in that community, for every new friend you make that is white, make friends with someone who is a person of color. It showed me in a sharp glance, that hey, all my friends were white.
later, When 9/11 happened, I thought about how for a few weeks, people came together, and helped, and we were just Americans, pulling together, and putting way less attention on skin color.
Here and there a class or a presentation came up about race, racism, relationships across color “lines”; and I went wanting to learn
In 2000, the census lady who came to my door sat me down after we did the quickie questions, and said, “now, you see the difference between me and you” I remember I wanted to say ‘yes, you’re older’, but I knew she was going toward skin color/ race, and while I wanted to also say, ‘you’re the same as me, we’re people first’, I also didn’t want to be rude, and I was eager to get her talk. She shared generously about all kinds of experiences she had as a black women.
Once I began working for Denver public schools I began to have regular contact all the time with Black people, and other people who were “non- white” or “minority” especially in the summer jobs and after school programs, and I got to know some people, make a few more friends.
Then a few Black friends on Facebook started posting how they felt less safe as 45 was in office, and George Floyd, and Black Lives Matter were in the news. Friends shared past and current experiences, or bits of black history, mostly on Facebook, but it opened a dialogue for me. Because they were people I knew, it let me care, personally. It stung, because I hate to see friends being hurt. But it taught me a lot; this is where I woke up more to it.
There have been a few books. Black like me. Roots. There’s a book a friend recommended, that I need to get back to, Waking up white, and finding myself in the story of race by Debby Irving. Alice Walker has some poems that were eye opening. There was a novel by the author of fried green tomatoes, about passing and the color percentage laws in the 50s. I’d like to read Mr Coates, some Baldwin, the 1619 project.
Since I learn through the personal, I want to add, that when I run into my internalized racism, and it says, ooh, this person is different,
I kick it, hard, and tell that silly voice, nope, you can see the differences in appearance, but I guarantee this person sleeps, and eats, and loves and cares for children and our world, same as you. I tell that voice to stop.
Starfish (she/her)
@dnfree: Black is a cultural identity.
White is a process of assimilating of various groups with no underlying shared culture into one group, and those who want to create a white culture are white supremacists.
persistentillusion
@wonkie: I grew up in Omaha in the sixties. My older sibs went to Omaha Central, a recently desegregated high school. My sis decided to throw a party and invite the theater and chorus kids she knew. Many of whom were Black.
One of the invitees said to my sis “This was a really nice party. Thanks for inviting us. We’ll kill you last.” He was kidding, but that was an eye-opener.
Gretchen
@Princess: The first time that my daughter brought her Indian boyfriend (now husband) home to see where she grew up, he looked around and said it’s so white here! I’d never noticed until that minute, but he was right.Fish/water.
Yesterday one of her friends was sharing real estate listings of houses they are considering. Friend is married to Indian high school friend of my son in law, which is how they met. I asked why the friends are looking in the far south suburbs although she works downtown. It just dawned on me that the south suburbs has a lot of Asian and South Asians, better to raise their family than the whiter inner ring suburbs.
Daughter and her husband are staying in New York.
Spanish Moss
@wonkie: I also read Black Like Me in late elementary school, and it made a big impression on me as well. I became very interested in books with racial themes, not only Black/white, but Hispanic and Native American as well. Other books I read in middle school and high school included Run Baby Run, Hatter Fox, To Kill a Mockingbird, Black Boy, Native Son, Song of Solomon, A Lesson Before Dying, The Beet Queen. I read these on my own so I probably didn’t get as much out of them as I would have if I had studied in them in a class, but I nevertheless got a taste of different cultures within the U.S. and some perspective on what it might be like to be “other”.
I was a young white girl growing up in Alabama in the sixties and seventies, so I saw racism and racial tensions up close and personal. My small elementary school was completely white, but once I got to middle school the student body was about one third Black.
The most moving book I have read as an adult is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. He is such a great writer, and some of his views on our country and political system were a surprise to me. He gave me a lot to think about.
Starfish (she/her)
@KatKapCC: I responded with numerous racial identities, including my own.
WaterGirl
@schrodingers_cat: The answer to that is up to the commenters.
