Cannonball Read 13

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Two out of three in Caste bingo (is not a game I want to win)

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

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I imagine at the end of the day this book is more like 3.5 stars that I am rounding up. I’d say it’s three star for what it is trying to do, but four stars if I take it at what (I thought) was face value. Which is to say, I just finished this book and feel 50/50 convinced by Wilkerson’s thesis that America suffers from a caste issue, as opposed to (or, above a) race issue.

I am Indian-American, so taking a step back this book, which focuses on the system of oppression in India, Nazi Germany, and the US, hits me on two out of its three fronts. It’s really reassuring to start reading a book on the exotic yet wildly known Indian caste system and not feel like you have to cringe and get weirdly defensive of an indefensible system. Wilkerson is measured, insightful, and at times pointedly critical of the Indian system and the network of academia that has grown around it. If part of the goal of this book is to develop the radical empathy she later talks about, then the first parts of the book certainly serve to cut me down to size.

But the main premise, that it’s not fundamental racism but fundamental casteism that festers at the heart of America, is one that I find myself only half able to clearly articulate. My litmus test—being able to recite the points of a book for someone else who is not reading the book and did not ask for me to start recounting its minutiae—made it clear that despite being a fantastic writer, Wilkerson might not be best suited for what is, at the end of the day, a research paper of sorts.

I’ll also caveat that this point isn’t of Wilkerson’s invention, and that she references scholars before her who came to the same conclusions and/or wrote on the same topic.

Back to points for/against.

For:

– I think of examples like France, which one would argue has more racism than casteism as an issue (my contention, not Wilkerson’s). Pillars such as “one drop rule” and “no intermarriage” separate the one from the other, and to the best of my knowledge there’s no intermarriage ban in French history. It’s all that égalité, after all.

– Even though Indian caste is nominally not visible at first glance, Wilkerson realizes that with some time, she can pick out those of dominant/subordinate castes at various academic conferences

– The melting of time of the boundaries of the dominant caste—while just as white as anyone else, it took a while for Italians and Irish immigrants to be allowed to enter into the same group

Against:

– It’s hard to argue that every time Wilkerson talks about subordinate class she’s talking about Black Americans. And while sure, the dominant class definition might have grown to include more white immigrants over time, it’s also true that their defining characteristic has always just been skin color based. Rules like “one drop” were meant to deal with the ambiguity or ability for some people to pass

– Which is to say, how can you discount that it’s “just” racism? I don’t think I’m doing a great job of explaining the parts of the book that lost me, but at the end of the day I felt like Wilkerson hadn’t convinced me that racism is just part of the caste issue.

This book is, I will caution those interested, a lot. Wilkerson emphasizes the “Origins” part of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, and even as someone who has a pretty fulsome understanding of the horrors of slavery and the utter bitter injustice of, well, all the years after, I found myself learning new terrible facts. People used to send lynching postcards?! White school district heads would purposefully hire the worst of two candidates for teaching positions in Black schools?!

If anything, I think that the emphasis on the terrible left fewer words to create the strong line from America’s 1619 Sin to the present day. While the overall timeline is there—slavery to Civil War to a Short Stint with Reconstruction to etc—the individual parts are a bit disparate.

High fives all around!

A High Five For Glenn Burke by Phil Bildner

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Sixth grader Silas Wade adores baseball, and it adores him. Center fielder for his middle-school league and the heart of the team, Silas loves to boost morale with good-natured pranks, spreading love of The Sandlot (aka the greatest movie of all time), but most importantly winning games.  For his middle school biography project, Silas turns to baseball too, and knocks it out of the park with a presentation on Glenn Burke, five-tool talent of the L.A. Dodgers in the 1970s, who not only killed it on the baseball diamond, but who invented the high five.  For Silas, though, Burke is more than an athlete to look up to for his stats and his swing; Burke had a secret, and Silas does too. Being gay meant the end of baseball for Glenn Burke. Will it be the same for Silas?

Middle grade has featured some really great LGBTQ books in the past five years or so – granted, they are still a rarity, as adults struggle to define what is or isn’t “appropriate” in a children’s book (ugh), but they are trickling in more and more as years go by.  This is a special entry in that canon for sure. For one thing, most queer MG books feature girls.  And for the books featuring boys, they mostly focus on the sensitive artsy types. But A High Five For Glenn Burke places the star of the baseball team as the one in the closet, challenging stereotypes and hopefully providing middle schoolers (especially straight cis boys) with a more dynamic view of the people around them.  It also showcases some wonderful adults and a great best friend for Silas, plus a realistic depiction of youth culture. The baseball talk is fully invested in and should be gobbled up by readers who love Mike Lupica and Matt Christopher books.

