…is right here.
There’s a long tradition of Socialist Worker movie reviews generating major debates, so I am eagerly awaiting responses.
My workout ground to a dead halt tonight when I noticed that the TV above me was covering Trayvon Martin and I watched, riveted, while mainstream news said things like, “This is a new movement.”
That’s what it feels like, even being here in Wisconsin where there isn’t yet a response despite our own local murder of a Black boy for doing what teenagers do (what I did); despite the latest vicious racism, like semester-clockwork, from our frats; despite everything. It feels like something was let out of the bottle with Troy Davis and Occupy, or maybe like something finally crawled its way out, and it’s not going back even if it hasn’t yet taken stock of itself, even if it hasn’t figured out yet what it is.
I can’t stop thinking about the picture from the CNN slideshow of three men of color on a New York City bus urgently photographing the Million Hoodie March blocking their bus’s progress. It feels like a line is being drawn, between cops and prosecutors and reporters and racists laying bare that they don’t care in the slightest about Black boys’ lives, and people shouting that we care. When I look at that picture of the bus, it feels like maybe this is the first time they ever saw someone shouting that they care. It feels tangible how much they care back. It feels like one of those moments when options change.
I hope, I hope this is a new movement. Because we really need this one.
What I think is interesting in this case of censoring school board mistaken identity is that at least this particular article seems to think it’s natural that, if the same Bill Martin who wrote BROWN BEAR… had also written a book for adults called ETHICAL MARXISM, then it would be just fine to keep his well-loved (I haven’t read it) kids’ book out of the curriculum.
Whereas historically, as we now know from Julia Mickenberg, during McCarthyism, children’s publishing (because it was so trivialized) was one of the few places that blacklisted authors could still find work. Which is one reason why it became a relatively progressive industry, with, for example, books about racism and slavery — albeit ones that might strike us as dated or inadequate now — in the early ’60s, while the Civil Rights Movement was still in a pretty early stage of its spread North.
When I say relatively progressive, of course, we know to take that with a grain of salt. (By the way, a post by Editorial Anonymous — which makes a great second point about how having ignorantly non-racist intentions does not constitute a Get Out of Accusations of Racism Free card — is sparking an interesting discussion about the obligations of authors, and when pragmatic professionalism becomes opportunity careerism.)
But back to that Dallas News article… the other thing I find hilarious about it is that the author mentions that one of the school board members orchestrating the censorship of BROWN BEAR… is just plain mad that there are so many books being approved for the curriculum. This is mentioned almost as though it partially excuses his idiocy — see, it wasn’t about this book; he doesn’t want teachers to be able to choose any book for their classrooms!
Posted in Censorship, Race and Racism
Mildred Taylor’s ROLL OF THUNDER, HEAR MY CRY has always been a favorite – I’ve read it, and its 2 sequels, over and over. But I only just recently learned that there is a prequel, THE LAND, that has been sitting there, unread by me, all along. No longer.
THE LAND is excellent in all the ways that ROLL OF THUNDER and LET THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN are excellent (I think THE ROAD TO MEMPHIS is very good, but not quite on par with the prior two). Great, complex characters, engrossing story, and most impressively, a really deep exploration of slavery, racism, and how people, black and white, deal with injustice in a realistic way (which Elizabeth wrote an excellent post about a while back). THE LAND is the story of Cassie Logan’s grandfather Paul Edward. Its set during Reconstruction, and Paul Edward is the son of a man and one of his former slaves. The exploration of his relationships with his father and his white brothers is pretty impressive in that it manages to very realistically humanize the white characters without in any way excusing their racism, or ignoring the reality of their place in the post-slavery power structure, and the power imbalances in their relationships with black people. As in Taylor’s other books, the way the characters, white and black, respond to and live within their racist society, is varied, nuanced, and believable.
What struck me most, though, was that reading THE LAND felt like finally hearing the full story of something you kind of know about and have often heard in bits and pieces, but now are getting all the gaps filled in, all the bits of information you just sort of know put in order and strung together. Which is an incredible testament to the world Mildred Taylor built in this series of books – its common to talk about world-building in fantasy books, where authors have to construct a full and consistent reality, but I think its a different kind of impressive to so fully construct a “real” world, one which is historically accurate, but has characters and places rich enough in detail, with personal histories so full, that reading more about them feels like hearing your grandma tell stories about when she was growing up, where a lot of it you didn’t really know, but it all sort of feels familiar anyway. I can’t recall another book where I felt that sensation of familiarity so strongly.
