Black History Month 2012

Now that I am caught up in my month-specific reading, I would be pretty sure that I could stay on track now—starting my Native American Heritage month reading on time in November and totally finishing before February. However, I know me, and something else will probably come up. I may not be in sync with the world, or the calendar, but I eventually get there.

Anyway, this year’s reading was largely formed of things that I just had wanted to read, and it was not necessarily true history reading, but history was a part of it.

I had been meaning to read “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot for some time, so I decided to read that, and it got me thinking about something else I should also read up on, leading to me reading Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment by James H. Jones. I also immediately decided on reading King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hothschild. I had been meaning to read that since it came out, I guess, in 1999.

Often I will have three books that kind of relate, and being domestic, and then have one that is international. I felt like I should add a third medical one. However, I read a review on another book, Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong by Raymond Bonner, and went to hear the author speak, and even though that is not specifically on African American history, the events were possible because of the history. Also, I had been meaning to read The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates (by Wes Moore), and so I added that.

Finally, I was reading a Smithsonian article about Black Like Me by John Griffin Howard, and I had not been aware of it, but it seemed like a good thing to read.

It was nearly worse. First of all, reading Black Like Me, it occurred to me that maybe the counterpoint would be to read Harlan Ellison’s The Invisible Man, but reading more about it, it sounded like it would be irritating, because you have one real character and a bunch of stereotypes, and I did not need that. Also, I had decided the third medical/science book could be The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Richard J Herrnstein and Charles Murray.

Adding those last two books would have made my reading take much longer, as both are over 500 pages. (Add the notes, and The Bell Curve is over 800.) I have already mentioned that I was feeling overwhelmed, and the thought of adding more was just not working for me. Usually I will pick four books. (This is generally more than I read in a single month—that is more like two months—hence my tendency to fall behind.)  This was already six books, and it was a lot.

In addition, these had been good books, that I enjoyed reading. They were well written and interesting. I did not feel like I was going to enjoy those other two, or maybe relate to them.

They may not be off the table forever. Discussing my dismissal of The Invisible Man with one friend, she agreed, but also said that because it is an important book to the racial discussion, and because I care about things like that, I will end up reading it eventually. Maybe it is necessary, but also she clearly found it to be inevitable. Well, that can be okay. Maybe it will fit in better with a different year’s reading, or after I have read other things.

For The Bell Curve, my initial reaction when it came out was that it did not deserve to be read. It came out in September of 1994, just after I got back from my mission, and there was a lot of discussion about it when I started college again the following spring. What we decided at the time is that they were mistaken in their beliefs that IQ could be measured without bias, invalidating their key point.

When I was looking for something else medical, I remembered the book, and reading more about it sounds like there are actually a lot of good points in the book on what to do because of the social inequality that exists, and that people ignored those points because of their anger over the racist nature of their IQ conclusions. That made me lean towards reading it, and it could have fit in well with studying about the HeLa cells and the syphilis experiment, where maybe you have people with good intentions and aims, but other things prevent them from having good implementation or results. It could have worked, but I just felt like I would end up too annoyed. It may not be off the table forever, but I just can’t deal with it now.

Still, it’s a lot of books with a lot of information, so there will be multiple posts on the things I have taken away from my both late and extended (May 6th through July 5th—thank you Goodreads) Black History Month 2012 reading.

I think next year I will focus on the Harlem Renaissance, but like I really know.