Gwangung
Long Time Californ’ about the Chinese in Anerica
Aiieee! edited by Frank Chin, Lawson Inada, Paul Michael Chan and Shawn Wong, the very first Asia’s American literary anthology, but with loads of interesting introductory material
roots, not the Haley book but a collection of Asian American essays and poetry from UCLA that formed the basis of ideology for a lot of the first generations of Asian American activists.
Trivia Man
@Suzanne: I loved Judy Blume. The girls in 5th grade were passing Are You There God around and i couldn’t wait to read it. I always was much more interested in what girls thought than the boys. I figured i already knew “what a boy thinks” and my insatiable curiosity led me to discover what girls think. I still find much more value listening to women. Old, white men mostly bore me.
Trivia Man
@Marc:When i first learned of it i was floored by the concept. First – that it was needed. And second – what an amazing source of comfort on the road in strange and often potentially deadly places.
frosty
@Trivia Man: Tommie Smith and John Carlos were pallbearers and gave a eulogy at Peter Norman’s funeral, almost 40 years after the Olympics.
He told them “I’ll stand with you.” A significant moment.
Trivia Man
@persistentillusion: In Holidays In Hell by PL O’Rourke (I know, I know) he tells a joke he heard in apartheid era South Africa.
The white lady is concerned about the increasing violence and has a tearful conversation with her maid.
“We treat you do well! How could you kill us?”
The maid very tearfully reassures her. “Oh! Missy! We could never harm you! Thats why we would go next door and kill them, their servants will come here and kill you.”
Gwangung
@Gwangung: I will say that getting oriented with my own group’s ideology made it much easier to gain entree into Black American thought.
Gloria DryGarden
Has anyone seen Freedom Writers, the movie w Hilary swank, based on a true story? It addresses a lot of differences in class and background, very poignant.
frosty
That’s thought provoking and very well said.
Trivia Man
@Trivia Man:
Gloria DryGarden
@TBone: the more I read Barbara kingsolver, the more I love her. Any particular book of hers?
NotMax
Cane, by Jean Toomer.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown.
Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe.
Quaker in a Basement
@Trivia Man: I am surprised to scroll this far down to find a mention of Black AF History. If any of y’all are thinking about reading it don’t wait a day. It’s terrific!! Insightful, informative AND hilarious.
Also, I have to mention “The Souls of Black Folk” by W.E.B. DuBois which was made available to me by the late Earl Dunovant a/k/a Prometheus 6. His death was a loss.
Gloria DryGarden
@Trivia Man: you have good taste.
and your comment on the snowy day,” I assumed the kid was just like me. “ I love that. A kid walking in the snow… I work w kids, all colors, many languages, and they’re still all just kids.
dnfree
@Starfish (she/her): I think that is well-expressed. I’m just tired of policing forms (like whether something is capitalized or not). I care more about what is being said and done.
Somebody can capitalize correctly and still not be getting the underlying concept, or be not capitalizing yet making a very cogent point. It’s simply no longer my focus after all these years of having accepted terminology changing and then changing back.
In my lifetime the accepted/encouraged term has changed from colored to Negro to Black to African-American and now back to Black. Yet the issues remain.
dnfree
@raven: Alas, Babylon is an excellent subtle reminder. Thanks.
dnfree
@Suzanne: Yes, “Beloved” was an eye-opener. Unforgettable book.
Trivia Man
@Quaker in a Basement: We listened to the audio book of BAF – even better to hear it in the intended cadence.
dnfree
“Knock on Any Door” is about an Italian boy but expresses so well the effect of environment on how a child grows up. It’s from the 1940s but I recently read it again and it holds up well.
WaterGirl
@Gwangung: Curious about how that helped.
hitchhiker
No new books to name, but a couple of experiences.
