Going to the Races: Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And other conversations about race, by Beverly Daniel Tatum, PhD
In his first public statements, Sharpton's rhetoric was critical of some of the protesters, urging them to contain their anger and using terms like "gangster" and "thug" to describe them. In Ferguson, Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and other established civil rights leaders were rejected as part of a generation out of touch with young people's struggles. Dontey Carter, a young Ferguson activist, said of the older leaders, "I feel in my heart that they failed us. They're the reason things are like this now. They don't represent us. That's why we're here for a new movement. And we have some warriors out here."
This is a 20th anniversary revised edition of a book first published in 1997 (new edition published 2017, with just enough time before it hit the press to comment on the Republican "Muslim Travel Ban" going into effect), and the lengthy prologue is the most riveting part: Tatum's message is that there is virtually NO good news. Other than the history-making Obama Presidency, every aspect of race relations in America has become considerably worse than it was just three years after the Crackdown On Civil Rights (called Clinton's Violent Crime bill by some). And if the book had come out two years later, it would be worse yet.
Seems to me, the police violence, vote suppression, BBQ Becky incidents and staggering racial inequality in criminal sentencing have been with us for decades; the difference is that it is now being captured on camera and publicized on social media (the regular media having become the propaganda wing of the Republican Party ever since the Fairness doctrine was abolished) so that it can no longer be just pushed under the rug. My hypothesis is that we will see a lot more of this before we eventually see much less.
The original edition that follows reads like a textbook on how black and white racial identities develop, and what must happen for these identities to become healthier. A long chapter near the end gives a survey of Latinx, Native, Asian and Middle East/North African racial issues, but the main focus is on black people, white people, and routes toward understanding, forgiveness, healing and making a more perfect union among ALL of "we the people". Highly recommended.
Birth of a Genre: The Bret Harte Reader
Besides Mr. oakhurst, who was known to be a coolly desperate man, and for whose intimidation the armed escort was intended, the expatriated party consisted of a young woman familiarly known as "The Duchess", another who had won the title of "Mother Shipton", and "Uncle Billy", a suspected sluice-robber and confirmed drunkard. The cavalcade provoked no comments from the spectators, nor was any word uttered by the escort. Only, when the gulch which marked the outermost limit of Poker Flat was reached, the leader spoke briefly and to the point. The exiles were forbidden to return at the peril of their lives.
--"The Outcasts of Poker Flat"
As far as I can tell, Harte wrote the first "westerns"; Owen Wister and Louis L'amour, and even Twain and Bierce were clearly influenced heavily by the tales herein.
The general theme involves rough, unhewn men on the frontier, finding grace in the strangest places in a part of the world governed by forces larger than human civilization. There is a lot of wry humor, and usually something sublime that packs a wallop.
On the other hand, Harte was apparently racist as fuck, and his descriptions of especially the "heathen Chinee", who is reduced to a wily, inscrutable trickster, both offensively subhuman and infuriatingly likely to trick you (because Chinese = no morals) are horrible by today's standards. See also, debunking the "noble savage" trope by asserting that NA are merely "savage". The introduction to this 2001 collection asserts that the poem "Plain Language From Truthful James" was one of the most famous American poems of the 19th century. Thankfully, I'd never heard of it before encountering this book, and hopefully you haven't either.
The stories are generally worth reading. The racism appears most prominently in the poems and the nonfiction essays farther in.
My Heroine Addiction: This Fight is Our Fight, by Elizabeth Warren
Housing discrimination isn't the only way systemic racism pulls black and Latino families down. Discrimination has been thoroughly documented in criminal justice, in employment, in education, in auto lending, in access to bankruptcy relief and in health care--even in access to stores that sell fresh produce. The cumulative impact of decade after decade of discrimination becomes painfully obvious in just a handfull of economic snapshots:
Among those who work full time, African-Americans earn 59 cents and Latinos 70 cents for every dollar earned by whites.
For each dollar a college degree adds to the income of a black or Latino graduate, the same degree adds about $11 to $13 for whites.
Compared to whites, African Americans are 80 percent more likely to be unemployed. For Latinos, that figure is 37 percent.
compared to white families, black families are 68 percent more likely and Latino families twice as likely, to have nothing in retirement savings.
I fanboy-squee for Elizabeth Warren, and this book is part of the reason why. She just makes so much sense. From a point by point exposure of the ways in which big corporations are fucking America over, to her plan to do something about it and give regular people a shot at the American dream, like she had in the 1960s when America cared about investing in our (white) youth, to examples from her tweet game, this is who Warren is and where she wants to bring us. I close my eyes, and I'm THERE!
Along the way are the true stories of many people whom Warren has met along the campaign trail, who have been failed by the Republican America that has replaced the land of opportunity she once knew. People Who had a fair chance, until people voted Republican and the companies that paid the middle class a wage that allowed them home ownership, health insurance, a chance to save for retirement and to get education, transferred operations to a foreign country, getting subsidies from our tax dollars to do so. Or the companies "reorganized" and paid their full time workers "gig" rates or part time hours, and rearranged their schedules with notice of only a few days, limiting their ability to even plan for time off. Or disreputable degree mills charged through the nose for worthless pieces of paper and actual universities raised their tuition to the point where the young sign up for a lifetime of debt where there used to be grants. Often, the ability to get credit ran out before the credits needed to graduate could be had, and students ended up with no degree and no future. After doing everything right.
DID YOU KNOW?--When Elizabeth Warren wanted to go to college, her mother hit her in the face and asked her why she needed to be better than the rest of her family. Nevertheless, she persisted, And got a full scholarship to GWU.