The book is also a very sensitive and overdue love letter to Glenn Burke. It celebrates his life and legacy, and is frank about the bigotry within baseball and dissolvement of his career, as well as the tragedy of his eventual addiction and death. I would be interested to know from sports fans if his legacy does endure, or if it was buried. I’ve never heard of him but I’m not a sports fan.  From all accounts here, though, it looks like he was an incredibly talented athlete.

Highly recommended for children and middle-grade readers.

Two women. Two powerhouses

The Power of Her Pen: The Story of Groundbreaking Journalist Ethel L. Payne by  Lesa Cline-Ransome

Marie Curie and the Power of Persistence by Karla Valenti

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Another recent health issue caused me to have a few days off from work and I did some reading. I first picked up a few picture books as I figured I could concentrate on them. And except for one book, they were all not easy. The first two were about women of history. Women that we might not know about or know about, but not everything.

The Power of Her Pen: The story of Groundbreaking Journalist Ethel L. Payne by Lesa Cline-Ransome and John Parra is a “Wow” book. It is a great look at someone we might not be familiar with. She is a pioneer of black and women’s history. This book in a great introduction to the power of then pen and overcoming anything in your way. Payne was a powerful woman, who knew what she wanted and how to get it. And yet, because she was a woman and black, the road was less than easy. Payne is the kind of person I enjoy learning about because she is not a “Well known.” Sure, Rosa Parks is amazing. Yes, Amelia Earhart did great things. But it is women like Payne that are just as important. The fun illustrations top it all off. They are slightly realistic-abstract, give good details and have strong colors.

Marie Curie is a woman that some things are known about as she is a Medium-Known. This biography has pieces of information I was unaware of about Curie. It is a good introduction to her. And even if you think you know, you might pick up things as well. The only part I did not like was the fantastical element of “fantasy beasts” that want to stop Curie (and in turn the knowledge she gains and gives to the world) by tossing in obstacles and other hardships. However, it will be the perfect addition to stop the flow of traditionally biographical information in a story format and help your reader or listener to process the information. Marie Curie and the Power of Persistence is a picture book that was created by a team: Karla Valenti, Annalisa Beghell and  Micaela Crespo Quesada.

All ages can enjoy, but the younger crowd might not sit for the length of the book. However, both illustrations can be fun and you can make up a bit of a story from them. If you are looking for a black history and/or women’s history book (as February and March are coming up), these are two are must haves.

More work to be done

The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt by Jill Watts

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

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The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt by Jill Watts was our Mocha Girls Read book club selection in June. It became a very timely selection after the horrible death of George Floyd, which shone a brighter light on Black Lives Matter activism in America. As a Black woman, I was suffering from emotional exhaustion during that time. This history book actually helped put so many current things in perspective. We have come a long way, but there’s more work to be done.

Black Cabinet - Wikipedia

The Black Cabinet is a deep dive into how the unofficial group of Black intellectuals brought about social change during the FDR years. Part one swiftly covers the early 20th century where things were pretty bleak all around. I was especially angry after reading about many presidents how blatantly allowed lynchings and refused to outlaw them. There was an initial “black cabinet” with Black civil servants meeting in a popular DC cafeteria. It was dismantled after race tensions spiked and Woodrow Wilson got rid of most of the Black government workers. The book then focuses on the individual backgrounds of the FDR period black cabinet. The five major figures are the educator and women’s club leader Mary McLeod Bethune, the Harvard trained economist Robert Weaver, the brilliant attorney William Hastie, the crusading newspaper publisher Robert Vann, and the Howard University-trained journalist Alfred Edgar Smith. I especially loved learning more about Mary McLeod Bethune as the Black women’s center in my hometown was named after her. Her friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt was vital to the cabinet being taken seriously by the president and his immediate staff.  This is quite a fact-heavy book that includes surfaced stories of smaller figures who helped shaped the cabinet. It leans more into historical text that presents what happened and less of a narrative text with commentary. I highly recommend this to be taught in schools to shine a light on how hard and long people have been fighting for civil rights in America. This would be a great gift for history and political enthusiasts.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks': Q&A with Author Rebecca Skloot | Live Science

In contrast, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is part-history and part-narrative. Skloot reveals the medical history of the HeLa cells along with a first-person story of how she came to write the book and meet the Lacks family. Her entire research process is part of the book itself. It was an interesting read about how medical ethics and experiments have evolved drastically over time. It is not as illegal as one would think to keep cells without informing patients. Henrietta Lacks went to John Hopkins for cancer treatment, which unfortunately accelerated tumor growth of her disease. Her cells were collected and found to unexpectedly multiply indefinitely. Using her cells, eventually led to a cure for Polio and are still used to this day. Much of the book follows Deborah Lacks and her determination to learn more about her mother while fiercely advocating for recognition. It takes many months for the author to gain her and her family’s trust. These moments of the book were especially illuminating to me. Many Black people are rightfully wary of medical experiments after the Tuskegee incidents. It took me over two months to finish the book. I was exhausted from reading about Black people in pain, especially with COVID-19 disproportionately affecting Black and Brown people in the USA.