Spanish Moss
@wolf parade: Kindred is such an excellent book! Some parts were really hard to read, but it sure gave me a lot to think about. I would have loved to discuss it with someone. I tried to get my book group to read it, but they have never gone for anything remotely SciFi, so the time travel part was a bridge too far, alas.
rivers
When I was teaching Black Boy by Richard Wright, I thought it would be interesting to show my 8th grade students examples of Jim Crow laws. It was as much an education for me as it was for them. Their immediate reaction was disbelief, not that racism was codified into law, but that the laws went into such bizarre and surreal detail in order to make sure that whites were in no way contaminated by contact with black people (and in some states with Chinese people).These are two examples I recall we discussed. North Carolina:”Books shall not be interchangeable between the white and colored schools, but shall continue to be used by the race first using them.” (written in 1889). South Carolina: “Any circus or other such traveling show exhibiting under canvas or out of doors for gain shall maintain two main entrances to such exhibition, and one shared persons attending such show or traveling exhibition shall pass in and out of the entrance provided for colored persons.”[24]: 58 I remember that in the discussions we had, we talked about how the language of these laws revealed a form of mental illness on the part of white society.
Gloria DryGarden
I almost forgot! My anthropology teacher sent us to the Denver history museum for a great exhibit about race. I went w a friend, who dragged me to an impromptu forum that was set up in a huge museum meeting hall.
We sat in an oval, bigger than a basketball court, and went around the room. People shared what the exhibit touched for them, what their experience was as a black person. Just a few white people were there. As an introvert, I really didn’t want to be there, and I would rather have continued reading exhibits and information signs, but as people shared, it was so eye opening, so personal. I’m grateful to my friend for getting me there.
it was so much more meaningful to hear the personal stories and connections.
Melancholy Jaques
Off My Chest by Jim Brown, which I read when I was ten and still in the professional athlete worshipping phase of my life, did wake me up to the fact that all was not well and that I needed to learn more about Black people. I had read other bios of Black athletes – Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella – but those were the PR versions. Jim Brown was blunt and, as the title says, got a few things off his chest.
Hildebrand
‘Why We Can’t Wait’ by MLK.
Read this my second year as an undergrad in a religion class – Nonviolence and Pacifism. A great class, in which we read a whole series of pivotal books, but this one really opened the floodgates for getting turned around in thinking and acting on race and justice.
That year of school was really formative, as another book that still echoes through my thinking and perspective was Aldo Leopold’s ‘A Sand County Almanac’ from my Environmental Biology class.
Gretchen
Everything I learned I learned in a Chinese restaurant. Gay Chinese kid in 1980’s Detroit (my hometown) writes about growing up different in a time of lots of change for his family and the city.
Gvg
I don’t recall any book making much impression on me, and I was a voracious reader. What I learned was directly from my parents while they watched the nightly news and discussed it, then tried to explain to me growing up in the 60’s into the 70’s. They were early liberal civil rights people. Not so much activists as thinkers and voters, and careful parents. Dad was a southerner who had observed, maybe not said much, but certainly thought about what he saw and was very cynical and outraged about it. Mom was a northern farm girl who had had enough of farms and a traditional woman’s drudgery. I was brought up very aware of racial issues.
I read a lot of books, mostly not specifically about racial issues, but I remember noticing a lot of things that were racial and gender roles in them. Background assumptions to make the story flow. I have reread some of them, and I didn’t catch everything, but I did notice plenty.
I think though that it was most helpful just to go to school in a mixed school and be comfortable with the idea the crowd “should” look mixed. To get suspicious when an area or school or company was all white, and check for reasons. The current trend of charter schools is a back door way of undoing the good of busing, which they don’t do anyway, but antidiscrimination laws still would keep most school more mixed if not for these special programs. We need to pay more attention to what happens in schools.
I do think the TV series roots had an impact on me. It also mattered that almost everyone watched at the same time.
Tom
I would strongly recommend anything written by Leonard Pitts Jr. His columns for the Miami Herald hit home for me for years and his novels, especially 54 Miles (his latest), are tremendous. He is an American treasure.
RevRick
I have read that children as young as three understand the caste structure of our society, I have to begin with the shitty reality. I grew up in public housing in Stamford, CT for the first 8.5 years of my life, but it was segregated… all our neighbors were white. I learned as a boy that the black people lived in Southfield Village. I first encountered Asian and Black children in 3rd grade, when I moved to another school. My teachers treated integrated classes as a matter of fact thing as did my classmates, so that was that.
