Monday, April 18, 2016

Black History Month 2016


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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