Final thoughts: Black History Month 2024

My reading would be impossible without the local library system (including its participation in Inter-Library Loan). 

I though about calling this post "Keepers". In the course of the reading I found three books that I kept longer, wanting to refer back to them and get other people to read them, and eventually just realizing that I wanted to own them:

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, by Ibram X. Kendi

(previously featured in https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2024/05/spotlight-on-stamped-black-history.html)

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

(previously featured in https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2024/05/antiracism-black-history-month-2024.html) 

Caste: The Origins of our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

(featured on the Sunday blog, in the introduction to an ongoing series on dominator culture: 

https://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2024/04/an-introduction-to-dominator-culture.html)

I think each of these books does a very good job of explaining and laying out important things. 

It doesn't mean that any of them are complete or the final word on their own, but individually they would each create a good foundation. Especially helpful would be reading all three.

They are also all very readable, which can't be said for every book that I find helpful. 

I was especially impressed by how accessible Wilkerson's prose was. One of the scenes in the movie based on the book and its creation, Origin, has Isabel talking with her cousin Marion, explaining what she is researching. Marion tells her that she needs to explain that in words for people like her. I have to think that was a guiding influence during the writing. Pulitzer Prize winners often indulge in much more superfluous verbosity.

So I recommend all three of those books. Check them out from your library (library orders support writers too) and read them. If you find them as valuable as I did, consider buying them. Recommend them to others.

Even though Caste is the book I have written about the least of these three, the other thing I want to write about is more from How to Be an Antiracist.

Actually, it started with something about the Moynihan report in Stamped.

The Negro Family: The Case For National Action may be remembered as the report that raised alarm bells about Black single mothers and ghetto culture. Kendi pointed out that while the percentage of births to Black single mothers had gone up, it was because married Black women were having fewer children. 

That was interesting, but he added additional information in Antiracist.

A fourth of Black households were led by single women. A fourth. Not the majority. Not even half. Not even close to half. A fourth.

It was twice as many as white households, so that is more. I won't even say it's statistically insignificant. But this is not the number that was implied when people were being all alarmed about it.

Back in 2015 I wrote about realizing that when looking at my Black friends,most of their parents were still married. I knew of of two divorces where the children still had contact with both parents, but also at that time there were at least two couples where one of the parents was dead.

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2015/06/lies-we-tell-about-black-people.html

That actually leads to another issue, which I am especially aware of after reading African American Grief: life expectancy is lower for Black people in the United States. Between that and the higher rate of incarceration (though let me emphasize NOT a higher rate of criminality), how many of those households were missing a parent not because of a couple breaking up, but of them being broken apart? 

(Also, were any of those households led by two women?)

This is something that Kendi addressed too. 

I think it was inspired by Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, because I remember reading about that Oprah episode there too. She asked where the Black men were, for these single Black women. They did not seem to take into account the men in jail.

Kendi took that a step further, and I am going to have to make a weak attempt at paraphrasing. 

Criminalizing Black men results in no "good" Black men. Add the stereotypes about Black women being strong and angry and emasculating, and there are no "good" Black women (and we definitely get into misogynoir and stereotypes going back to slavery now). Putting it all together, there are no "good" Black people.

(Let's just assume that plenty of people will find a reason to judge non-binary people of any color.)

So this is the other thing that comes largely from Kendi (but let me also throw in a shout out to Theodore W. Allen's The Invention of the White Race): there are centuries of racist thought and dehumanization to justify mistreatment, including but not limited to slavery.

That mistreatment creates other problems, like unemployment which is strongly linked with crime.

Some will point to that as justifying the dehumanization, and some will fight really hard to beat the odds... work twice as hard and be twice as good (uplift suasion) ...but it doesn't work.

The only thing that will work is persistent antiracist thought, policy, and action.

That is everyone's job, and these books are a start.

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