And actually, reading Taylor’s books again set me off on a civil rights history kick in my reading – and so I will mention, although its, you know, not on the topic of this blog, that LETTERS FROM MISSISSIPPI, edited by Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez, is one of the best books I’ve read in a very long time and I highly recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in civil rights history.
Posted in Land, The, Race and Racism, Taylor, Mildred, Why I love it
I’ve been reading EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT BEING A GIRL I LEARNED FROM JUDY BLUME, edited by Jennifer O’Connell (who writes for adults in that name and young adults as Jenny O’Connell). Which, so far, has been kind of disappointing. Many of the essays — despite some notable exceptions — are almost astonishingly poorly written (considering they’re all written by professional novelists — though not, I suppose, essayists), and most are oddly didactic as well.
In that last vein, the most peculiar that I’ve read so far has got to be Jennifer Coburn’s meditation on “White Guilt,” ostensibly about Blume’s IGGY’S HOUSE. After a plot summary of that book, most of the essay consists of Coburn assuring us many, many, many times that her efforts to prove herself the most enlightened and anti-racist white person ever were misguided and condescending… and actually, I do respect her willingness to recount some of her more unfortunate activities in this regard.
It’s possible I would have judged the essay as a whole more charitably had it not explained early on that Coburn’s New York City upbringing suffered no lack of diversity; after all, as a sixteen-year-old she once shared a cab with a “Middle Eastern dignitary.” …Seriously. It’s the kind of statement that you feel must be intended as irony or satire, except surrounded as it is by more normally earnest statements about the ethnic mix at her schools, I think it’s… not.
The essay as a whole mostly just made me sad: here’s someone who’s obviously quite horrified by racism; we’re in a country where 1 in 15 Black men are in prison or jail and where the Black middle class is perhaps being obliterated, and the (published!) preoccupations of an anti-racist are… this?
One thing I am enjoying about EVERYTHING I LEARNED, though, is seeing some variety in what in Blume’s work spoke to folks. There’s a particular example that struck me, which, now that I’ve puzzled over Coburn’s essay for a lot longer than I expected, will have to be taken up in my next post…
Posted in Blume, Judy, Race and Racism
A month or so ago I won an advanced copy of Michael Hemphill’s and Sam Riddleburger’s STONEWALL HINKLEMAN AND THE BATTLE OF BULL RUN from 100 Scope Notes.
The premise of this book for the 5th-8th grade set is that 12-year-old Stonewall, who’s less than enamored of his parents’ Civil War reenactment obsession, gets sent back in time to make sure the war turns out more or less the way it actually did — despite the interference of a time-traveling neo-Confederate. (No, really.)
So it’s basically a fun way to explain to kids what happened at Bull Run. And it is a fun, and well-done, book in a lot of ways — particularly, in Stonewall’s voice and his sardonic commentary on the reenactments.
The problem, though? It’s fundamentally trying to eat its cake and garner congratulations for its abstinence from dessert, too.
What I mean is, Hemphill and Riddleburger make a big point of putting their book on the side of the Union army’s ultimate victory. Well, uh, that’s good. And actually, the most interesting part of the book is probably the slave boy character. The authors have Stonewall try to interact with him like any other 12-year-old, and the slave, whose name is Jacob, just patronizes him like he does every other white person around, which is, of course, how he survives. I’m really glad they didn’t go for some lame feel-good development where Jacob comes to understand that Stonewall isn’t like all the other white people who are casually determining his future.
But. The book’s real hero is… Stonewall Jackson. A Stonewall Jackson who has magically lived through the intervening centuries and turned into a hippie who sees how wrong he was… so we also see what a great guy he was, even though he was really wrong on this one little issue of slavery that was the defining question of his time, and killed a ton of people defending it and other details like that.
And I’m all, come on.
Because I think what Hemphill and Riddleburger (Virginia residents both) are really trying to do is attach themselves to some piece of Confederate nostalgia for Southern “heritage” while disclaiming its racist implications. And I just don’t think they can do that. I’m certainly not saying they’re racists… I’m just saying they’re liberals who are against racism but also seem to want to avoid pissing off some frankly racist parts of the book market and get their book taught in Southern classrooms. Which is, though not just as evil, at least a little bit as annoying.
Posted in Race and Racism, Stonewall Hinkleman and the Battle of Bull Run
Oh, gosh, I just read about that! Then I went *facepalm* “groan”
Yes … I’ve always thought that the biggest problem in schools is that they have too many books.
Even if the two books were written by the same Bill Martin, it’s hard to see “Brown Bear” as particularly subversive.
Then again, I would argue that kids should be free to read “Ethical Marxism,” too. Something about learning to think for themselves and about other people’s ideas.
And people wonder why Texas has a reputation as not education-friendly!