I was a precocious kid and read U.S. News and World Report and Time magazines, so I was aware of Little Rock and Gov. Faubus. I was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan and had heard their history and learned that the great Jackie Robinson lived in Stamford, but in the rich part. Our family watched Walter Cronkite so I knew about the growing Civil Rights movement. And Life magazine. I was shocked when my hometown was split by a proposal by the city mayor to integrate various neighborhoods. I thought racism was something only Southern whites did.
I learned about the Civil War in history class and we read Ellison’s The Invisible Man when I think I really started to think about slavery and its aftermath. I was transfixed by the series Roots.
My education has deepened in the past decade.
I guess the two that made the greatest impact are The Lynching Tree by James Cone and The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist, which includes testimony from formerly enslaved persons gathered by the WPA.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
It’s sad that people here who trot out material that supposedly influenced their general racial awareness now push some of the most racially tone deaf policies imaginable using disingenuous language to make it sound all progressive. Libertarians in Trench Coats.
Yes, I’m channeling my inner s_c here. :P
Quaker in a Basement
@Trivia Man: Oh, man! I bet that was amazing. I’ve seen a few clips on Harriot’s web site. He’s up there with a handful of people who can inform and make you laugh at the same time.
Quaker in a Basement
@hitchhiker:
That is shocking, isn’t it? It’s hard to imagine how much work that must be and what effect it has on a person.
Trivia Man
@Quaker in a Basement: I was active in a company resource group for African Americans and it was key in becoming more aware and comfortable in multi-racial groups. I had a long way to go from my super white experiences. At one event, 2 of my friends looked at each other and said, “Think we should tell him about CP time?” They did, and I learned why I was always the first one to every event. Even when I planned to be “late” by our standards. (Mrs Trivia is from a German Lutheran background. If it started at “12”, they might start calling your house if you weren’t there by 11:45.)
b
Obv, STOS
Kayla Rudbek
@Suzanne: I read All-of-A-Kind Family and Harry Kemelman’s Rabbi David Small mystery books, as well as Isaac Asimov. I still remember Asimov’s essay Lost in Translation where he updated the book of Ruth for 20-century America, so Ruth was Black and Naomi and Boaz were White.
JustRuss
When I was 6 or 7 my family hosted a black college student from the Virgin Islands. He was the nicest, funniest guy, all the kids in the neighborhood loved him. Racism never made any sense to me, but it took me a long time to understand white privilege, until a friend of mine told me about a conversation he had with a black friend. My friend said when he was a young man he could walk into any town with a factory or mill and have job by the end of the day. His friend replied, “That was never my experience.”
randy khan
A bit late to the party, but the biggest influence by far on my views about race and ethnicity (and, for that matter, gender and sexuality) came from my parents. For which I am thankful.
I had an English teacher in high school who had us read a bunch of books focused on the Black experience – Black Like Me, the Dick Gregory autobiography, To Kill a Mockingbird (well, sort of, since it was told through the eyes of white girl) and probably some others I have forgotten. I actually only remember Black Like Me because it seemed ridiculous to me – a white guy uses makeup to pass as Black in the South to tell white people about what that’s like. (And maybe it wasn’t that ridiculous, but I was 15 and it just seemed dumb to imagine that he really did pass, particularly among Black people.) There were a lot of jokes about what seemed to be her fixation (she was white, by the way), but the more serious problem was that she wasn’t a great teacher, so a lot of it was like being hit with a 2×4.
If there were any real influences from literature, they came from reading science fiction and fantasy. There’s a strain of diversity in a lot of SF writing, even from old school writers like Robert Heinlein, including mixed-race marriages in some of his novels, at a time before Loving v. Virginia. And some SF is pretty explicit about racial equality (less so on gender equality, though).
Martin
What are you talking about? He’s acknowledged that. But he’s not going to surface that debate because he’s also acknowledge that he’s not a historian, he’s a journalist, and he’s only reporting in his most recent book what he has seen.
And your characterization is itself debatable. The concept of Israel predates the Holocaust by half a century and was in its inception a plan to evict Jews from the UK. It wasn’t a solution to a problem, it was a manifestation of the problem, with the full recognition by the very experienced colonizer of the UK that proposed the idea that Israel could only hold that land by force, and the UK was more than happy to be both rid of the Jews and make money selling them arms and protection, and of course that’s precisely what happened. Note, none of the western countries that supported Israel made any notable efforts to ban systemic antisemitism in their countries. That didn’t happen in the US until civil rights, two decades later.