Despite how long it took, I was thoroughly fascinated when reading about Henrietta and her one-of-a-kind cells. And I wasn’t the only one! Oprah starred and helped adapt it for HBO. I haven’t seen it, but glad Henrietta’s contribution is finally being celebrated. This was another Mocha Girls Read selection for Banned Books week in September. A Tennessee parent didn’t like how it talks about vaginas even though it’s entirely clinical in the book. This a well-written and powerful book that makes history and science interesting! Many curriculums could benefit from its inclusion. If you’re even mildly curious about medical science, this is an excellent book to pick up. I would also recommend this for anyone looking for unconventional non-fiction narratives.

Read more of my musing on my blog, Confessions of a Pop Culture Addict. 

 

Putting Black women back into the historical narrative.

A Black Women's History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry & Kali Nicole Gross

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This was a really good book for what it was—a survey of Black women’s roles throughout 400 plus years of North American history—but the relatively small 219 page count just wasn’t enough space to really get into the sorts of details I really love when reading about history. I don’t think we can discount the impact of the purpose of the book, though, since its entire aim is to place Black women back into the historical record, and it very much succeeds in that goal.

The book is also a hybrid creation of historical scholarship and popular writing, as the authors plainly state in their introduction that they wanted the book to be accessible, even approachable, by the general public. Honestly, I’m not quite sure they succeeded in that second aim. I don’t think anyone who doesn’t already like reading about history will much enjoy this as it’s pretty dryly written, and especially in the first half when historical details are less plentiful, the authors use a lot of generalizations. (By this I mean, they make well-educated guesses based on the historical evidence they have, it’s just there isn’t very much of it to work with.)

Basically, this book was very informative and will be very helpful going forward as a way to place Black women in more historically active narratives, but I wanted more detail and less of a general survey feel, which was not this book’s aim. Each chapter is structured around a particular era of history, and named after an individual woman, but again this is sort of misleading. The chapter on Shirley Chisholm, for example, features about a page and a half, maybe two, of Shirley Chisholm, and about twenty pages of a bunch of other Black women we only meet very briefly. I think it would have been helpful for me to know going in that I wouldn’t be getting a deep dive on any particular woman or era out of this book.

The perspective the authors bring from telling the familiar (aka white) stories of historical eras from this new perspective was really interesting, and in most cases, quite damning. For example, in just one act of fuckery, infamous explorer Francis Drake once marooned a pregnant Black woman on an island with two Black men because she was pregnant, after his crew (and possibly himself) had gang-raped her. But the authors don’t just aim to illuminate all the bad things that happened to Black women throughout history, they also aim to chronicle Black women as movers and makers of history, and key drivers of progress. If anything, I felt the book was often missing the middle of the road perspective between those two extremes. The book is also full of small details I’d never learned before, like that Black women were sometimes slaveholders themselves, but mostly they did so in order to keep their families together when some members were free and some were still enslaved.

Definitely worth checking out, especially if you like history, or have an interest in Black women’s history

Some places, you never leave the same

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

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Kicking off my CBR12 Bingo with The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead for the RED book cover square. A beautifully written novel about a segregated Florida reform school during the Jim Crow era. All the boys never left The Nickel Academy the same as when they arrived.

The novel flashes between the present and the past through Elwood’s eyes. Each chapter gives you a lyrical moment in time. We learn about the place in pieces, flashing forward to Elwood as an adult. As soon as the author introduced Elwood, I was ready to protect him with my life. A sweet mild-mannered boy who was at the wrong place at the wrong time, which gets him sent to the academy. To be honest, MOST places when you’re the wrong skin color in the South. He goes in hoping to keep his head down, but that’s impossible in the Nickel. If you look at some of the guards the wrong way, that will get you a beating.

One ray of light is when Elwood meets Turner, another lost boy who seen some things. They form a tight friendship while they both try to survive a place that is out to beat them down. The school is corrupt and uses the boys as free labor on and off-campus. Elwood and Turner luck out sometimes when working odd jobs for the rich men of the local town. They get to see glimpses of the real world but are reminded to know their place. Even with this “cushy assignment”, Elwood is not satisfied. He is inspired by MLK and feels he needs to change the system. Unfortunately, for Elwood the system is corrupt.

I won’t spoil the ending, but it was a doozy. The story was based upon a real notorious reform school, which makes my heart hurt. I was pleasantly surprised that the violence and abuse were written to be harrowing but not graphic. After reading Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, I dreaded reading this for Mocha Girls Read. Instead, I was gripped almost immediately by the creative storytelling focusing on vivid scenes centered on character. It was less plot and more narrative, which was a relief. I highly recommend this book for fans of Stand By Me and lyrical fiction based on true stories. I would hope by now you have a long list of Black authors to read, which includes Colson Whitehead!



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