This took longer than I meant it to, but I kept
adding, even though I have been in a busy time.
These are the books in the order in which I read
them, and some thoughts on each.
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor
I don't know why I never picked this up when I was a
kid, as I know it was around. It may have seemed too realistic, and I was drawn
more to fantasy then. This is very realistic.
Reading it as an adult, one of the things that
struck me was how it would be hard for a Black parent to balance telling their
children enough to keep them safe, but not so much as to break their spirits or
have them live in fear all the time. The book does a good job of giving enough
of an idea without being too traumatic.
The reason I decided it couldn't wait anymore came
via Go Set A Watchman. I didn't read To Kill A Mockingbird until
late in life either. While I liked it I never loved it the way some do, so
reading that an older Atticus sounds pretty racist wasn't as traumatic as it
could have been. However in those discussions, some people mentioned Thunder
as superior to Mockingbird anyway.
I tend to agree. In Mockingbird you can care
about the Black characters, and you can see ugliness to racism, but all of that
is at a remove. Thunder has it all more vivid and real and children can
relate to the characters: brave ones, timid ones, and obnoxious ones. This
should be read.
Vixen: Return of the Lion by Willow G Wilson and Cafu
I'm still trying to keep comics included when possible.
Black Panther had been disappointing, and I feel like I should be more of a
Marvel girl than DC, but Vixen was a lot more compelling. There may be too much
pressure on T'Challa to be perfect.
Mari is great, but she is also utterly human. She feels
friendships and grief and self-doubt. In this storyline she faces a crisis of
confidence and comes back stronger than ever, and with a greater understanding
of herself. She has also missed something important that is probably going to
come back as a problem. I really liked it.
The Last Crusade: Martin Luther King
Jr., The FBI, and The Poor People's Campaign by Gerald D.
McKnight
After reading Abernethy's book, And the Walls
Came Tumbling Down, I always wanted to know more about the Poor People's
Campaign. That is why I wanted to read this book, but it is also why I was less
satisfied with this book, because I feel like McKnight missed a lot of the
important things that I already knew.
That being said, I think that even though he meant
to write about that campaign, there was so much that was compelling about the
Memphis Sanitation Worker's Strike, which King was supporting when he died, and
the FBI's role under Hoover, that he probably should have just switched gears
and wrote about that. To be fair, the FBI was a part of the problems of the
campaign.
So I did learn a lot from this book, "Hands up,
don't shoot" applied then, and what the government can and has done is
disgusting, and things do connect, but it wasn't the book I was expecting.
Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat
I had been meaning to get to Toussaint L'Ouverture
this round, and this book has gotten great reviews, so I thought that reading
something set in modern Haiti near the time
that I read about the history of Haiti could be useful.
I don't know that they connected that much, but it's
a beautiful book so I have no regrets there. We do all need to look out for
each other, but that can go wrong too.
Black Against Empire: The History and
Politics of the Black Panther Party by Joshua Bloom and
Waldo E Martin Jr.
I was really excited that for my multimedia aspect
there was going to be a documentary about the Black Panthers on television, and
then it got really slammed for accuracy, and I deleted it without watching.
I was going to read the book anyway, but one thing
from the foreword of the book is that they were trying to be comprehensive.
There was so much going on that it would be easy to focus on one part and think
you understand, but there are other things that are contradictory.
This book tried to bring it all together, and
certainly there could still be more to know, but this book has a lot. Pretty
heavy, worth reading, and once again we see some patterns repeating, especially
if you look at white support of the Panthers when the draft threatened white
kids, and when it didn't.
But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's
Studies By Akasha Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and
Barbara Smith (editors)
What is not included in the official title, but
helps it make sense, is "All the women are white, all the Blacks are
men..."
This had been on my list for a while. I hadn't
intended to get to it on this go round, but I have been running into so many
things relating to intersectionality and misogynoir that I felt like I needed a
better grounding now.
This is a very early work, so those terms are not
really mentioned, but the concepts come through. I was also surprised to see no
mentions of Octavia Butler, but again it is just a little early.
The collection attempts to give you everything,
including syllabi and lists of resources and bibliographies. This doesn't make
great reading, but it creates a very valuable reference source.
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and
Moral by Phillis Wheatley
I don't love her poems, but her mastery of the form
common at that time, and her familiarity with religious and classical imagery,
is impressive enough that the book needed to contain witnesses testifying that
the poems were really written by her.
Wheatley obviously had a sharp mind and a hunger for
knowledge. I can't help but wish she would have had the time and the resources
to celebrate the place of her birth, instead of feeling like she had been
delivered from it.
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint
L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C.L.R.
James
This was also a book that was not what I
expected, because it was written as a response and defense against criticism of
L'Ouverture that audiences today probably don't need. I don't know that people
know a lot about him now, but I believe what is known tends to be favorable.
That was not always the case. The author
wrote this book in 1938, where there were concerns about fascism in Europe, and
African independence, and then added an appendix in 1963 where there was more
on West Indian independence, especially as relating to Castro. Even though it
is more than fifty years later, this still matters. So this book probably gave
me the best reminder that history isn't really that far away
Black and Latino
I did still watch some multimedia: a short video
about being multiracial. Having previously watched videos about being Black and
Indian, well, there's interesting room for thought here. Not everything is race
and not everything is culture, and sometimes the lines can get blurry.
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