What I've read since last time:
- 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. I had started reading this one as of my last history post, so already shared a bit about it. The central thesis is that the Americas were much more populous and advanced (technologically, politically, artistically... in every way you can think of, basically) than we have historically been willing to acknowledge in the face of overwhelming supporting evidence, given that the more we acknowledge the extent of pre-contact American civilization, the more horrific the ensuing genocide we also have to acknowledge is. The book also tries to reconstruct some of the history of various empires, wars, etc... in the Americas before 1492, which helps dispel the colonial misconception that American Indians were somehow these history-less people frozen in time at the moment of their "discovery."
- Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People. I really loved this book! I learned a TON about the history of Asian American activism and resistance (and even the emergence of "Asian American" as a social category). It is incredibly engaging - the author interweaves the broader history with her own personal story of identity and activism (i.e. she went to Princeton in the first class to admit women, and worked to establish an Asian American Student Association there. She's also a lesbian and writes about the intersectionality of Asian American movements with LGBTQ movements). I didn't realize that there had been so much Asian American involvement in the labor movement, and how much of that involvement was done in partnership with Latin@ activism in multi-racial coalitions. One of the stories that really stuck out to me was that of the Wards Cove cannery workers - the Asian workers were restricted to the lowest-paid and most dangerous jobs, while the White workers got the higher-paid and safer jobs. They sued for discrimination and the case went to the Supreme Court, who basically said "okay yeah, the data shows all the Asian workers get crappy jobs and all the White workers get good jobs, but you can't PROVE discriminatory intent, so suck it." The ordeal unfolded over decades and there was never any justice for any of the involved workers.
- City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972. This book was a bit denser than I anticipated - I think it was somebody's dissertation turned into a book? Anyway, it was still very interesting, especially because so many of the events happened in our old neighborhood in Philly. Growing up after mainstream acceptance for being gay was already starting to spread, I don't think I fully realized the extent of the oppression gay people had to live under not that long ago - large-scale police raids, mass arrests, and beatings were a fairly continuous part of the gay experience for decades in Philly.
- Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America. I added this book to the list after I saw it recommended somewhere, and holy cow am I glad I did. It's about a rape case Thurgood Marshall took on when he was still a lawyer with the NAACP, before Brown vs Board of Ed. It was a pretty archetypal Jim Crow-era rape case - a white woman claimed to have been raped by four black men, and although there was zero evidence to support her claim and a ton of evidence to disprove it (example: two of the four men she accused weren't even in town when it allegedly happened), it was a white lady's word against four black men's, so all were convicted and sentenced to death (by an all-white jury, of course). A lot more stuff happens as well, but I don't want to give it all away - I highly recommend everyone read it. It's engrossing and enraging in many different ways; one of the most striking is how many of the quotes in it are virtually indistinguishable from contemporary ones. For example, in 1949 the (white) mayor of the town involved said, in reference to the NAACP getting involved, "[outsiders] are attempting to create race hatred and discord... where relations between whites and coloreds have always been good." This was the mayor of a town where the majority of Black citizens labored under debt peonage and the sheriff was literally a publicly active KKK member, not to mention all the regular injustices of the Jim Crow South, and yet if you update the word "coloreds," it could have easily come from the white mayor of Ferguson in 2014. And it's not just quotes that still resonate nearly 70 years later - there is literally a case in front of the Kentucky Supreme Court right now about the (un)constituionality of all-white juries.
The thing that most surprised me in reading this book actually had to do with gender, not race. In particular, I was taken aback by my own reaction to the white girl (she was 17 at the time) who accused the four men - the part of my brain that says things before I can consciously think about them pretty consistently reacted to everything she did with some version of "that whore" or "fucking slut," and I found that I hated her the most out of everyone involved. And yes, to be clear, what she did was reprehensible - but why did I hate her more than the sheriff whose literal job it was to uphold justice, and who instead refused to conduct an actual investigation and did all kinds of terrorist activity with the KKK? Why did I hate her more than the judge who, again, was legally obligated to uphold justice, and refused to admit any of the evidence that would have exonerated the men? And why did I hate her in such gendered terms? My brain never said "what an asshole," it was always "what a whore." I think part of my intense hatred comes from the sense of betrayal that I feel whenever a woman makes a fake rape claim, because it feeds into the popular narrative that rape is something women often make up, which in turn makes it so much harder for actual rape victims to be believed and get any sort of justice. But the fact that my automatic reaction was to express the hatred in such gendered terms tells me some disturbing stuff about the extent to which I have internalized patriarchal ideas about women. Ugh. I'm glad it forced that particular bit of ugliness to the surface so I could start to grapple with it, though.
- Racism On Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice
- Mankiller: A Chief and Her People
- Working my way down Ta-Nehisi Coates's reading list
- Whatever other recommendations come my way!
