learning more about Racism

I joined the 21 day challenge on learning more about racism :

• For 21 days, do one action to further your understanding of power, privilege, supremacy, oppression, and equity.
• Plan includes suggestions for readings, podcasts, videos, observations, and ways to form and deepen community connections. Suggestions are in the following categories

Well... after 6 days... discovered this which seems a little less abstract.
https://www.jewishclimate.org/21day-challenge

Day 1:
The first word that came to mind after reading an article, "How White People Got Made" left me feeling exhausted — a word worthy of examining.

What makes us feel EXHAUSTED?  What saps our energy… makes us feel less vital?  

The etymology goes back to “drained out” — the French “fatigué” as in tossing a salad with dressing — you take  freshness out of the crisp greens, adding flavor of oil and vinegar or lemon.

to reduce, extenuate, This is where I love thinking in French.  A synonym is “éreinter”: Rompre ou fouler les reins, et, par extension, battre, rosser.  To break your kidneys!  beat up violently.

Looking in the mirror is hard work.  

Day 2: James Baldwin The Fire Next Time

Day 3: The Fire This time

(see my goodreads write up.)

Day 4: June 22 issue of the New Yorker:  see the cover.

I am a man:

How can we get a country to understand what it means to be a human being?

NO MAN should be lynched.  No man should be enslaved.

One of the cartoons:  Make sure you can see how insignificant I am.

Well... two white people on the edge of a canyon at night, looking up at the moon, and the man

asking the woman to take his picture.

Day 5:  The Uprising: by Luke Mogelson:

"It's not just about George Floyd.  It's about all the unseen shit, where we don't have the video."--Simon Hunter, 19.

Photo of the vigil site with mural.  Shawn Dunwoody's BLACK LIVES MATTER around the corner from us.

Photo of protesters lying down outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art for 8 min. 46 seconds.

the amount of time Derek Chauvin pressed his knee on George Floyd's neck.

See other issues.

Day 6:  Flannery O'Connor article.  1943, she appears as a bigoted young white woman.

How can anyone refer to a person with black skin as "nigger"?

To know yourself, you must know your region.

KKK: Grand Dragon; Grand Cyclops and "hundreds of men stamping and hollering inside sheets.

It's too hot to burn a fiery cross, so they bring a portable one made with electric lights."

She doesn't like the "philosophizing prophesying pontificating James Baldwin kind of Negroes.

Very ignorant but never silent.  ML King not the age's great saint but he's at least doing what he can and has to do.  Ossie Davis.. Would this person be endurable if white?  If Baldwin were white, nobody would stand him a minute.  I prefer Cassius Clay.  "If a tiger move into the room with you and you leave, that don't mean you hate the tiger.  Just means you know you and him can't make out.  Too much talk about hate."

to read ? Toni Morrison: (b. in Ohio, 1931): Playing in the Dark:  Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992):  The fabrication of an Africanist persona by a white writer is reflexive... an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly consciousness.

So... is O'Connor working through her racism understanding it as a form of evil, from the inside, practicing it?

"Posterity in literature is a strange god--

how not to address her racist passages...

Measuring Man: Josef Mengele’s malignant “science”.

pretense of empirical rigor armored the Nazi study of racial difference.

“All ideas, ideals, are capable of being twisted into their opposites.  Religious doctrines praching nonviolence and loving thy enemy quickly turn into a search for enemies not to love. 

this practise:  hypocrisy.

1894: Dreyfus

Day 7: from https://www.jewishclimate.org/21day-challenge

https://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/mcintosh.pdf

List 50 ways in which your whiteness is a privilege. What can you do to change things so such a list does not depend on skin color?  How will you expand your circles?  Help others realize barriers they put up as do you?  How do we get to the HUMAN we all share?

Day 8:

Enzo Silon Surin, Haitian-born poet, educator, speaker, and social advocate, is the author of When My Body Was A Clinched Fist

“‘When Night Fills with Premature Exits’ was inspired by a meditation on Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet and the idea that Black people cannot conceive a world, even a different planet, where they are not feared. The ‘premature exits’ referred to in the title echo a lifelong sentiment that we die at too fast and at too high of a rate, especially as Black men, because we are not deemed worthy of being free or carefree and because those who target us, as Claudia Rankine eloquently puts it, have a hard time policing their imagination. The poem is written in the form of questions because I am on a daily quest for the answers myself, especially as the father of two beautifully radiant sons. I wanted to express the deeply rooted exasperation and exhaustion that comes with always trying to live and build a life in the gurgle of goodbyes.

Day 9: mldunham@gmail.com writes about Suburban racism.  I just subscribed to his blog.  Why these suburbs and redlining?  

AND NOW... over a month later... 

https://bostonreview.net/race/melissa-phruksachart-literature-white-liberalism?utm_source=Boston+Review+Email+Subscribers&utm_campaign=8d609c011b-MC_Newsletter_8_25_20&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2cb428c5ad-8d609c011b-40737165&mc_cid=8d609c011b&mc_eid=e7c55ddda2

Wading through this article was difficult, having read many of the titles.

Day 10:  see my goodreads review of "The N Word" by 

Day 11: see my good reads review of White Fragility

Day 12.  Started, but decided not to finish Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo

452 pages.  Perhaps the style is passionate, "razor-sharp, brimming with energy and humor" as the Booker Prize judges say... but I found the lack of capital letters for any sentence disconcerting and only after getting to the third section of the first family felt I was getting snippets and snapshots of one family and not a hodgepodge of unrelated observations.

Day 13-23 .  Black Nature - anthology of 4 centuries of African-American Nature poetry.

The 23 page Introduction will get you thinking about the relationship between eco-poetry, and politics; how a black person and a white person, in different time periods and places will write differently about "nature".  I feel sad that skin color has to enter into appreciation of good poetry.  Any good poem should be loved first because it is a good poem.  What you learn about the poet is secondary.  I saw many familiar names about whom I didn't know anything except that I enjoyed their poems.  I'm not sure knowing they are black changed how I read the poem, but suspect something changed.  I was however glad that in August, many of the poets I hadn't known before appeared on poem a day with biographies,

as well as unfamiliar poems by many of the familiar poets.  

The book is divided into "Cycles" each with an introduction.

1. Just Looking

2. Nature, Be with Us

3. Dirt on our Hands

4. Pests, People Too

5.  Forsaken of the Earth

6.  Disasters, Natural and Other

7.  Talk of the Animals

8. What the Land Remembers

9. Growing Out of this Land

10. Comes Always Spring.

The book will be discussed at the end of Sept. in the Newark library.

And here is another Boston Review article... I'll say more on this later.  LOVE the opening paragraph:

There is a long tradition of white people thinking they can read their way out of trouble. Examples abound, from sentimental novels like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)—which engaged white antebellum readers through appeals to sympathy and Christian sentiment—to sociological readings of race novels by mid-twentieth-century middlebrow book clubs, the formation of “U.S. ethnic lit” during the canon wars of the 1980s and ’90s, and the explosion of “global literature” in recent decades. As Jodi Melamed noted almost ten years ago in Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (2011), “The idea that literature has something to do with antiracism and being a good person has entered into the self-care of elites, who have learned to see themselves as part of a multinational group of enlightened multicultural global citizens.”

https://bostonreview.net/race/melissa-phruksachart-literature-white-liberalism?utm_source=Boston+Review+Email+Subscribers&utm_campaign=11d1375ae8-MC_roundup_8_31_20&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2cb428c5ad-11d1375ae8-40737165&mc_cid=11d1375ae8&mc_eid=e7c55ddda2