And this is why I think Coates doesn’t want to jump into this topic because ‘Zionist’ is also descriptive of western Christians that were more than happy to deport Jews to the Middle East and let them and the Muslims fight to the death for that land, and the question of ‘what problem is Israel designed to solve’ is debatable at best.
Additionally, Coates book is a book about journalism, not the Middle East, and in every interview I’ve seen he sticks to reporting on what he experienced. That’s just staying on message.
TBone
Dunno how I forgot this important book last night
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_of_Small_Things
TBone
@Gloria DryGarden: Animal Dreams
David_C
Seriously late to the party, but my awakening was more personal, not literary. My awareness of the civil rights era came around the time of Cicero, so it coincided more with the more difficult days. I grew up in a white “ethnic” neighborhood in Buffalo, mostly Italians and Eastern Europeans, so we were not the most racially-enlightened kids. The change came in 5th grade when I was enrolled into a “special progress class” (an early attempt at a magnet program) at a school that was a mile from my house, but on the other side of the divide, and I was one of two white kids in the school. I wasn’t beat up every day, the kids were great, and I was quickly steeped in Black culture. I also learned to see beyond skin color, while of course acknowledging the skin color.
The riots happened the summer after that and I wound up back at my home school the next block over. The change was, first, that Black kids were beginning to be bused to the school, and second, I was the white kid who had no trouble reaching out to the kids and just talking about normal stuff.
Books – too many to mention, but in college I read a book about Reconstruction that went against the then-current, Southern-influenced narrative.
gluon1
I can’t see a reference to To Kill a Mockingbird, even though it did not get much discussion in the thread, without sharing the revelation I got when I first encountered Monroe Freedman’s deconstruction of the myth of Atticus Finch. The short of it is that, long before Go Set A Watchman scandalized people by showing an older Finch as a racist, Freedman explained how the Finch of Mockingbird was actually akin to the country club Republicans whose objection to Trump is that he says the quiet part aloud. He has to be dragged into defending Tom Robinson, whereas he jumps to defend the lynch mob, etc. This article is a decent precis of Freedman’s argument with a link to the original.
lou
From youth: Black Like Me today is cringe-y but we were obligated to read it in school (I wonder what the black kids thought?) and it was eye-opening to a sheltered white girl. My next experience was Vine Deloria’s Custer Died for Your Sins. It radicalized me about race. Then I noticed when my family did a big family reunion tour of Iowa and South Dakota, people were much more open about their prejudices toward Native Americans.
PS re: Barbara Kingsolver. Poisonwood Bible, Animal Dreams, The Bean Trees.
Miss Bianca
Meant to post last night, got sidetracked bottling mead and making stew.
First big influence I remember was a book called Mary Jane, by Dorothy Sterling, a children’s book about a girl who is among the first to integrate her public school. It was the first book I ever read (besides The Snowy Day) that tried to show me the world through a Black child’s eyes, and so the memories of it have remained with me for over 50 years. (Interestingly, Sterling herself apparently was Jewish).
I do remember getting Black Boy, Huckleberry Finn, and To Kill a Mockingbird as required reading in school (this would be my preppie suburban private school, not public school.) Those were some eye-opening reads as well.
NeutronFlux
Black Like Me John Griffin 1961
BillD
Confessions of a White Racist by Larry L. King (not the radio King)
Taylor Branch’s bio of MLK and history of the civil rights movement.
Parts of Robert Caro’s bio of LBJ that highlighted how openly racist some U.S. senators were. They weren’t even trying to hide it.
The new John Lewis bio.
The PBS series Eyes on the Prize.
dp
My views on race were shaped by my deeply Christian mother and grandmother, both of whom expressly and explicitly taught me (a South Louisiana Cajun + redneck kid) that Black people were just as human and deserving of respect as anyone else.
That said, over the holidays I read Wright Thompson’s The Barn, about the lynching of Emmitt Till and the history of the area, and it was both enlightening and heartbreaking.