Blunt force Trauma: The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel Van der Kolk
Having been frequently ignored or abandoned leaves them clinging and needy, even with the people who have abused them. Having been chronically beaten, molested, and otherwise mistreated, they cannot help but define themselves as defective and worthless. They come by their self-loathing, sense of defectiveness, and worthlessness honestly. Was it any surprise that they didn't trust anyone? Finally, the combination of feeling fundamentally despicable and overreacting to slight frustrations makes it difficult for them to make friends.
This is a book about various therapeutic approaches to recovery from PTSD, especially from repressed memory of childhood trauma. It is good and it has useful information and it was recommended to me for personal reasons and is quite triggering, and I recommend it. And that's pretty much all I feel like saying right now.
Philosophy Digest: The Nature of Truth, by Harold Henry Joachim; Our Knowledge of the External World. by Bertrand Russell; The Life of Reason, by George Santayana
There are no such things as "illusions of sense." Objects of sense, even when they occur in dreams, are the most indubitably real objects known to us. What then makes us call them unreal in dreams? Merely the unusual nature of their connection with other objects of sense.
--Russell
The first period in the life of science was brilliant but ineffectual. The Greeks' energy and liberty were too soon spent, and this very exuberance of their genius made this expression chaotic. Where every mind was so fresh and every tongue so clever, no scientific tradition could arise, and no laborious applications could be made to test the realm of rival notions and decide between them. Men of science were mere philosophers. Each began, not where his predecessor had ended, but at the very beginning.
--Santayana
A theory of truth as coherence, if it is to be adequate, must be an intelligible account of the ultimate coherence in which the one significant whole is self-revealed, and it must show the lesser forms of experience, with their less complete forms of coherence, as essential constitutive moments in this self-revelation. Thus, it must render intelligible the dual nature of human experience, which a mere theory of knowledge and a theory of art or conduct assume as the fundamental character of the subject-matter which they have respectively to study.
--Joachim
Three books of varying difficulty and value. I'll start with Harold henry Joachim, whose text reads like am undergrad's philosophy essay, and I'll have to leave it to people who know the subject better than I do to explain why it's considered relevant. He basically talks about objective reality in terms of 'coherence", meaning that simple truths like "this box is red" don't count as real truth because they don't fit into a coherent whole, by which he means--I think--something that important white men will agree is important. And then he ends by claiming to have merely proved what truth ISN'T. And at least has the grace to apologize.
Russell's thin volume makes me glad I've progressed through history to the point where I can read Russell. he makes SENSE to me and speaks conversationally, not like a pedantic lecturer. Russell claims to be pioneering a revolutionary new approach to epistemology by subjecting it to--gasp!--logical analysis, which has never been tried before!
I admit to being VERY skeptical of anyone who says that something allegedly revolutionary is "just simple reason"---but what Russell puts his technique into effect by disproving the old Zeno problems about how Achilles will never catch up to the tortoise or how a spear that has just been thrown must be at rest--just by introducing the concept of continuity, which I guess hadn't been mentioned by the Big Brains of the past--well, maybe he's got something.
Santayana also claims to just be about simple reason. I realized early on that it isn't Santayana's--or Russell's--fault; I've just come to have an instinctive revulsion to assertions that such-and-such follows from "reason", because it's been so frequently said (decades after both philosophers died) by fools on the Internet who assert bullshit as "reason" while actually asserting facts not in evidence or appealing to superstition, prejudice, or the urge to ridicule. Santayana does in fact argue AGAINST this specifically, and the bulk of his five volumes (general reason, society, religion, art and science) involve applying 'reason' to facets of life that generally defy it. Art, for example, is inherently self-justifying, and exists to delight the beholder.
Santayana and William James apparently had legendary comments-section type fights at Harvard, calling each other idiots on the subject of religion. I'm not sure what the fuss was about. It seemed to me that both James's pragmatism and Santayana's reason theory came to the same counterintuitive conclusion--giving religion a vote of confidence despite it relying entirely on faith and being almost by definition unprovable by logic. Just the fact that it assists one in living a good life if one gains comfort and willpower by believing in a good higher power and an afterlife (and if you don't gain from such a belief, or cannot convince yourself that it's actually true, no reason to not just throw it out) is sufficient. The rest is navel-gazing.
The History of the United States, by Henry Adams
Another super-long book that took me several months to finish. I should have read it in an earlier year. I was attracted by the idea of a history written at the beginning of the 20th century of our nation so far, before we'd even had either Roosevelt, the Depression, WWII, etc.
I missed the fine print. Adams wrote over 2,000 pages dealing ONLY with the 16 years of Jefferson and Madison's presidencies, with heavy emphasis on disagreements in DC (apparently, the people now known as the Democratic Party have ALWAYS managed to bicker and dither themselves into ineffective flailing, even when the opposition has been reduced to a rump party with no power. Democrats are their own opposition, and Republicans aren't even necessary); foreign relations, and the War of 1812.
Not sure about your education, but my three formal classes in American history (two of them in 8th and 11th grade) all skimmed over the War of 1812. We got this vague bit about how we tried to invade Canada because something something garbanzo, our sailors being all impressed with the British navy, and something something burned down the White House, with the National Anthem, ensuing. It took me until now to learn that the war lasted much longer than just 1812 and had as many exciting and important battles as the US Civil War, from Fort Detroit to Niagra Falls and Lake Champlain, and naval engagements all over Lake Erie.
Also, except for the details of the Louisiana Purchase, almost all histories I've read about the early 19th century had either the new USA growing over here, or the Napoleonic era over there. Adams' history is the first one I've read that goes into detail about those things happening at the same time, with details about how Napoleon's absorption of Germany, or his invasion of Russia, affected American relations with the English.
Adams' history, in short, filled a glaring gap in my knowledge of my own country, that I hadn't realized I'd had. Very high recommendations.